Fall 2001 Human Rights Magazine

By Jack Nelson

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was already thirty minutes behind his scheduled arrival time at Brown Chapel in Selma, Alabama, on that February day in 1965. We were used to King not arriving on schedule. But there was one thing we could count on: He would never arrive so late that waiting television crews could not get their coverage of what he did or said onto the networks' evening news programs.

Decades later it's easy to see why Martin Luther King, Jr., would join George Washington and Abraham Lincoln in the pantheon of those honored with a national holiday. Even in the mid-1960s, however, it was clear that King might become a catalyst for historic change, in part because he understood two things:

First, the importance of the rule of law. Second, the importance of the news media in shaping the public opinion that shapes the law in our democracy.

For the country as a whole, the civil rights movement that Martin Luther King, Jr., came to personify was a transforming force. For the law and the news media, it brought to an end attitudes and practices in the South and elsewhere that shamed both law and journalism. And the civil rights movement of the 1960s also created an opportunity for the law and the press to play roles that each now looks back on with justifiable pride.

Without new laws and a transformation of the old system of ''Jim Crow Justice,'' the civil rights revolution might have failed. And without the news media's increasingly careful coverage of King's activities-and the powerful responses it drew-it seems unlikely that public opinion could have been mobilized to demand change.

Before the civil rights movement, the way blacks were treated by the law-and the way most newspapers and other news organizations dealt with that treatment-made a mockery of almost every principle lawyers and journalists professed to believe in. Then, as a changing news media began to show the whole country how the law was applied-or misapplied-in the South, public opinion cried out for change. And the rule of law became an instrument for ending terrible injustices and changing a whole society.

In more than fifty years as a journalist (and I've covered impeachment proceedings against two presidents) I have never covered a story as important as the civil rights movement. In the early 1960s, when King began leading demonstrations aimed at desegregating public accommodations in Birmingham, he had already learned that coverage on the evening television news was essential to moving public opinion. Riveting images of Birmingham Police Commissioner Bull Connor's officers using dogs and fire hoses to attack defenseless blacks, including women and children, sparked such national outrage that Congress passed the 1964 Public Accommodations Act.

In Selma, King was leading a voting rights drive. He had chosen Alabama again for two reasons: First, it was one of the Deep South states where white supremacy was so rigid that even blacks who had fought for their country in World War II and Korea could not vote. Second, it offered villainous antagonists who made for good television drama-Governor George Wallace, first and foremost, but also Bull Connor and Selma's Sheriff Jim Clark.

It was Clark's posse, some mounted and armed with clubs, whips, and cattle prods, that would make the Edmund Pettus bridge a name to go down in history. As demonstrators, led by John Lewis of Atlanta and other King associates, reached the bridge for a scheduled march to Montgomery, members of Sheriff Clark's posse savagely attacked, injuring many of the demonstrators. Lewis suffered a fractured skull. Some of the horses trampled women and children. Once again television broadcasts and newspaper reports of the brutality provoked a public outcry. Public pressure became so intense that Congress, despite the heated opposition of some powerful Southern political leaders, passed the 1965 Voting Rights Act. In signing the bill into law, President Lyndon Johnson described it as ''one of the most monumental laws in the entire history of American freedom.''

In fact, the law profoundly altered the nation's political landscape, guaranteeing hundreds of thousands of blacks the right to vote and dramatically increasing the number of black elected officials. In 1965, according to the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, 260 blacks served as elected officials. Last December, in its most recent annual report, the Center reported that there were 8,936 black elected officials. There were only four black members of Congress in 1965; today there are thirty-nine-among them John Lewis.

Although their increasing representation in Congress has raised African Americans' political profile nationally, most black elected officials serve at the local level. And their influence there has been substantial-especially in the administration of justice, which was the last pillar to fall in the South's system of segregation. Prior to passage of the Voting Rights Act, one seldom saw a black person at a courthouse in the Deep South who was not a criminal defendant or pushing a broom. Today, in counties with heavy black populations, judges, prosecutors, and chief law enforcement officers often are black. And predominantly black juries are not uncommon. Covering the South in the 1960s, I attended trials where all-white juries freed Ku Klux Klansmen or other white supremacists despite overwhelming evidence that they had murdered blacks or white demonstrators. In one Alabama case, a juror entering the courtroom after deliberation winked and smiled at the defendant before the jury returned its not guilty verdict.

In some instances, such as the notorious murder of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi, local prosecutors did not even bother to bring such cases before a grand jury. In 1962, one of my sources, civil rights lawyer Charles Morgan, Jr., represented a black man named Boa Sanders, who was accused of murdering a white person. Morgan filed a motion in court documenting the all-white makeup of Alabama's system of justice and declaring that the system was often perverted to preserve the ''Southern way of life.''

Morgan noted that Sanders was arrested by whites, transported to jail in a car driven by a white to a segregated jail staffed solely by whites, and would be taken to a courthouse of all-white officers and prosecuted by a white before an all-white jury in a courtroom where black spectators would be segregated. And if Sanders were to get the death penalty, he would be given a last meal by white guards, visited by a white chaplain, shaved by a white barber, taken by white guards to the electric chair, where a white hand would throw the switch before white witnesses.

In early 1965, prior to passage of the Voting Rights Act, I opened the Los Angeles Times' Atlanta Bureau and soon began working on a five-part series on ''Jim Crow Justice.'' One night, I went to a mostly dark Capitol building in one of the states in my region to meet with a conscience-stricken official. He had promised me access to official records documenting how black defendants were routinely given a raw deal under the segregated system of justice.

The official was courageous enough to cooperate but cautious enough not to want his identity published. And he insisted I come at night because he dared not be seen with me. Like many other Southern political figures who helped journalists covering the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, he knew that public exposure could end his political future in a society where nothing was more segregated or unfair to blacks than the courts.

He wanted to be identified only as ''a state official in the South'' who was sickened by the system. The state's name was irrelevant anyway, he pointed out, because the same corrupt system existed in every southern state.

"When it comes to Negroes," the official told me, "the callousness of some courts is unbelievable." My confidential source was Walter B. "Bee" Brooks, then-chairman of the Georgia Pardon and Parole Board and a long-time behind-the-scenes power in Georgia politics. He died many years ago. That night at the capitol he laid out records of more than fifty criminal cases that provided dramatic evidence that racial injustices were routine. In two typical examples:

• A black teenager with no previous police record was hunting when a gang of drunken whites decided to ''devil'' him. One of them grabbed the boy's gun and it accidentally fired, killing the son of a prominent white citizen. An all-white jury convicted the black youth of murder and sentenced him to life imprisonment even though a witness said, ''If he had been white, he never would have been tried.''

• A white woman, jaywalking despite repeated police warnings, was killed when she walked into the side of a car driven by a black man. Charged with manslaughter, he pleaded guilty rather than face an all-white jury. He was sentenced to five years in prison even though a local official called the death ''strictly accidental'' and said the defendant got ''a raw deal.''

Sometimes black defendants were in such fear of white juries that they pleaded guilty, gambling that a white judge would show more leniency than a white jury. Frequently they lost the gamble, as in the case of a black defendant who pleaded guilty to charges involving minor burglaries. Slapped with two fifteen-year sentences to run concurrently, the defendant muttered, ''He really stuck it to me.'' The judge overheard the remark and angrily declared the sentences would run consecutively, doubling the prison time to thirty years.

Long before television made its mark as a vehicle for social reform in the 1960s, a handful of newspapers had begun exposing civil rights violations in the South, especially in the justice system. And the extensive coverage that national newspapers gave to Selma and Birmingham, combined with the increasingly powerful influence of television news, mobilized public opinion that pressured Congress to pass the landmark civil rights acts of 1964 and 1965.

Much has been said about how the press helped end the Vietnam conflict by bringing the fighting and suffering into America's living rooms and dinner tables. But much less attention has been given to the role of the press in covering the civil rights movement. And the fact is that, except for the New York Times, the national press paid relatively little attention to civil rights issues until after the Supreme Court's 1954 school desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education. The New York Times delved into the social problems that caused deprivation and injustice in the black community; however, most of the media showed no interest in covering such a volatile issue in the South and were content to ignore civil rights until the school decision touched off social unrest and resistance to desegregation by whites. Even then-and until the King-led movement blossomed in the 1960s-most of the press was content to cover civil rights simply as a breaking news story instead of exposing the underlying injustices and social problems blacks faced.

As for local media, much of the Southern press favored segregation and promoted massive resistance to school desegregation orders. At a 1987 National Symposium on the Media and the Civil Rights Movement at the University of Mississippi, some fifty journalists who covered the movement in the 1950s and 1960s discussed the press's role, its faults as well as its triumphs. There was broad agreement that, while part of the press uncovered and reported injustices, another part dug in its heels and fought any change to the ''Southern way of life.''

Some Southern newspapers were part of the segregationist establishment and vehemently opposed what they called ''race-mixing.'' Some major newspapers with strong editorial policies of supporting law and order nevertheless failed to provide comprehensive news coverage of the civil rights movement.

In 1957, the Nashville Banner used the dateline ''With the Federal Occupation Forces in Little Rock'' on its stories describing the desegregation of Central High. A Jackson, Mississippi, newspaper columnist had suggested flamethrowers be used on civil rights demonstrators. Two NBC affiliates in the South dropped the "Huntley-Brinkley Report" because of John Chancellor's aggressive, but accurate reporting out of Little Rock.

The Atlanta Constitution, where I was a reporter in the 1950s and early 1960s, had two courageous editors-Ralph McGill and Gene Patterson-who won Pulitzer Prizes for standing up for racial justice on the editorial pages. But the news pages of the Constitution left the Selma story to the wire services in 1965, even though it was the hottest story in the nation and hundreds of journalists from all over the world were covering it at its height. The Constitution was not alone in leaving Selma to the wires; most Southern newspapers did.

For my part, while at the Constitution, I focused on exposing then-rampant corruption in state and local government-a subject my editors considered more urgent than racial protests. The one exception was Little Rock: The Constitution did send me there after President Eisenhower dispatched federal troops to enforce court-ordered desegregation.

I became deeply involved with civil rights stories only after joining the Los Angeles Times in February 1965, and going directly to Selma where I covered the story for months.

At the same time, the record is clear that-much earlier than Selma-some journalists and news organizations in the South risked lives and fortunes to report the civil rights struggle. They not only reported to their readers but helped countless national correspondents find their way on a new, confusing, and sometimes dangerous story.

Among these lonely voices were two brave Mississippians, Bill Minor of Jackson and the late Hazel Brannon Smith of Lexington. They both fought the Ku Klux Klan, worked under constant threats, and had their offices bombed. Brannon won a Pulitzer Prize for pursuing racial justice. Minor, now seventy-nine, still champions racial justice in a syndicated column for Mississippi newspapers.

There also were courageous white lawyers who cooperated with journalists and often risked their lives and careers in seeking racial justice. They included Charles Morgan, Jr., of Birmingham and Avin J. Bronstein of New York. Morgan's law practice dried up after he denounced the white establishment in the wake of the Birmingham church bombing that killed four black girls. But he continued his civil rights advocacy as an ACLU lawyer in Atlanta. Bronstein, who served as a civil rights lawyer in Mississippi during 1964-68, operated under almost constant threats and was beaten by police in Pike County when he objected to their hostile interrogation of teenage civil rights demonstrators.

Until the mid-1960s, such voices were the exception. It was only after the news media began to cover Martin Luther King's protests extensively, and the broader public began to respond, that real reform began to take place.

The press, having played a crucial role in Congress's passage of the 1964 and 1965 civil rights acts, carefully monitored enforcement of the Acts, helping minimize segregationists' resistance and ensuring steady federal enforcement.

And when justice finally came, as King would have said, it rolled down "like a mighty stream."

Jack Nelson, Los Angeles Times' chief Washington correspondent and a former long-time Washington bureau chief, covered civil rights in the South for the Times in the 1960s. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1960 for exposing wrongdoing at a Georgia state mental hospital and is the author of several books, including Terror in the Night/The Klan's Campaign Against the Jews.

As published in Human Rights, Fall 2001, Vol. 28, No. 4, p.3-6.