JOHN STEWART: Good evening. I’m John Stewart, Director of Education at the Kennedy Library, and I want to welcome all of you to our forum this evening. I also want to welcome C-SPAN. We’re always happy to have C-SPAN here, and we’ll look forward to watching this whole program at some time in the very near future.
We’re here this evening as you all know to continue our consideration of our history of the civil rights movement. This is the fourth session in our series, and next Sunday we’ll continue with a program on the struggle for civil rights in Boston. We have a wonderful line-up of speakers Sunday afternoon at 2:00.
Our goal this evening is to look very carefully at the process by which the nation generally, apart from those who were directly involved in the civil rights movement, became aware of what was happening and formed their opinions and attitudes about what had to be done. We’re here to talk about the media and civil rights, and see if we can better understand just what kind of an impact the coverage of all the demonstrations and events in the South, was having on the rest of the country.
We have a very, very full program of speakers. But we thought we would start by looking at about five minutes of some news footage of the demonstrations in Birmingham, which you all know took place 35 years ago next month, and at a snip-it of Robert Drew’s remarkable footage taken inside the White House, and inside the Justice Department. But the piece that we’re going to see was taken inside the Oval Office, and all of that footage was used in the making of his documentary Crisis, which appeared in the fall of 1963.
[video]
STEWART: I should tell you that the narration by that little bit of film was done by Donna Cotterell. Donna is the coordinator for the series of programs we’re doing this spring on civil rights history, and has done a wonderful job in not only doing many of these programs together, but she has a background in film production and so she did the narration for that.
I should also point out that Mr. Drew obviously will tell us a lot more about the making of that film Crisis in the program tonight, but he has donated a considerable portion of the footage that he did in 1963 to the Kennedy Library. And much of it is used in the exhibits downstairs.
And finally I should point out that CBS-- Dan Rather’s company-- has donated a lot of footage to the Kennedy Library. And again donated a lot of the production help when our new museum was being put together several years ago.
Okay, we have asked Judy Richardson to serve as moderator for the program this evening. Ms. Richardson has an absolutely amazing career as a teenage activist in Mississippi, a seasoned veteran of arrests and demonstrations by the time she was old enough to vote. As you remember, you couldn’t vote until you were 21 back in those days. A writer, a bookstore manager, a film producer, she was the associate producer of Eyes on the Prize. An editor, teacher, a shaker and a mover in the very, very best sense of those terms. A child of the 1960s, I think it’s fair to describe her, who has had the good sense to retain the idealism, enthusiasm, and eternal optimism that is in such short supply in America today.
So I’m proud to introduce Judy Richardson, who will be the moderator this evening. And I would ask that Judy and the other panelists come up on stage now.
[applause]
JUDY RICHARDSON: I’m a lot shorter than he I guess. I want to thank you for that wonderful introduction John. I might just add though, one brief thing, which is that for the past two years, I’ve also been working with a group of women from the civil rights movement on an anthology of writings by these women who were so much a vital part of both the troops and the leadership of the civil rights movement. And now, before I introduce the first of the four gentlemen on my left, I’d like to just give a sense, very briefly, of the focus and the importance of the focus of this panel.
For better or for worse, the media, both print and electronic, helped define the civil rights movement for the general public. And from 1955, when Jetmagazine first published that very famous photo, seen in millions of particularly African American homes, a 14-year-old Emmett Till, who was murdered in Money, Mississippi for saying “Hey baby” to a white female store owner, with his face bloated and beyond almost recognition. To the time 10 years later when TV coverage of the so-called Bloody Sunday march in Selma, Alabama. And at that point ABC TV, in the middle of this march-- in the middle of showing Judgment at Nuremburg-- interrupts the showing to show this march, which was called Bloody Sunday, and reveals the really inhumane gassing and beating of the demonstrators in Selma, Alabama.
Now both of these events represent the profound effect which the media had in shaping the public’s perception of the civil rights movement. What we’re going to do is proceed. Each of the four who are to my left will speak for 15 minutes. And then we will go to question and answer.
And now to speak first about this topic is Charles Cobb. Now as you can see from your program-- and of course a longer description of all of these men are in the back of your program-- but as you can see from the program, Charlie Cobb has had a long journalistic career, particularly related to Africa. He is reporting on Eritrea in East Africa, won the prestigious Harry Chapin Award for best reporting.
In addition as one of the early field secretaries for SNCC-- the Student Non- violent Coordinating Committee-- he was a primary force behind SNCC’s so-called Freedom Schools. 300 of which blossomed in Mississippi during the Freedom Summer of 1964 and beyond. He is also a published poet. And so I give you Charlie Cobb.
[applause]
CHARLES COBB: Let me put on my glasses. I’m not really going to read a speech, but I find as I get older I need these time limits as some way to manage coherency.
It’s funny thinking about the media. Like a lot of reporters I think, and writers, I tend to have file folders full of scraps of notes and clippings and what not that I’ve collected over the years intending to do something with. And this gives me an opportunity to do something with at least one scrap that I even forgotten that I had.
It seems in February of… And what I’m going to do is start in the middle, and talk some about the media and some about the movement. And hopefully you can see a connection. And I’m going to use several people’s words. Starting with the New York Times travel section, 1974. In February, I can’t think of the date, I didn’t write it down on these notes. But what it does… It’s very interesting because it gets to one of the problems with the media, which I will elaborate on later. It describes a fun-- that’s what the writer calls it-- a fun souvenir shop run by Lester Maddox in Underground Atlanta. And Underground Atlanta was brand new then. And it admires
Lester Maddox’s salesmanship, and how easily he disarms potentially hostile customers as he sells plastic axe handles that of course help make him famous. The real handles help make him famous because he used axe handles to drive demonstrators away from his restaurant.
In fact, at that restaurant he had a drawing that he would offer the customers. It was called “The Kiss of Death” which was a drawing of a white woman in the arms of an African. And the New York Times Travel section found this all quite delightful. And so as I’m shuffling through the papers trying to prepare myself to come up here and see this, I was trying to imagine the music section of the New York Times today. Admiring in print the violin skills of Minister Louis Farrakhan, and recalling nostalgically his 1960 calypso hit in Harlem, “White man’s heaven is a black man’s hell.” And I failed in that attempt.
That was supposed to get me into this big discussion of media, but I fell asleep actually. But what I want to say is too often the civil rights movement-- and I think this has a lot to do with media-- that too often the civil rights movement is defined as a series of protests that led to the passage of civil rights legislation. And while protest was indeed an important part of the movement, as in Montgomery or Birmingham, or with the sit-ins, or Selma, and etc. The movement was in fact about organizing. Specifically about organizing to have at least some say-so in the decisions that affected your life.
And to gain that, black people had to not only challenge white supremacy, and not only challenge segregation as it existed in the 1960s and ‘50s, but they had to challenge themselves. And the central point to me about the civil rights movement is, as I saw it, was this challenge that black people made to themselves, within the context of making the effort to topple white supremacy and segregation. And this is the missed point, I think, of much of the writing that exists about the civil rights movement. And I come from that part of the movement. That has a great deal to do with organizing, even though I started out with protests like most people my age in the 1960s. I was 18-years-old when I went to Mississippi.
And again, to kind of reinforce Judy’s point, it was the media in some ways that got me into the protest. But the protest that got me into the organizing. And the press is real good about the protest part. Not so good about the organizing part. Not so good about how the 18-year-olds or 19-year-olds-- Hollis Watkins, Curtis Hayes, names you may or may not know. Two kids, one 18, one 19 from Macomb, Mississippi decide to sit-in at a Woolworths in 1961. Macomb, Mississippi was one of the most vicious, meanest Klan towns in Mississippi. So why do these two guys, 18 and 19-years-old, decide to sit-in?
We never saw those stories for the most part, and I think that’s unfortunate. It’s more unfortunate that we still don’t see those stories for the most part, although I have not read yet David Halberstam's new book called The Children, which focuses in on young people in the civil rights movement.
The media got me as a student involved in the movement. I think Emmett Till was the first great media moment of my generation of black people. That body, as Judy described it, appeared in the pages of Jet magazine. Started a conversation among those of us who were 15, 13, 12, 10-years-old about the South. And what we would do if we were Emmett Till.
The next great media moment, the student sit-ins. You may notice that I skipped Montgomery. It’s not that Montgomery was important. To me, Montgomery seemed more like adults doing something, grown-ups doing something. The student sit-ins were like the kids, the guys that I hung out with doing something, and my relationship and reaction to via television was radically different than Montgomery.
And there’s not a lot of time, so I’ve got to say this real fast. We also didn’t use the term media in those days. It didn’t exist as a phrase. There was newspaper, magazines, radio, and television. They were all very different because… And it was local television. I was telling Judy earlier today, I don’t recall… I was in Mississippi from the end of 1961 until 1967. I do not ever remember watching the local news in Mississippi. I don’t remember.
I can only remember a handful of instances when I read The Jackson Daily News, or The Jackson Clarion Ledger, the two major newspapers. And if you weren’t in Greenville, Mississippi, you had no access to the one “liberal” paper in the state, The Delta Democratic Times. Essentially we didn’t read newspapers. If we read newspapers, we read The New York Times, or maybe The Atlanta Constitution, which in those days anyway was the big newspaper in the South. Even bigger than The New Orleans Times.
We did read the black papers. And they’re often excluded from this discussion of media. Not only Judy and I’ve both mentioned the importance of Jet magazine, but the first reporters I can remember talking to in the South were black reporters. The Jet reporter Larry Still, the reporters for the New York/Amsterdam News, reporters for The Pittsburgh Courier. Reporters for the Washington or Baltimore Afro-American. And certainly the reporters who dug deepest into our lives, because even the national media didn’t get to the out of the way places where we were organizing. National media, for its own reasons-- and having been in the business I understand it more clearly than I did as a 19 or 20 year old-- didn’t get to the out of the way places. And certainly television didn’t.
Television looked at protests. It looked at heroes and heroines and great events. There’s no story in the day-to-day drudgery, which is what it was, of knocking on doors, trying to wrestle through people’s fears. No action, just a lot of anxiety, which doesn’t translate well on the television screen.
There were no black television stations or networks. There were a handful of black radio stations, but they didn’t do this. It was the print media from the black side.
There’s a lot more I want to say, but I just want to conclude because I know that my 15 minutes. I’ve got five minutes, and it’ll take me four minutes to go through all this.
I think in conclusion that the problem… We didn’t like the media, let me put it that way, very much. Except for the photographers. All the press people, we’re talking about rural counties now. I’m not talking about the big demonstrations, the Birminghams or Montgomery, or Albany, or St. Augustine, places like that. I’m talking about the real backwoods. The people who dug in deepest in my recollection with us were the photographers, black and white. I think they had to. I think there’s something in the structure of what they have to do, the nature of what they have to do that requires them to sink some roots into a place. To capture the kind of image that they want.
I think one of the reasons aside from all the structural problems, which I could spend a long time talking about with the media, and the way it works, and why you can’t have a television crew. Or you can’t have a reporter spending a month. I used to work for National Geographic, so I got into the habit of spending two or three months in a place, and all my other reporter friends with the daily newspapers would criticize me for the amount of time I took on stories.
But I think all that aside, I think you have in media then, and you still have it now, most clearly seen in the Africa coverage, a problem with consciousness. It’s not that media doesn’t want to do right. I think they’re not aware of the fact that they’re not doing it right.
Example, this is what I mean. Two reporters reporting on the same scene. The resumption of the Meredith march. If you may recall, in 1966, James Meredith on a protest march from Memphis to Jackson was shot. The march was picked up by any number of civil rights leaders. On the same, two reports came out. One came out in a magazine, and the writer wrote it this way: “No one can make statements in the name of all the marchers, because they are a mixed bag. SCLC, SNCC, CORE, NAACP, Delta Ministry, Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and freelance demonstrators of every persuasion. There is Mrs. Barbara Kay, wife of an Englewood, New Jersey symphonic composer, and one of the original Jackson Freedom Riders. Mrs. Kay, who brought her beautiful 14-year-old daughter Ginny along sometimes lets her hair grow out. She’s presently cutting it African again in a private protest of the ‘apathetic white and black drift in civil rights.’
“Plodding doggedly along nearby in an old lady’s old fashioned sunbonnet is a 71-year-old white woman from Douglasville, Georgia, whose parents were share croppers. And has plowed her own moral field at considerable personal costs. Dispensing salt-tablets is Mrs. Helene Richardson, a doe- eyed young negro girl from Belzoni, Mississippi, who left a tenant farm to become a registered nurse. And is working the Delta with the Medical Committee for Human Rights.
“A negro bus driver from Brooklyn, Vincent Young is walking his vacation away, and carrying a sign saying, ‘No Viet Cong ever called me nigger.’ There are beards and clean shaves, sloppy thinkers and acute ones. There are black people from Mississippi and Chicago wanting revenge. And mothers and others seeking Dr. King’s beloved community.” One report.
Second report, this time from UPI, went out to about a thousand or so newspapers. “This march has become part movement, part circus. Among the 350-odd marchers are about 50 white youths who wear t-shirts and denim, sandals and weird cowboy hats adorned with freedom buttons. One is an avowed Marxist. Another is a one-legged redhead, who forsook the United States and lives in exile in Mexico. There’s another marcher who starts each day at the head of the column, and then drops out when the news cameras are turned off.
“Another white man approached a reporter to talk about the coming sexual revolution, which he said would be centered around homosexuality. ‘This is a great assembly of kooks,’ said a Mississippi highway patrolman. Most newsmen agreed.”
The latter report-- and I’m sure this guy is sympathetic to civil rights-- the latter report, the latter attitude, the latter consciousness, structures the way we receive information. Because you know we like to say as reporters the public has a right to know, when what we really mean is that the republic has a right to know what we think is important. Which means that all the baggage that we bring counts for an awful lot in terms of how the story is presented, received, and therefore how attitudes are shaped. That was the crux of the problem, and I don’t mean to dwell on problems. But that was the crux of the problem in terms of media and civil rights.
And my view point is it’s the crux of the problem now, in terms of reporting. And I know I’m over my time, so I’ll stop right here. And thank you very much.
[applause]
RICHARDSON: Thank you, Charlie Cobb. And next a man who truly needs no introduction. He comes into our homes every evening at 6:30, not only as an anchor, but as managing editor of the evening news. He’s known as a strong advocate of hard news, cautioning that we not confuse news with entertainment, as so many of our news programs do.
He has won numerous Emmys, and even has a building named after him. The Dan Rather Communications Building at his alma mater, Sam Houston State University. And what more to say about a man who’s considered a CBS institution? Dan Rather.
[applause]
DAN RATHER: Well thank you very much. It’s an honor to be here, and a pleasure to be afforded this opportunity to recall what remains one of the most important, if not the most important story I’ve ever covered as a reporter, and as an American. Yet, I’m determined, in so far as it’s possible, to keep my mouth shut here this evening. To this day I am more interested in this story itself, in the participants, and what they thought and felt. What they hoped and believed. I am less interested in the reporters, beginning with myself, and less interested in what we thought and felt.
Nevertheless, our purpose here isn’t merely to examine the American civil rights movement, it is to examine press coverage of that movement. So let me begin with a little background.
While I was still working for the television station in my hometown, Houston KHOU TV, I covered Freedom Rides in Jackson, Mississippi, through some of the Carolinas. And back home in Houston, I covered an offshoot of the Freedom Rides, conducted by students at a local college, which was at that time all black.
Between 1962 and 1964, as a new correspondent just starting the CBS news, I was assigned to cover the movement. This took me to places such as Albany, Georgia, Birmingham, Alabama, Savannah, Georgia, Jackson and many other locales in Mississippi, Louisiana, and state lines long since forgotten. I was assigned to cover Medgar Evers, and broke the news of his assassination. Later I covered the death of Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman in and around Meridian, Mississippi. The march on Selma and the Memphis Garbage Workers Strike, as well as James Meredith’s entry into the University of Mississippi.
It was my privilege in many of these assignments to cover the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I say it was my privilege, although I covered him only as a reporter. I never really got close to him as a person. It was never my purpose to befriend him, or to take his side. As a human being, I might have liked to try to be his friend. Might have liked to join him, as a matter of fact. But as a reporter, what I could do, what I did do, was walk near him and beside him.
What I did was listen, not necessarily agree. All I could do was question, not confirm. I was constantly aware, and my employers constantly reminded me, that my purpose was to throw open a window for the American people to see Dr. King and his work. And as a reporter, that’s exactly what I tried to do.
But as an American, as a human being, I knew I was bearing witness to something special, something very special. When I went back to my motel room in the evenings, when I went home at the end of an assignment, I was not the same person. I didn’t see the world the same way. No one could cover the movement and remain the same person.
It wasn’t all that long ago when I heard another great man use only the power of his language, the sound of his voice, to defeat injustice and tyranny. Winston Churchill combating the menace of fascism. At that time, here in the same room with me was another hero, striving to do something very similar. And I have known better, understood more clearly in the years since, how truly special Dr. King was. I miss him, to tell you the truth. And I have no apology for saying so. I miss the sound of his voice, and the things he said with his voice.
I miss the choir that resounded with him when he lifted that voice. Because Dr. King was a leader, not a soloist. I haven’t heard another voice like it. And I travel around the United States now, listening for another voice and I don’t hear it. Not yet, anyway. His choir endures, but without its choir master.
And so we may hear a phrase from the same song. Yes a peep here, and a booming crescendo there. But we don’t hear his voice. And I know that we are all the poorer. Yes and the more foolish because we no longer hear that voice.
Knowing what I know today, knowing what would happen to Dr. King, and what would happen to the country he loved, I sometimes wonder if it would have been possible to maintain my professional objectivity, and decorum, to the degree that I was able to do so in those far away times and far away places. Could I have kept my head when I heard his powerful music? I honestly don’t know.
As a reporter, I would hope so. But again, it wasn’t my reaction to his music that was important. What was important was to give other Americans the chance to hear him. But it’s become impossible to separate my emotions now.
Let me say this much, I am proud to have known him, whatever the circumstances. And I can tell you that when a reporter has covered such a person as Dr. King, well you can’t blame me for finding Dr. King’s story more interesting than the story of the coverage. You can’t blame me for thinking that John Lewis was more important than I. Or Medgar and Myrlie Evers, or Charles Evers, or Andrew Young and Jesse Jackson, and Julian Bond. Or any of the brave Americans who were fighting to finish the work that had begun nearly two centuries before with one simple phrase, “We hold these truths to be self-evident. That all men are created equal.”
This was the great unfinished business of the American experiment. I believe Thomas Jefferson wrote those words with his conscience although he never found the courage to follow through to free his own slaves, or anyone else’s. It was left to Abraham Lincoln to pick up the noble task.
But then for a century, the job had been left undone-- pretty much untouched. In spite of untold suffering, in spite of heroic sacrifice along the way, until Rosa Parks sat down on that bus, the United States was still waiting to fulfill its promise.
How can a reporter rival a story as big as that, characters as epic as that? We can’t. Which is why so many of us keep writing about it years later. As a reporter, you dream of the big stories. You wish you could cover another Abraham Lincoln, another great struggle with the intention not to divide the country, but to unite it in freedom and justice.
You wish that. I did it. I covered Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Can you blame me for thinking that’s interesting? For that matter, I’m not sure you can blame me for thinking that characters such as Bull Connor, Leanda Perez, and George Wallace were pretty interesting too in their vastly different ways.
Now it can’t have escaped anybody’s notice, particularly here with my accent, that I am a white Southern male. On the other hand, it can’t have escaped anybody’s attention that I have been sent into Alabama, and Mississippi, and Georgia by a big news organization, with its headquarters in New York City. So I was automatically provided with a lot of challenges, based either on my personal origins or my company’s origins. People on both sides of the debate assumed that they knew what I believed, and how I would cover the story, and they responded accordingly.
They tried to cozy up to me in some cases, to manipulate me in other cases. Manipulate on both sides. In some cases they were openly hostile on both sides. The great concern of Dr. King and the other leaders of the movement was that the message wouldn’t be heard. In this more cynical age, it may seem a little strange. Here was a political movement that actually wanted extensive press coverage; the kind of press coverage that sticks to its ideals and plays no favorites, pulls no punches. Just acts as an honest broker of information. Looks him in the eye, and lets the people decide.
Dr. King was concerned, for example, that Southern affiliates would persuade the networks to tone down their coverage of the movement. And he was advised to be concerned about it. At the time, I didn’t feel that such concern was really warranted. My own bosses in New York were rock-solid when it came to reporting the news without fear of favor to anyone, including their own affiliates. And yet, in retrospect, I can’t ignore facts such as these.
Just one, this one. The CBS affiliate in Atlanta, Dr. King’s hometown, didn’t even carry the national CBS Evening News through the early times of the movement. Didn’t carry it in 1962, the very year Dr. King took me aside and shared his concerns with me. Much of white America supported desegregation but didn’t support the demonstrations-- an important point particularly for young people who were not alive or of memory age at the time to know.
They supported desegregation, but not the demonstrations. In many cases, not the passive resistance and civil disobedience that Dr. King had learned from Thoreau and Gandhi, and from Mrs. Parks, for that matter. This was a kind of ambivalence on the part of white Americans, and it gave many unscrupulous figures in local, state and federal government the opportunity to try to skew events and press coverage their way.
When J. Edgar Hoover was making a point to whisper malicious gossip about Dr. King, any reporter trying to do right had to begin by questioning why his source was talking. What were this person’s motives? Providing honest information or trying to spin me? All of these issues, attempts at manipulation, outside pressure from advertisers and affiliates, improper sources. All of these issues were ones they taught us about in journalism class; it wasn’t as if I was completely unprepared for all of this.
And of course I’d been reporting daily journalism for over a decade by the time I got to those Datelines, and places such as Albany, Georgia where I first met Dr. King. The point is that on such a story as this, everything you do as a reporter, all of your training and instinct, your standards and your ideals became absolutely essential every minute of the day. Your guard had to be up. You had to protect your reporting from the biases of others and yourself. And you knew it because you knew this was a truly important story.
Maybe if you ever had time to pause for breath, you’d realize that all the stories are important. That all the stories demand that much from you as a reporter. But in the meantime the fate of your country was being decided, and you knew that you had better work hard and act responsibly.
Now I don’t want to bog down on old war stories at this point; plenty of time to do that later on as we go through the evening. When we get into discussion, and my friends here have the necessary advantage of cutting me off when I go too long. Any minute now begins the portion of our program where I start keeping my mouth shut. But I want to repeat my gratitude to you all for giving me this chance to recall a time when righteousness and honor found their strength in this country. When virtue overcame adversity, and when justice had its day. When a king-- Dr. King-- triumphed over tyranny. And when I was lucky enough to be a part of it. Thank you very much.
[applause]
RICHARDSON: Thank you, Dan Rather. Next we come to a man whom Ebony magazine named one of the 15 greatest African American ministers in the nation. I must admit because he was chief of staff for SCLC-- the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, whose head then was Dr. Martin Luther King-- and because he played such an important role in the major campaigns of the civil rights movement, Dr. Walker was a sought after and critical interview for our series Eyes on the Prize.
One statement he made in the Albany, Georgia segment of that 14-hour series has stayed with me. He reflected that Albany’s chief of police, Laurie Pritchett, was non-brutal, he said, rather than nonviolent as some of the media had termed him. And he said, “It’s bizarre to say that a segregationist system or a law enforcement official of a segregationist system could be nonviolent,” said Dr. Walker, “Because first of all, nonviolence works in a moral climate. And segregation is not a moral climate.” A nice distinction. So Dr. Walker.
[applause]
WALKER: My generation of African American preachers reverenced Benjamin Elijah Mays, the president of Morehouse College. And it is not the tradition of ordained Baptist preachers of African ancestry to speak from a prepared text. But across these nearly 48 years of ministry and human rights struggle, I’ve learned that there’s some venues where it is required. And Benny Mays said of prepared texts-- he said, “It’s like kissing a girl on the telephone.” [laughter] “It ain’t quite as enjoyable, but it’s a lot safer!” [laughter]
And I knew I was going to be with-- I really was looking I guess for your dad. Yeah, I thought I was going to see his father, this Charlie Cobb, Jr. And I knew Judy by reputation because we were all a part of that fabric of the south. I first met Dan Rather in Albany, Georgia. And our paths have crossed many times in that movement and across the years since then. Since I’ve gotten establishment.
The media and civil rights movement, the impact of electronic news gathering in the ‘60s. The civil rights movement, as it is generically labeled, is framed by the Montgomery bus protest, and the poor people’s campaign, which was punctuated by the brutal assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. on April 4th, 1968. The impact of media reporting, especially television reporting of the heroic movement, was second only to the contribution and involvement of the African American church community.
It was the mass media reporting in the Birmingham campaign that laid bare the inane cruelty and nonsensical logic of segregation and discrimination by race, whether statutory or by custom. It must be quickly noted that the media was early on an unwilling and begrudging accomplice in that struggle. For the most part, media personnel of the early days of the movement, before the sit-ins, they were exclusively white males, and Southern based in mindset if not in geography.
Since those days we have seen many confessional pieces that detail their conversion to the principle and goals of the movement that they reported without passion, and sometimes with disinterest. David Halberstam’s recent work The Children is an example of that conversion.
I speak to you today as an eyewitness to the events of that period of social revolution, which convulsed this nation almost as greatly as did the Civil War 100 years earlier. It certainly has had greater results in terms of political and social demographics.
Let me suggest to you why I carefully use the word “revolution.” When one considers that before Montgomery, much of the nation and all of the South was fiercely segregated on the basis of race by legal mores. And that in less than a decade and a half, that system of racial division that had been in place for nearly 100 years was completely dismantled. It almost boggles the mind to think that that happened. And there were some legal decrees that prompted some activity. But for the most part it was that the philosophy of that movement convinced people of African ancestry that we just would not tolerate being segregated any more. And the chief spokesman for that movement was Martin Luther King, Jr. That is revolutionary.
The assault on the system was not legal, it was moral. And its leader, irrespective of organizational labels, was a regularly ordained Baptist clergyman named Martin Luther King, Jr. Though Dr. King had no Madison Avenue credentials, he was sensitive to the potential power of the media in aiding and embedding our fledgling movement. The design and strategy of our nonviolent protest were geared unapologetically to capture the attention of the media. Which in turn would placard, hopefully, our cause to the nation with a view toward generating a moral response to the dilemma of systemic racism in the body politic of the nation.
To assert that we succeeded nobly is an understatement. It must be said that prior to the sit-in movement, the reporting was at best begrudging, and did not generate the world wide attention created by the phenomenon of the Montgomery bus protest. It must be remembered that the bus campaign in Montgomery lasted almost a year. Its endurance made it a compelling story, given its venue, the former capital of the confederacy. The methodology employed Christian nonviolence in a mass movement, and its adversary, inter-city bus segregation.
Despite continuing assaults on segregation, very little media attention was given. Local and regional efforts between 1956 and 1960. Montgomery was viewed as an instance of race phenomenon which would not repeat itself.
Now things began to change rapidly with the joining of the sit-in movement, led by the students all across the South, prompted by the four students in Greensboro, which like a prairie fire swept the South and the North. The television reporting of neatly dressed college students making a bid to integrate lunch counters while absorbing the hateful assaults of whites wielding baseball bats and chains, cursing and spitting all the while. That began to stir America’s conscience on the moral issue of statute enforced racial segregation.
The right to use a public library was flushed into the arena of comment and debate. The wisdom of an expensive and dual educational system across the South introduced yet another controversy colored by race. The undercurrent issue of the right to vote began to germinate, but did not catch fire until post- Birmingham. The Albany, Georgia campaigns were stifled by some dirty tricks. And the racist police chief, Laurie Pritchett, who hypocritically boasted he was using nonviolence to blunt the movement.
It is sad to say that the media bought it hook, line and sinker. Then came the Birmingham campaign and Project C. So far as I know, there is no quarrel amongst most pundits that Birmingham became the chief watershed of the nonviolent movement in America. It produced the 1964 Public Accommodations Act of 1964, and led to Selma and the 1965 Voting Rights Bill, both of which have altered the social and political landscape in the South forever.
The focus of the Birmingham campaign was clear. By repeated nonviolent protests, and a stranglehold economic boycott, bring the South’s largest and most violent city to an economic standstill. The corollary was to create a confrontation nonviolently so powerful that the world could not ignore it. The record is legend. Dogs, fire hoses, children’s marches, police brutality transmitted to the capital cities of the world convinced the racist administration that we need to talk.
President Kennedy did a 180-degree turn between his State of the Union message in January, and his nation-wide address to the nation in June following the truce signing in Birmingham. I shall always remember the byline of a Life magazine article on Birmingham: “The fire that water could not put out.” With spectacular photos by Chuck Moore.
We had won the war for the media, and created a climate of reconciliation in Birmingham. During the discussion period, I’ll be happy to share the anatomy of what we did to accomplish all of the above. Thank you very much.
[applause]
RICHARDSON: I am impressed. I mean, I’ve gone to Rev. Walker’s church, and I just thought I’d be passing up the notes and instead I’m-- Okay.
Next, Robert Drew is famous among film makers for having pioneered, along with a few others, the practice of cinema verity, which is the unscripted documentary. And of his many films, the one that most affected me was Crisis, which is noted in his bio, about the stand-off in 1963 between Governor Wallace in Alabama and the Kennedy Administration over the desegregation of the University of Alabama.
Now we watched it during the production of Eyes on the Prize and marveled at the amazing film making, at the style and at the access that this film making team got. The absolute sense of reality that we felt when we were watching this film. The moment for me, when the Justice Department’s Nicholas Katzenbach calls back to Bobby Kennedy in the middle of this amazing crisis-- absolute tension. And ends up talking to Kennedy’s little daughter Kerry on the phone. It’s such a humanizing moment, and it’s one of those times that you realize the real power of documentary film to reveal people’s inner selves. So I give you Robert Drew.
[applause]
ROBERT DREW: Thank you, you just changed the subject to documentary filmmaking and saved me about five minutes I think. Because I have to change the subject in my own mind from this fantastic movement we’ve been talking about, and the great heroes of it, and the passions involved, to something technical. When I say technical, I mean storytelling becomes technical when you start looking at the details.
Going to go back a little bit. I was a writer at Life magazine, before that a correspondent. And my job was to take Life photographers and get them up to bat someplace, so that when they began taking pictures, something would happen. Or something would be interesting. So my job was to forecast what would be happening in another city, at another time, at a precise moment so that somebody could take a picture. It’s a kind of strange, perverted kind of storytelling. I say strange because I only know a few people who did it, even at Life magazine only a few people did it. But something happened to me when I saw a story in Life-- a still picture story-- called “The Day the School Bus Stopped at Hockley.”
I doubt if anybody here ever saw it. If you did, you’d remember it maybe. It was only two, two and a half pages. And somehow Mr. Cobb talked about photographers being the people who could get there. Somehow a Life photographer had been standing beside a road in the South when a school bus stopped to pick-up two black children. Now the school bus was full of white children, and the school bus had never stopped at Hockley before.
The picture simply showed the fear on the faces of the children, black and white, the school bus driver’s obvious bewilderment almost. And the bus goes to the school, and the kids get off, and immediately they separate. And there are classes, and there are recesses and so forth. And by the last recess, I don’t mean to be Polly Anna, but the story showed that by the last recess, the black kids were playing with the white kids. And somehow things were beginning to work a little bit. It wasn’t murder. There was something working.
They all got back on the bus, and the school bus left the black children off at Hockley. Well my specialty was telling stories in pictures, and I wondered then what would have happened if we-- the camera men-- had had a motion picture camera with sound. And had been nearly invisible, and simply recorded what happened. And put it together as an experience. And I think it would have been an overwhelming filmmaking experience if it could have been done.
About this time, I took a year off from Life on a Newman Fellowship at Harvard to look into storytelling in motion pictures, knowing that there’s no way to get the motion pictures candidly. You had to go out with crews, and lights, and so forth to get the pictures. But I studied storytelling in different ways and found out what I thought. You see, I couldn’t figure out why the documentary film was dull. To me it was dull. And every day I was out there in life, laughing and crying and living it. And at Harvard I finally figured out why I had spent this whole year at Harvard. It was to figure out that the reason the documentary was dull was because it was a lecture.
A lecture? You turn off the picture and the soundtrack would play perfectly well. The logic was verbal. So during this year I finally realized if we could get the pictures in human circumstances, continuously, candidly, then we wouldn’t have to edit verbally. We could edit continuously. And we could let stories tell themselves like movies do, maybe.
So during this year I’m tussling with storytelling, and it’s so far from the great movement that we’ve been talking about here that I feel like apologizing. But at the same time, something else happened. I read a book called The Education of Henry Adams. And Henry Adams, when he went to college in the 1850s, was expected to learn everything. And so the book begins with him expecting to learn everything.
But 1905, when he finished the education of Henry Adams, people were so divided among the knowledge that has exploded that the experts couldn’t talk to each other. Scientists couldn’t talk to philosophers, couldn’t talk to literary people and so forth, because knowledge had exploded. And so about the time he finished the education of Henry Adams, he said that, “The world has become unmanageable. Democracy can’t work. It’s impossible because nobody can know enough. But on the day that I die, probably, a child will be born somewhere who will grow up to think that he can see it all. And it may be that unity, like beauty, is in the mind of the beholder.”
I’m telling you all this because when I left the Newman Fellowship, and I finally got a chance to start trying to make the kinds of films that I had imagined, I had to find a story. And I looked around, and there was this young man-- improbable young man running for president. I couldn’t believe it! And I went out to see him in Detroit, and he walked out before a crowd of thousands of people all alone. And I feared for him! He began to speak, and I said, “My God, it’s the child who was born!”
Soon after, Henry Adams died. This fellow thinks he can see it all. He thinks it makes sense that he can run it. Some years later, I finally got some storytelling work. And-- I’m sorry I’m skipping ahead too far. I don’t know how much time we’ve got left. Five minutes?
So I made a film on this fellow, John F. Kennedy, running for president. It was called Primary. And when I proposed to make it to Kennedy, because the camera would have to be with him from morning until night, and we would have four cameras working, and some on Herbert Humphrey, and some on him, he said in effect, “Okay, what’s in it for me?”
And I said, “Well, it won’t help you get elected. But if you do get elected, you’ll have a record of the most vivid kind ever made of the history of your campaign.” Well, he was a history buff, and he agreed, and we made a film called Primary. I showed it to him after he’d been elected, and before he was sworn in. Halfway through the film he hollered, “Hey, get Joe out here.” And his father, Joe, was brought out. And because this is the first film that really played without narration-- maybe two or three minutes-- in which you went with a character, you saw what happened. And they combated, and there was a result. I was proud of it, he liked it.
Next I said, “I want to make a film on a president with his back to the wall in the White House.” He said, “Well, maybe a few days after I’ve moved into the White House, you come in and shoot for a day, and see if I can stand it-- the presence of a camera.” He forgot the camera completely on the trail, but…
I said, “No, I don’t want to do that because that’s just a picture of a man in a closet, a president at a desk.” And he gave me a steely look, and he said, “I think you better come down and try it.” So I said, “Yes, sir, of course.” I shot for two days in the White House, a test. That test turned out to be a one- hour documentary for ABC. And we were left then with waiting for the crisis. And it was agreed that I was going to come back during a crisis. So every time a crisis would come along, I would call Pierre Salinger and say, “Pierre, this is it!” And Pierre would say, “Wait a minute.” And he’d come back to the phone and say, “How can you do this at this moment? How could you propose this? How insensitive are you? It’s a crisis!” [laughter] “Yeah, I know it’s a crisis.”
So finally a crisis came along, and you’ll see how I’m backing into the subject of the evening tonight. And how I did back into it. There was a domestic crisis. The Governor of the state of Alabama was going to stand at the door and block those two students. The President could stand it because there was no international complication. He didn’t have to worry about missiles or anything else; it was just a domestic crisis. But it was a real one, and a deep one, and a big one. Because the Presidency had never committed itself morally to integration.
And the question was, would the President solve the crisis, and would he then go before the American people and commit the Presidency behind integration as a moral issue. And he did and it made a pretty good film. Thank you.
[applause]
ROBERTSON: Thank you Robert Drew. I’d like to frame just one question, and then we’ll go out to the audience for your questions and create a discussion. I just wanted to ask the panel-- and this will come, I’m assuming from different perspectives-- whether you think that the media framed the movement correctly? And I mean that in terms of the values, in terms of the activities, in terms of the people of the movement. Did it frame the discussion correctly? Why don’t we just go boom, boom, boom.
COBB: Well, you know, movements are movements because they cover such a broad political swath. To the extent that the civil rights movement, and this I mean the southern civil rights movement, was breaking down segregation in public accommodations, struggling to secure the right to register and vote for black people, I mean, I think that came across clearly in both television coverage and print coverage.
The point I was trying to make earlier was the movement was about more than that. And here I think the press is not so good. You’ve got these other questions that surround voter registration and beating down white supremacy. Those are harder for the press to deal with just because of how the press works in this. Because the whole question-- which is still unsolved in society-- empowerment of black people is the big question in society still. Decision-making, the movement, and of course where you can see it most clearly if you look back in those times of course is by and large the nationalist part of the movement, which is completely excluded.
RICHARDSON: What do you mean by that?
COBB: Meaning the Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam, Mike Wallace and his documentary on it-- I think The Hate that Hate Produced-- is an exception. I mean, so there’s a whole nationalist stream-- nationalist/pan African stream if you will-- that also belongs as part of the civil rights movement that’s not in the discussion at all. It doesn’t exist in the discussion.
And this is important because remember at the same time the students were sitting in, and Dr. King is leading marches, you have Sharpeville.
RICHARDSON: Sharpeville is where?
COBB: In South Africa, and you have the explosion of independent states in Africa, and these are also acting on the movement. That discussion doesn’t exist in media coverage. It’s sort of in that same category of the deeper questions of how black people organized themselves as we see our own self-interest. That really doesn’t exist in many ways in the media coverage either.
DREW: Well here I am focused on how to tell stories, and the question is how did the media frame the civil rights movement. It’s a little beyond my competence, but I will say this, that I think the media are many mediums, and you’ve got television and you’ve got radio, and you’ve got print, and you’ve got Corthern print and Southern print, and so forth.
I’m saying this because I did make a civil rights film before I made the Kennedy film. And it was about a mother who was walking her daughter to school everyday through mobs of people who were protesting. Now they were protesting because they were boycotting a grade school, because a grade school had admitted a black student. The mother walked her daughter through the mob of protesting people, because she thought it was right to do that.
And the film I made showed mothers with babies in their arms screaming hate, and throwing things, and being vicious. And I called it The Children are Watching, because everywhere you look-- everywhere you saw a Southern person screaming at the mother leading the child, there was another child watching in every picture or in arms. And I made the film and I thought it was a strong film. And it was broadcasted by ABC.
And I actually thought that when the people in New Orleans saw themselves-- saw what they were doing, saw the hate in their own eyes, and saw their children watching, that they would be converted. They would be ashamed; they would change. Well two things happened. One, the New Orleans television station didn’t carry it. Two, other people in the South who saw it were not converted, they were outraged. And I did not editorialize, at least verbally in any way, I simply showed what happened.
So I’m going to conclude by saying that from my standpoint, I thought that the nightly news-- television nightly news was framing things up pretty well. Now I didn’t know everything, or even much, but I felt that the nightly news was doing fine. The documentary side of television was not doing it. They could have been there ten times as much as they were, and they could have evoked and brought the feeling across, and done much more. And the news depended on where you lived and who wrote the stories. So I think I thank God, really, that there was a television, and that there was a nightly news.
RATHER: I’m not sure I’m qualified to answer the basic question. Obviously I’m in television and run the high risk of being biased in my answer. I do believe in the end-- let me put it in an overarching way-- that we framed it correctly. At least in this sense.
Basically what we were trying to do, others would have to judge how well we did it, we were trying to hold up a mirror and say, “This is what’s happening.” Now the inherent question in that is, “This is what’s happening, and do you think it’s right?” And in that sense I think we framed it correctly.
In the instance-- and I remember this very well, this scene in New Orleans, and I remember discussing it with someone in the Roman Catholic Hierarchy, at least the local hierarchy, which, fortunately for us, the Catholic Church owned our affiliate in New Orleans, WWL television, and they did show our material. The other stations were not owned by the Church, and had their own problems. But that’s another story for another day.
In that instance, you hold up the mirror and you say, “This is what we are doing to our children. This is what you, America, this is what we’re doing to our children.” Inherent question, “Do you think that’s right?” In that sense I think we framed it right.
Let me quickly bounce off a couple of things that were said earlier. Charles, you’re quite right about, one, our coverage tended to be centered certainly in places where there was action. Television loves action. It’s not true that we have to have it. What is true is we so often believe that we have to have it. It is true that it tended to be centered in the larger places, Birmingham, Montgomery, even Albany. Albany was not a huge place, but it was not a tiny place either.
But here’s one thing I wanted to raise, and we’ll move onto Reverend Walker, whom I suspect has more depth on the question at hand. But television is at its best in taking you there. That’s where we are unique. We can take you there, and put you in the middle of the scene in Birmingham we’ve seen here. The mothers with babies shouting these epithets at other children. We can take you there. That’s what television is great at.
We lack when it comes to depth. Television has difficulty with depth. Some of the things that you were referring to, which were under cover in some cases, only barely covered, had to do with the depth of the movement. The organization in small outlaying places. We didn’t do a very good job at that. It’s the kind of thing that we rarely do a good job on.
WALKER: I think the answer is both yes and no. And it has to do with the division of labor in the media. In the early days of the movement up to the sit-ins, Nashville, Petersburg, Virginia, Monroe, North Carolina, the places like that, print journalists, despite the fact that they were there on the scene looking at what was happening, did not have the emotional capacity to interpret what was going on. And so their reports were skewed.
I remember in Petersburg, where I cut my civil rights teeth, we had a reporter from the liberal Washington Post. When she came to town we had a very powerful movement. That was the first instance of jail without bail. It didn’t get very much coverage, but that’s where it began in Petersburg, Virginia in 1959, I believe.
And in covering it, she went to the city manager and the president of a bank-- you know, the presiders and deciders in white life-- to see what their assessment of this rabble-rousing movement was about. And never once made an inquiry of either my colleagues in ministry, Reverend Reed, Reverend R.J. Williams, and myself, who were the leaders of the movement. She determined that what white people thought was significant, but dismissed whatever black people thought. And the movement turned out to be a very powerful movement, despite the fact that print journalists in that instance and others could not accurately report what they were looking at.
So that’s the no part of it. The yes is the Chinese said that pictures are worth a thousand words. And we made television work for us. I think Dan you said something about being manipulated. We consciously manipulated television, particularly in Birmingham. I mentioned that Dr. King did not have Madison Avenue credentials, but he had some folks around him who were creative.
When he sent me to Birmingham to set it up, he said, “Wyatt, you have to find a way to create a crisis.” I said, “Yes I know leader!” I said, “I don’t know what it is, but I’ll keep probing until I find it.” And our plan was when we went to Birmingham April 3rd, we had 300 people already signed and sealed who would go to jail, and we were going to march 12 or 15 people a day to gradually build up the momentum of the movement.
Meanwhile, announcing the boycott on downtown, we had what we called primary, secondary, and tertiary targets in case we had a problem getting downtown. Well Bull Connor played into our hands. He’d only let us get about a block and a half from the 16th Street Baptist church, and we said we were going to City Hall to pray. I often wonder in reflection-- I wonder what would have happened if he had let us go to City Hall and pray. After about three or four days, it was an old story, and television wouldn’t be interested!
But on a Sunday afternoon, some of the… We were having a pastor’s march. And their afternoon services ran longer than we thought. And the people in Birmingham, after two weeks of sporadic demonstrations, 12 and 15 getting arrested everyday, something was supposed to happen. So about 11 or 12 hundred people gathered around Ingram Park. And finally the pastors finished with their services, and they came out to march.
And in the meantime, in preparation for the march, Bull Connor with the dogs, and I forget the other fellow’s name, and the fire hoses. They had some encounter with people who were just spectators. And this will illustrate what I mean about the print journalists.
So the next morning UPI reported 1,100 marchers in Birmingham, 15 arrested! So I got up and I said, “Dr. King, I got it!” He said, “What is it?” I said, “All we have to do is slow down the demonstrations, wait for the people to come home from work, and gather.” I said, “And we can count on Bull Connor to do something silly to help us!” And that was the format we used! We waited until people got home from work, and gathered around Kelly Ingram Park. 10 or 9, 11 or 12 hundred people, gathered, waiting for something to happen. To see what was going to happen.
And we were getting two and three minutes on the Huntley-Brinkley Report every other night. And for a 15 minute news program, for us to get two or three minutes in Birmingham, I mean, it was capital! And then of course because that was a network show, it got transmitted to foreign countries. And so that brought the pressure on Mr. Kennedy and others-- our state department about how can you be stonewalling Mr. Khrushchev, and yet these poor black folks in Alabama you sick dogs on and knock down children with fire hoses?
So television was in some ways an unwilling ally. But it had more persuasive power, because the people who did the print journalism really-- it took them some time to come around. You know there’s some names that probably I shouldn’t call, or writers in the South, Hal Rains, Claude Sitton.
You know they had some interest in what was going on, because it was their bureau and they were in the South, and so forth. But they were not really committed to what we were doing. And that’s what I meant in my remarks about the confessional pieces. Hal Rains, I heard him say directly of how that movement changed his life, and David Halberstam, has made his book available.
And we’ve got a very clear and profound testimony from Dan Rather tonight. Don’t you think?
[applause]
RICHARDSON: Before we go to the audience, and maybe you can begin lining up at the mic in the center, one of the things that becomes clear in listening to those gathered here is something that you run up against-- I take Eyes on the Prize into the schools a lot. And what I find is that a lot of young people say, “Well, there are only three of us in the meeting, and we can’t get the other students out.”
And it’s because in Eyes on the Prize, in the kind of coverage that you were able to use, it makes it seem that in Selma, for example, you had three people in a meeting one day. And then two weeks later, you had 20,000 people marching across the Pettus Bridge. And it never happened that way.
And so one of the things that I think we need to think about is how do we fully allow people-- and I think of film in terms of being a change agent-- how do we let people understand that cold, hard difficulty of organizing people for change?
Anyway, the first question.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I wondered to what extent, and how often, the goal was publicity rather than results? A few weeks ago on public television, I saw a program on desegregation in Houston in the early 1960s. You probably all know more about it than I did, I never heard about it. But apparently, maybe about 1960, the restaurants and theaters, maybe buses, I don’t know what else-- department stores, all desegregated over night, with no fuss and no media attention. And the way it worked apparently was that the civil rights leaders went to the Chamber of Commerce and said what they were going to do. They were going to bring in the media, and they were going to have a confrontation in front of the world.
And the Chamber of Commerce-- and tell me if I have this wrong, but I saw it a few weeks ago-- understanding that they were going to lose anyway, and they were going to be humiliated in the process, agreed among themselves that they would all desegregate say the next weekend. And they did, and nothing happened. It worked smoothly. The media never heard about it until a week after it happened when they noticed the things that changed. I wonder to what extent the media-- if I understand this correctly-- to what extent there has been unnecessary turmoil because the media needs pictures to get an audience? Turmoil which could have been avoided?
COBB: There’s two things going on in the South in Broadstroke. You know, what Reverend Walker was talking about, big demonstrations in places like Birmingham, Albany, St. Augustine, etc., etc. Which seems to me, again as Reverend Walker rather eloquently elaborated on, that getting the publicity for that is all a part of that. I mean, I don’t think it’s the cause. I mean, you can’t say that fire hoses and dogs in Birmingham are because the movement was seeking publicity.
But certainly if you’re protesting in this kind of grand way, as they were in Birmingham, and places like that, publicity is a natural part of what you’re seeking.
And there’s another level at which you seek publicity, which I think people aren’t aware of. Say in Mississippi, between 1961, which is when you started to get a resumption of the efforts around voter registration in Mississippi. Between 1961 to 1964, you had a steadily increasing level of violence. Meaning white violence directed at black people. There were killings like--
ROBERTSON: Herbert Lee, Lewis--
COBB: --Herbert Lee, Lewis Allen, and Emmett County, I won’t go into all of these. But there’s a whole string of killings and church bombings that are taking place that no one is paying attention to. Because they’re happening in places that are too tiny, and too remote for anybody to be interested in it.
Wanting to publicize, that strikes me as different than wanting the kind of publicity that you’d want around a big demonstration. Yet, clearly, I mean one of the reasons for the 1964 summer project in Mississippi was because nobody was paying attention to Mississippi.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Do I have it right, that Houston was about 1960?
ROBERTSON: No, you were correct in what you said. He’s just saying that there are other circumstances of other cities of having difficulties in other ways.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: But, and I’ll close with this, it seems to me that in some of those cases, the provocation really involved some kind of an illegal act. In other words, in order to… maybe illegal assembly.
COBB: Everything is illegal.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: No! It’s illegal to have a parade without a permit, for example, for anybody. And if you want to create a lot of attention, you can get Bull Connor to react by doing something illegal.
RATHER: Let me try to be helpful. I know you want to get to the next question, let me try to be helpful. I was born and reared around Houston, and I know something about this situation. I don’t want to get bogged down in the situation.
But the story overall and overarchingly is correct. However number one it is not true that the local press people didn’t know about what was happening. Or let me speak only for myself, that in short, what’s wrong with what you said-- and I say this respectfully-- the thesis that you’ve propounded was that Houston was booming in the post-WWII era. It had a great sense of itself. It being on the move and a leader. And here’s the point.
If what happened in other places-- If what happened in the Carolinas and in Mississippi had not happened, and had not been on television, there is in my personal opinion no way that the powers that be in Houston in that time would have done what they did. But give them credit that the power structure of the city said to themselves, and said to others in private, “Listen, we can learn from what’s happening elsewhere.”
Now we get to decide. We can have hell here, or we can do what’s right. And we’re going to have to do it sooner or later anyway, so let’s move. So that’s a different thing than saying, “Well, if there hadn’t been publicity, maybe you could have done this all over.” That part of your thesis, I say with great respect, simply doesn’t hold up. That it took the pictures. You made a powerful point, Reverend Walker, that the Chinese proverb is a picture’s worth a thousand words. But as the late Eric Sevareid said, “Sometimes a word is worth a thousand pictures.” But not in this case.
That people who wrote about it could be dismissed as, “well they’ve made it up or they’ve embellished it.” Once you had the pictures, and what we call in television pictures that wiggle-- the moving pictures, there was no way to deny what was happening was happening.
ROBERTSON: Next question, and if you could keep your questions fairly brief.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I’ll do my best. I’ve been waiting to ask this question for 34 years, and I’ve never had a chance to ask it to this kind of group. And I’d like to just try it, and I need just a moment to set the stage. And to speak to some of the questions that you’ve been raising about action and about forecasting what there’s actually going to be, and Mr. Walker’s stories.
Four of us, obviously white faculty members from Boston University in late June 1964, were registered anonymously in the Monson Motel in St. Augustine, Florida. We were working trying to find out what was going on in the white community at the behest of Andy and Brad and Martin.
We watched when Martin came back to town the Monson Motel filled up with photographers and news people. And these guys knew he planned the demonstration, planned Martin’s coming back to town. Now my question is really this:
This makes our learning episodic. This means that when Taylor Branch spoke here earlier in this series, he said, “America doesn’t know any history, young or old.” We don’t know any history partly because we don’t want to know history. We don’t know history because the press gives us episodic reporting. The question is, is it essential? Is it changing? Is there anything we can do about it?
RATHER: Well, under the anchorman creed of frequently in error but never in doubt-- [laughter] let me take a quick swing at it. Again I want to say respectfully I’m a reporter, I’m not a historian. Yes, I have tried from time to time in recent years to write some history when I’m working a story.
I may be the best I can do, on my best day, and at my very best, I can give you a first draft of history. I don’t want to give you history. It’s too much to ask even of egotistical and overpaid anchor people to try to teach Americans history. What we do is provide… It is episodic, by very nature, storytelling is episodic. And that’s what we are, Mr. Drew in his way, I in my way. A good reporter is a good storyteller.
He’s not someone who sees himself as the historian. And I would say to you, in all respect, beware of a reporter who goes on a story saying, “I’m not so much a journalist as a historian.” I would put my hand in my wallet, get my back to the wall right quick if anybody said that. But it is episodic. When you have a free and independent press, a multi-faceted press, as we do, it’s inevitably going to be episodic.
DREWS: Henry Adams said that knowledge is exploding and the experts can’t talk to each other. And nobody can know enough. And if that was true in 1905, that’s true today in some multiple spades. And the fact is, if you think about where you get your information, you may get one piece from CBS news, one from ABC news, and then a piece from a newspaper, and something from a magazine. And you may even read a book. And if anybody tried to chart where we’re getting our information from, they couldn’t do it. But if they could, it certainly would be episodic.
RATHER: I know you want to move to the next question, but it’s important to understand that when you’re covering a story, particularly a story such as the civil rights movement, when you’re a reporter on the line, you don’t have time to think about where this story may fit in the great mosaic of history. You know, it’s a little like trying to change the fan belt on a moving Mercedes. You know, you’ve got all you can handle just right in front of you.
I’ll come back to the point-- Others have to take the reporting, stand off, hopefully have some reflection. And weave it into the tapestry of history.
WALKER: I would just like to say simply it’s the nature of the beast. If it had not been for instantaneous news reporting and electronic news gathering, our movement could not have nearly been as successful as it was. And we took the nature of the beast, and used it to our best purpose when we could.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: My question regards the movement and the change agents that made that movement go forward. I was born in 1951, and I was fortunate in 1961 to travel to Washington, D.C. with my parents. And that was a very momentous trip for myself. I wasn’t ready.
I did read the paper even at 10 years old, and watched the news. But I saw very little that would prepare me for looking at hotels, restaurants, rest rooms with signs on them saying “Colored Only.” I wasn’t prepared for that.
When I came back from a week trip in Washington, and told my friends about that experience, first of all they didn’t believe me. They didn’t think that type of thing existed. So that lived with me for several years, until I became a student in high school and we studied that particular topic.
RICHARDSON: I’m sorry I’m going to have to interrupt, and just ask you to get to the question.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yes, and the question is, and Dan Rather alluded to it, we had in 1865 a President who made the movement go forward, we had great leaders in the ‘60s that made that movement go forward. Do we think we have leaders today that will continue that movement, and finally get this racism issue to bed? And in light of the reactions to the…
RICHARDSON: And we’re going to have to hold there. Thank you very much.
COBB: You mean, elected leaders?
RICHARDSON: You mean any kind of leaders? Leaders, general leaders.
COBB: Well, clearly, I mean I think… Let me answer you this way. I’m probably more pessimistic and negative about elected officials now than I was 30 or 35 years ago. But what I know now, I think, is that you don’t only have to look at that direction for leadership. And my way of thinking, we’re in a period that’s… This is a bit of a stretch. We’re in a period roughly equivalent to the late ‘50s, early ‘60s where there’s a whole lot of grassroots leadership bubbling down there. We don’t see it for the same reason we didn’t see it in 1959 or 1960, in my way of thinking.
But it’s there, and it’s a bit early. I think it will emerge, and it kind of balances my negative outlook on elected officials.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: When you say local leaders, what kind of--
COBB: Well, I live in Washington, D.C. I mean, we have tremendous problems with our mayor! [laughter] On the other hand, only to neighborhoods, where I could say now this person… Young people! Jim Foreman, for instance, who was the executive secretary of SNCC when I was a field secretary for SNCC, his son, who at one point was graduated from law school, who one time was clerking-- a law clerk at the Supreme Court, is now involved in a community organization working with teenagers in one of the most difficult neighborhoods in Washington, D.C. He’s a young leader, and the kids like that.
And older people, you know, Kimmie Grey, another name probably people in Boston don’t know, but I could spend some time about how she organizes public housing tenants, and she lives in public housing herself. And you’ve got that, I think, in lots of places around the country. And as I say, it balances-- moderates my negative feelings about other levels.
WALKER: Let me say a word about the African American churches in the ‘90s-- or the ‘80s and the ‘90s. I made about 34, 35 states during a 10 month period most years. I’m on a lecture platform a good deal, so I have a pretty good view of what’s happening in exercise of religion among black churches because that’s my arena. And in the early ‘80s, I could see a quantum leap in black church life, turning to what is now termed economic development.
And if you name a city, I can tell you some pastor there, some high profile in terms of what he’s doing, as how he’s empowering his people through economic development. The largest sector of housing development in America in the last 15 years has been church-sponsored affordable housing. I pastor a working class congregation in Central Harlem; we meet in an old theater. And along with Moran Weston, the Episcopal priest, in the last 25 years, Moran Weston and I produced more affordable housing than the city and the state of New York combined two black preachers.
And a part of the problem that you have alluded to, Charles, is that the black condition is not a priority. And the homelessness that plagues our large cities is because government is not addressing the needs of the people who are most set upon by the circumstances of urban life. And I’ve seen the African American church taking up that slack.
Charles Adams in Detroit, Michigan. Floyd Flake out in Queens-- I mean, it’s just a long litany of ministers who have literally hundreds of people working at full-time occupations, because of the enterprises of their church that are satisfying needs. On one corner, Charles Adams has a McDonald’s. On another corner, he has a Burger King. And he has a program with those two franchises of training young people in entrepreneurial efforts.
RICHARDSON: Dr. Walker, let me just suggest, because I think this is a good discussion, what I’m worried about is we have 15 minutes, and I see seven people back there. What we can do, I think, if the questions stay short, and if we keep it a little pithy up here, we may be able to make it through all seven before--
RATHER: We’re going to our two-minute drill! [laughter]
RICHARDSON: Okay, we’ll do a two-minute drill! You’re on.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I hope I can help that some. Wyatt T. Walker, to what extent did the media frame the movement in the Commonwealth of Virginia before you left Petersburg, and after you left Petersburg?
WALKER: I didn’t hear the first part, I’m sorry.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: To what extent did the media frame the movement in Virginia prior to your movement to Petersburg and after?
WALKER: It was not very useful to us, and I gave the instance of the Washington Post. The local paper would not take any notice of it. And the local newspaper had a colored page on the back page of the newspaper.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Petersburg Progress Index did?
WALKER: Progress Index, yeah, had a colored page. Yes. And it had no news, it had nothing.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: What about Virginius? Your assistant in Petersburg. Virginius Thornton.
WALKER: Virginius Thornton? Bless your heart! One of the pioneers of our movement in Virginia! Nice to see you, Virginius!
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I wanted to direct this question to probably Mr. Drew and Mr. Rather, and then probably to Mr. Walker and Mr. Cobb. Mr. Drew and Mr. Rather, when you were reporting on the civil rights movement, were there any times where you had to be critical of the movement, or was painful to do so given your own feelings about it? And Mr. Cobb, Mr. Walker, were there times when valid criticisms were made of the movement, and it was painful for you to hear them through the media?
RICHARDSON: Good question. We’re going to speed through this, okay.
RATHER: The short and best answer is no. Again, little time to think about it. That’s not an excuse; I’m trying to give you an explanation. And it’s hard to explain, but true it is, that we didn’t think of the coverage as praiseful or critical. A lot of my job was to get the photographers in the position to take the pictures, and to keep people off of them while they did that. And then to put some narration with the pictures. You know, I was then and I hope I still am, a straight news reporter. So commentators and others handled the criticism. I don’t remember facing that a single time.
If it turned out to be something that didn’t reflect well on the movement, it wasn’t my words that did that. But it was the pictures, and the words of others that one put into a report that did it.
DREW: I didn’t hear the question, but what you said-- [laughter]
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I wanted to know if there were times that you had to be, in order to be a responsible reporter, had to be critical of the movement, and whether that was painful to do-- to carry out?
DREW: That kind of question never arose. If I saw a story, I would tell the story, and the chips would fall where they may. I’m a reporter too, in a different way.
WALKER: Let me insert something that Dan Rather has not said. There was at times as much danger to the Dan Rathers-- white male reporters reporting for the networks-- as there were for those of us involved in the movement. And he has not said that, and I think that needs to be said. Because the racists were as livid about him being there, telling the truth with his reporting, as they was about our making our protests for justice and decency.
RICHARDSON: But now the second part of your question is were there times when you two movement people felt that there were things that were negative about the movement that did not get covered? Is that--
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Oh did get covered, and painful for… Were there instances where the valid criticism was made, and it was kind of painful for you to see?
WALKER: Well, I’d have to rely on Dan’s remarks. It’s like changing that belt on a-- What was that?
RATHER: Moving Mercedes. [laughter]
WALKER: Moving Mercedes, yeah. We didn’t have time to deal with that. You know, it was… We always felt that whatever the news media reported, even if they got it wrong, it was a crap-shoot at best. And if they mentioned what was going on, positive or negative, it was a plus.
COBB: Except in extreme… I don’t really remember much negative, except in extremely historical… Novak and Evans used to run a series of extremely hysterical columns about communists in the civil rights movement. So we never… We took that kind of stuff real seriously. Then you had all the local press. We haven’t had a lot of discussion about the local press. You know, the Jackson-Clarian Ledger and the Daily News in Jackson, I think, played a major role in the kind of violence that surrounded James Meredith’s entrance into Old Miss. And you’ve got that kind of local press.
Our attitude was we’d read something, maybe we’d say, “Well, if he spent all that time in such and such a place, how come he didn’t do this? Or have that?” It was more of that, and that’s not really a reaction to the negative. It’s more of, “Well, if I was writing the story… That’s how I got into the business in the first place… I would do it this way.”
RICHARDSON: Okay, next question.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Reverend Walker’s statement that this is more of a revolution than a movement, and Mr. Cobb’s statement that this is unfinished business from ’68 with the passing of Reverend King, and the clear national focus that this revolutionary leader provided, I’d like you to comment on the media’s responsibility, or lack of responsibility, or view of this gap, and what appears to be a lack of revolutionary leader provided to us by the media? Is it that there is no one available that’s capable? Is it that the media finds no one as media savvy or media friendly as Reverend King? Is it that the movement and revolution has progressed past the necessity of a national focus leader?
WALKER: Let me be candid and say that there’s a malaise in black life, as there is a malaise in white life. Not quite as deep. The people who quickly entered the doors of new opportunities following the days of the movement have become comfortable in their places of position and convenience. And you cannot have a revolution without middle class skills.
And I don’t think you can lay that hard wood on the media. It’s not the media’s responsibility. My contention is that the struggles that black people and others similarly situated have made, that that should not be our burden. That should be the burden of the majority community. I think white America has as much a responsibility for the establishment of justice as those of us who are the victims of it.
[applause]
RICHARDSON: Alright, next question.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yes, I have a very specific question. It’s also about leadership in particular to the media. Do you feel that during the civil rights movement there was too much focus on the difference between Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X? And what effect did that have on the civil rights movement?
COBB: No, I don’t think there was much of a discussion of that in the media. I mean, I really don’t. There clearly were differences. Malcolm himself, certainly before his trip to Mecca and his Africa trip, articulated his critique of the movement, which some reporters picked up. But in general, I don’t think that was much of a discussion at all. Because, as I said earlier, this whole nationalist, pan-Africanist part of movement and interaction is just written out of the whole period.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yes, I appreciate your coverage previously, Mr. Rather. Approximately three months ago, CBS followed Representative Congressman Gephardt through Mexico. And I would just like to say to the panel that there’s a lot of people still out here fighting injustice, and I’m in labor. And we fight for our people no matter what color they are. You know, it’s green, it’s not black and white right now. And what I’m hoping, and my question is, do you see in the future more coverage about what’s happening with a large segment of our society going backwards? Because the only coverage we’ve been seeing a lot of is the economic boom, and there’s a lot of people suffering from a boom-deficiency.
RATHER: I don’t think so. And there’s no joy in saying that. You said, what do we see? We see more of this coverage… I don’t think so. It’s sad to say, and I do not accept myself in this criticism, entertainment values have so consumed news values in so much of American journalism, including and especially television. The kind of coverage you’ve suggested that you want to see more of is less likely now than it has been at any time in my career as a journalist.
Number two, and Reverend Walker referred to this, economically for most people, times are pretty good. And when times are pretty good, it’s pretty easy to say, “I’ve got mine, Jack.” And worry less about those who are on the bottom. I wish I could be more optimistic. I’m an optimistic person by experience, and by inclination. But about this, the specific question you raise, I’m not very optimistic about it. Certainly not in the short-run.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hi. My question is about… I know we have a movement, and we’ve been moving and moving for over 400 years. But my question is, when you go down to a discrimination board, and they tell you you only have 180 days for a case, what kind of thing is this?
RICHARDSON: I’m sorry, could you be a little clearer?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Okay, for discrimination they only give you 180 days for a case for a black person, or minority or whoever. And they give you only 180 days, and we’ve been fighting for 400 years.
RICHARDSON: Okay, so you’re talking about a failure of the system. Okay, anyone want to comment on that?
COBB: I think the only answer for failure of the system is organization. And organizing. I mean, after all, you could argue that even in the ‘60s and before all along, and what people have been challenging in part is systems. And the way they challenge systems was by organizing themselves. And I think the same thing is true now.
I mean, I’m not familiar with the specifics of what you’re saying, but if the grievance is legitimate, you’re not getting the satisfaction in organization.
WALKER: Shut the office down for two or three days. Get the attention of the governor, or the senator, or something. Let me tell you two things that the adversaries will not-- they cannot digest. One is to influence the ebb and flow of money, hit them in the pocketbook. And inconvenience-- White Americans do not like to be inconvenienced! [laughter]
AUDIENCE MEMBER: That’s what I know! Oh, and I have one more thing. The only thing that reminds me of the ‘60s right now and during that time, is when I look in the paper and I see personal ads, “single white male,” “single black male dates.” [laughter]
RICHARDSON: Well, you can follow-up on this. Yes?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yes, Mike Wallace talks about in The Hate that Hate Produced, the documentary, the strategy about how the black Muslims would only talk to black reporters. And the Feminist Ledger used this strategy to great success, because newspapers have to hire female reporters to cover the movement. Could you comment on how pervasive that strategy was, and whether it was plausible for the rest of the civil rights movement to use that strategy?
RICHARDSON: Can I just take the prerogative of the moderator? Because we did a two and a half hour documentary on Malcolm X which I co- produced. And one fallacy is that Malcolm only talked to black reporters, that’s not true. That’s really not true. I mean, the person who wrote the intro of his book was a reporter, and he had very clear relationships with people. You know, with reporters like Mike Wallace, like Handler-- can’t remember his first name, but the person who does the intro to the autobiography.
You know, Malcolm was very savvy about how to use the press, but anyway, go ahead.
COBB: Well, that didn’t exist in the civil rights movement. You talked to whatever reporter made his or her way up, we were!
RICHARDSON: But I think what you’re referring to is the rebellions-- the riots of the late ‘60s where you do get an influx of African American reporters, because there are people in those cities who will not talk to white reporters. You’re right.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Right, and I saw something the other night in which Mike Wallace actually said that the Nation of Islam, in doing the documentary, they would not talk to white reporters, and so they had black reporters go and cover that.
RICHARDSON: Yes, that is true of the Nation, but not true of Malcolm.
WALKER: And I do think that in our movement, that along the way the networks began to see the wisdom of hiring people irrespective of what their gender-- that came a little later-- but of race. Because that could get-- If you had a black stringer, you could get on the inside. But it was an ancillary development. It was not a central focus or goal; it just developed.
I remember that fellow who got killed in an automobile. He did the ABC documentary Walk in my shoes, Lou. And you know, when you get to be near 70, you can’t remember things as well! [laughter]
RATHER: I suffer from old timers disease myself. I know what you’re talking about.
RICHARDSON: Next question, thank you.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: That was a great segue into what I was about to ask. Then and now, much as Mr. Cobb mentioned, the journalist probably did not want to depict the issues the way they did. But as we all have heard, the way you stand often depends on where you sit, so if you’re not sensitive to the experiences and the struggles of a people, it’s hard for you to explain and to depict it from their point of view. I see that same issue today, and I want to ask Mr. Rather, for one, if you think that there’s a greater movement of newspaper-- major media entities involving people of color to bring that diversity to the stories, and so they aren’t so one-sided and from one perspective?
RATHER: Well there certainly has been some movement in that direction. Very little, and very late. And I wish I could say two things to you. I wish I could say that one, that it’s already a fairly high degree of that. That’s not true. As a broad generalization, there’s certainly exceptions along the way. But generally speaking, newsrooms are not as diverse in terms of color and some other ways. But we’re talking about color here-- not as diverse in color as the country is.
This is particularly true the higher you go in the decision-making process. The diversity is most obvious in on-the-air positions. It is least obvious, and in some instances non-existent when you reach what I call “above the tree- line.” That is pretty high up.
I also wish I could say to you that the movement toward greater newsroom diversity is exhilarating. That is not true. Again, as a broad generality, it has regressed. Not progressed in the last 10, 12, 15 years. It’s going backward, and not forward in terms of the overall percentages, and certainly in terms of the commitment of top leadership, which is after all what it takes to make this happen. We’ve gone backward not forward.
RICHARDSON: Could I just mention a stat, because I use it a lot. From USA Today, those little boxes-- because they don’t really do news, they do boxes. So in the box you had 90% of the 55,000 newsroom work force is white. 93% of its managers-- its supervisors are white. And I think… Oh, you snuck up on me! Do you have a real short question?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yeah, it follows your question-- your statement actually. And it’s a question for anybody to answer. Is there such a thing as a white media?
RATHER: You haven’t had a chance to speak up.
DREW: I didn’t hear the question.
RATHER: The question is, is there such a thing as the white media?
DREW: Well, I’m afraid I’d have to say it is the white media. The media is the white media, except for the black media. [laughter]
RICHARDSON: If I could just ask you, ask why you’re asking that… How are you framing that question?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I had the problem at Boston University with professors there when I did a thesis on that very subject. And they told me that there was no such thing as a white media. My reason for bringing that issue up is because of the statistics that you just gave out. I worked at Channel 7 here as an intern one time. And I learned certain break-downs of how the broadcast media works. And one of the persons who is very important in that system is an assignment editor. And the assignment editor, I found, is the person who determines who gets what assignment, and what assignments are to be written. So down through the years I’ve been looking through the media…
RICHARDSON: Thank you, but unfortunately we are all out of time. Thank you to our panel, and to all of you for coming today.