The mainstream press had generally ignored issues crucial to blacks until the Emmett Till lynching in 1955. This had been the sole focus of the black press. “Arguably there wouldn’t have been a civil rights movement without the black press, which basically sensitized a couple of generations of Americans to want and then ultimately to demand full rights of citizenship in the United States,” observed Roberts, the co-author of Race Beat who had reported on the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.
The singular role of the black press changed with Selma. The prolonged voting campaign there saw the ascendancy of mainstream media as primary conveyors of the civil rights story. The black press was outgunned on a story that had been its raison d’etre since 1827. Black weeklies like the Afro, which had sent its own correspondents to the front during World War II, now relied on wire services like United Press International (UPI) for much of the Selma story that from January through March provided on a near-daily basis the drama King craved.
March 7, 1965 – Bloody Sunday – marked a turning point not just for the civil rights movement but also for media coverage, as 500 marchers en route to Montgomery to lay their claims before Gov. Wallace were met with armed resistance at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. State troopers, sheriff’s deputies and vigilantes beat them bloody with billy clubs, sprayed them with tear gas and trampled them with horses. What unfolded that day would sear the conscience of a generation of Americans – in large measure because, in the middle of a much-trumpeted Sunday Night Movie, “Judgment at Nuremberg,” ABC interrupted so anchor Frank Reynolds could narrate footage of unimaginable violence in Selma.
Viewers could hardly distinguish between the Nazi storm troopers in the movie and their modern equivalents in Alabama. “The news film of the beating on the Pettus Bridge produced such a strong national and worldwide revulsion that prominent people from all over the country, both white and black, dropped whatever they were doing and rushed to Selma to join our demonstrations,” Young recalled. Hundreds of not-so-prominent people did the same, converging on Selma in cars, buses, planes and trains from all parts of the country.
When President Johnson went to Congress with a voting rights bill on March 15, the words he uttered were seen and heard almost instantaneously: “Their cause must be our cause, too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.” Days later, the black press jubilantly caught up, nearly beatifying the indisputably unsaintly Johnson as “one of our greatest Presidents” and his words as “perhaps the greatest speech ever delivered by a President of the United States.” The New Journal and Guide in Norfolk was rather typical:
For as long as men love freedom and justice and equality, for as long as they have compassion for their fellow men suffering under a yoke of discrimination and denial, for as long as they aspire to live by the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, Lyndon Johnson’s immortal message to Congress asking for prompt passage of a new law to guarantee to every American citizen the right to vote will echo down the corridors of history reminding them of the immortality of his words.7
Strong editorials continued to distinguish black newspapers even when their stories from the civil rights front were stale, covered elsewhere more immediately and more thoroughly. The Amsterdam News’ technical difficulties in reproducing King’s speech in Montgomery, delivered on March 25 at the end of the third attempt at marching from Selma, were emblematic of the plight of the black press. Three weeks after
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4 “Behind the Selma March.” Reprinted in James M. Washington, A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King Jr. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986, pp. 126-131.
5 Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff, The Race Beat: The Press, The Civil Rights Struggle, And The Awakening Of A Nation. New York: Vintage Books, 2006, pp. 376-379.
6 Ibid., 386-387; Young, 358.