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The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation (Vintage)

Gene Roberts, Hank Klibanoff

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Free at Last, Free At Last, Thank God Almighty (almost) Free at Last 4 out of 5 stars.
6 of 8 people found this review helpful.

The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation

-- Reviewed by Philip W. Henry
When the civil rights story began in the early 1960's, I was a freshman at a Northern College. So much was happening between 1963 and 1968 that it was possible to miss some of the real history unfolding outside "The Ivory Tower `while studying the past. Now, I'm trying to fill in some of the blanks in my education. "The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of the Nation" is a good place to begin. Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff were both intimately involved in covering the biggest stories of the South. Drawing on extensive interviews, and digging in previously unpublished documents and memoirs, they paint a fascinating portrait of the crisis of conscience and confidence that the civil rights story caused in the Southern Media Establishment.
The tensions developed in covering the race story were not just between White, Liberal, and often Jewish Northern News Organizations v. the Old South; but within the Southern Media as well. There were honest and decent Southern publishers and editors who decried the move toward Klan violence and barricaded school houses epitomized by Lester Maddox, Orval Faubus and George Wallace. Ironically, many of the top editors of the supposed Yankee Press (especially The New York Times) were Southerners themselves. (Turner Catledge, one of the T imes's top editors, was from Philadelphia, Mississippi, where the three civil rights workers were found murdered).
If anything propelled the Story of the South into the living rooms of the country it was TV News. The sight of Freedom Riders being beaten, firehosed and dragged away; and the four little girls in their church outfits killed in the cowardly KKK bombing of a Birmingham Church, inflamed the American conscience.

The Assassinations of Medgar Evers; the Birmingham Four; and the three young civil rights workers from the north and the refusal of local law enforcement to investigate the case added to the fray. The sheriff and his deputy were later indicted by a Federal Grand Jury in a case prosecuted by John Doar, the young Justice Department Lawyer who later gained fame in the Watergate Prosecution.

In one telling scene, Doar stands in front of a group of rebel yokels and confronts them. He could easily have been killed or lynched, but by the force of his conviction he prevailed. .

If there is some vindication out of all this, several cases believed to be so cold or so compromised that justice could never be served, have been solved. Medgar Evers's killing took thirty years to solve, but the failed fertilizer salesman Byron De La Beckwith, who was spared by a hung jury earlier, paid a price thirty years later: (One Mississippi paper, unable to bring itself to claim De La Beckwith as one of "Ole Miss's Own," said: " Californian held in Murders." (He had spent his first five years in California)
"In 1994, thirty years after the two previous trials had failed to reach a verdict, Beckwith was again brought to trial based on new evidence concerning statements he made to others. During the trial, the body of Evers was exhumed from his grave for autopsy, and found to be in a surprisingly good state of preservation as a result of embalming. Beckwith was finally convicted of murder on February 5, 1994, after living as a free man for three decades after the killing. Beckwith appealed unsuccessfully, and died in prison in January 2001."

There are good guys and gremlins, of course. Robert Kennedy, never popular in the south, is portrayed as the loyal Attorney General to his brother, who never seemed to totally grasp the dimensions of the story. Justice Department Lawyer John Doar is a giant figure in the post-freedom riders killing trials. Moderate southern editors and publishers like Ralph McGill of the Atlanta Journal and Constitution and Hodding Carter of Greenville, Miss, where the three student volunteers were found murdered, kept their composure and focus despite financial and social pressure from conservatives. (Carter, in particular, began as a staunch segregationist but became more liberal).
"The Race Beat" is a valuable addition to the literature of Journalism and race relations in the United States.

Editorial Review:

An unprecedented examination of how news stories, editorials and photographs in the American press—and the journalists responsible for them—profoundly changed the nation’s thinking about civil rights in the South during the 1950s and ‘60s.

Roberts and Klibanoff draw on private correspondence, notes from secret meetings, unpublished articles, and interviews to show how a dedicated cadre of newsmen—black and white—revealed to a nation its most shameful shortcomings that compelled its citizens to act. Meticulously researched and vividly rendered, The Race Beat is an extraordinary account of one of the most calamitous periods in our nation’s history, as told by those who covered it.

At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (Modern Library Paperbacks)

Philip Dray

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 22 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

One word - outstanding. 5 out of 5 stars.
6 of 6 people found this review helpful.

Quite possibly the best, most well-researched book I've ever read. A smooth read, impeccable use of historical sources, and a clear narrative account of the most tragic era in American history. For scholars who research or teach in the area of social control, legal, and extra-legal punishment, you *cannot* have a full grasp of the topic unless you read Dray's work. A fine work of history...the author is to be commended.

Editorial Review:

Winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction

This extraordinary account of lynching in America, by acclaimed civil rights historian Philip Dray, shines a clear, bright light on American history’s darkest stain—illuminating its causes, perpetrators, apologists, and victims. Philip Dray also tells the story of the men and women who led the long and difficult fight to expose and eradicate lynching, including Ida B. Wells, James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, and W.E.B. Du Bois. If lynching is emblematic of what is worst about America, their fight may stand for what is best: the commitment to justice and fairness and the conviction that one individual’s sense of right can suffice to defy the gravest of wrongs. This landmark book follows the trajectory of both forces over American history—and makes lynching’s legacy belong to us all.

Uprooting Racism: How White People Can Work for Racial Justice

Paul Kivel

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

A New Edition--Great! 5 out of 5 stars.
37 of 43 people found this review helpful.

When I began reading the previous edition a few years ago, I realized that I wanted to discuss it with other white people as I worked through the exercises.

As a result five women in leadership roles in their church congregations discussed this book over lunches over some months. It took as many lunches as there are chapters. We learned much about ourselves as white women and much about the history of racism in the United States.

I continue to look for ways to share the impact of this book with others. I am pleased that there is a new edition and look forward to seeing what has made this very useful book even better.

Editorial Review:

Continuously at the top of New Society Publishers' best-seller list for five years, Uprooting Racism has been revised and expanded with more tools than ever to help white people understand and stand-up to racism. In addition to updating existing chapters, the new edition explores how entrenched racism has been revealed in the new economy, voting, anti-Arab prejudice, and health care policy.

What Blood Won't Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America

Ariela J. Gross

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Editorial Review:

Is race something we know when we see it? In 1857, Alexina Morrison, a slave in Louisiana, ran away from her master and surrendered herself to the parish jail for protection. Blue-eyed and blond, Morrison successfully convinced white society that she was one of them. When she sued for her freedom, witnesses assured the jury that she was white, and that they would have known if she had a drop of African blood. Morrison’s court trial—and many others over the last 150 years—involved high stakes: freedom, property, and civil rights. And they all turned on the question of racial identity.

Over the past two centuries, individuals and groups (among them Mexican Americans, Indians, Asian immigrants, and Melungeons) have fought to establish their whiteness in order to lay claim to full citizenship in local courtrooms, administrative and legislative hearings, and the U.S. Supreme Court. Like Morrison’s case, these trials have often turned less on legal definitions of race as percentages of blood or ancestry than on the way people presented themselves to society and demonstrated their moral and civic character.

Unearthing the legal history of racial identity, Ariela Gross’s book examines the paradoxical and often circular relationship of race and the perceived capacity for citizenship in American society. This book reminds us that the imaginary connection between racial identity and fitness for citizenship remains potent today and continues to impede racial justice and equality.

The Strange Career of Jim Crow

C. Vann Woodward

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Editorial Review:

C. Vann Woodward, who died in 1999 at the age of 91, was America's most eminent Southern historian, the winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Mary Chestnut's Civil War and a Bancroft Prize for The Origins of the New South. Now, to honor his long and truly distinguished career, Oxford is pleased to publish this special commemorative edition of Woodward's most influential work, The Strange Career of Jim Crow.
The Strange Career of Jim Crow is one of the great works of Southern history. Indeed, the book actually helped shape that history. Published in 1955, a year after the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education ordered schools desegregated, Strange Career was cited so often to counter arguments for segregation that Martin Luther King, Jr. called it "the historical Bible of the civil rights movement." The book offers a clear and illuminating analysis of the history of Jim Crow laws, presenting evidence that segregation in the South dated only to the 1890s. Woodward convincingly shows that, even under slavery, the two races had not been divided as they were under the Jim Crow laws of the 1890s. In fact, during Reconstruction, there was considerable economic and political mixing of the races. The segregating of the races was a relative newcomer to the region.
Hailed as one of the top 100 nonfiction works of the twentieth century, The Strange Career of Jim Crow has sold almost a million copies and remains, in the words of David Herbert Donald, "a landmark in the history of American race relations."

The Origins of the Urban Crisis

Thomas J. Sugrue

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Total reviews: 14 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Excellent history of urban decline 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

This was required reading for a graduate course in American history.
Thomas J. Sugrue attempts to prove that resistance to the civil rights movement had much deeper roots than the white backlash of the 1960s and 1970s. The author contends that resistance to the civil rights actually emerged as opposition to the New Deal coalition. Urban, anti-liberal, northern whites, as well as corporate leaders, unionists and politicians limited the possibilities of reform. Sugure maintains that northern urban white workers initially were the "backbone" of the New Deal coalition. And they found a common cause as the New Deal unified varied constituents in America. Yet, Sugure argues that underneath the seeming unity of the new coalition, were unresolved questions of racial identities. These unresolved issues began to fester, and were then exacerbated by liberal policies, specifically, public housing. And it is here that Sugure places the ''white rebellion" against the New Deal and liberalism, in the urban north.

From the 1940s until the 1960s, Detroit's racial geography changed dramatically. Sugure refers to Detroit as a "magnet' for African Americans after World War II, due to the lure of the defense and
automobile industries. When increasing numbers of African Americans began to search for housing in the predominantly white sections of the Detroit, racial tensions began to increase. Post World War II was described at "dark ages of Detroit." Riots and white flight occurred, coupled with a decline in the Detroit's post war economy. As layoffs mounted, and a national housing shortage, white homeowners feared foreclosure on their homes, as the economic ability to own home became increasingly precarious.

Sugure claims that race and housing became inseparable in the minds of white Detroiters. Basically, he contends that white homeowners feared that the influx of blacks would ruin their fragile economic security. Familiar racial fears and myths emerged; blacks were associated with crime and vice. White Detroiters even cited Jim Crow as a model for "successful race relations." In response to the "black invasion" and their increased economic stability, working class whites began to form neighborhood associations. Essentially, these associations were political organizations aimed at stymieing black constituents from moving into white neighborhoods. Sugure contends that these associations espoused the notions of values, protection, achievement and tradition, and were aimed at paternalistically protecting the neighborhood from vice-ridden blacks. They also served to foster a sense of "whiteness" among members (silent majority etc). These organizations corresponded with public officials and real estate agents (who played to both black and whites) to block African Americans from certain neighborhoods in various ways, including violence and intimidation.

By examining this, I believe the author uncovered a very prominent theme in American history and politics. What should be the level of government assistance in a capitalistic society? In this specific case, should the government have supplied urban housing for its poorer constituents, or should it have upheld the rights of privacy and association of its more affluent constituents? The affluent white constituents criticized the government when it tried to "force people" (blacks) down their throats," they cried for their freedoms of privacy and association, yet they called on that same "tyrannical" government to aid them in blocking the settlement of African Americans in their neighborhoods. Sugrue hits on this contradiction but does not pursue it. Which constituents should the government help and when should it help them? When is the government infringing on the rights on its citizens, and when is it fighting to uphold their rights? A fine line is drawn and illustrated by the struggle in post war Detroit.

I think the author is extremely misleading when he discusses the "black invasion" of Detroit. He presents blacks as a stifling, crime-ridden, vice infested monolith. I understand the aim of the article was to examine the position of the urban white class, but nonetheless, the quotes the author uses to describe migrating blacks is extremely derogatory, and in some cases, the author makes the white backlash almost seem justified. The black race is not a monolithic entity, no race is. I believe Sugrue should have at least written a few sentences dispelling the notion of the "black invasion" as a monolithic entity.

In summation, Sugure challenges the historian to probe deeper when trying to locate the backlash to the civil rights movement and liberalism. Instead of just viewing it narrowly as southern whites, Sugure contends that resistance developed among a very unlikely group, a group which initially formed the "backbone" of the New Deal coalition. Yet, as the housing shortage pressed, old racial tensions flared up and urban, working class whites banned together to resist liberalism and the "black invasion" in the 1940s and 1950s, a generation prior to the civil rights movement.


Recommended reading for anyone interested in American history, civil rights history.

Editorial Review:

Once America's "arsenal of democracy", post-war Detroit has become the symbol of the American urban crisis. This reappraisal of America's dilemma of racial and economic inequality, asks why Detroit and many other industrial cities have become the sites of persistent racialized poverty.

Ethical Dilemmas and Decisions in Criminal Justice (Ethics in Crime and Justice)

Joycelyn M. Pollock

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Book 3 out of 5 stars.
0 of 1 people found this review helpful.

I used this book for my crimnal justice ethics course and I did not find it to be very useful. The only purpose this book served was for my quizes I took through the course, otherwise the rest of the material was from my professor. Even my professor didn't care for this book very much either.

Should have specified book was torn-not used 3 out of 5 stars.
0 of 3 people found this review helpful.

The book was classified as used but did not specifically say on the condition of the book being torn. The book was in really bad condition.

Editorial Review:

This text is designed to introduce students to ethical decision-making in the criminal justice system. Its greatest strengths are its balanced coverage of 1) all three segments of the CJ system-police, courts, and corrections-and 2) both philosophical principles/theories and hands-on criminal justice issues and applications.

Notes of a Native Son (Beacon Paperback)

James Baldwin

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 10 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

brilliant, vivid, and incisive insights that shd be read 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

This is an absolutely wonderful book of essays about growing up, making a career, and being black in the US in the 1950-60s. Just the chapter on his step-father - an angry, brilliant, difficult man - is worth the price of admission. Beyond the black experience, everyone who has fought with a tough dad will empathise with Baldwin. Then there is a piece on living in France as a young writer, again it is unbelievably dense, funny, and moving, a true masterpiece of the genre of autobiographical essays. His style is so cool and clear, so icily brilliant, that any aspiring writer can study the style, as did I.

This book, in my opinion, has Baldwin's best work in it, of a quality that earns him a place in the literary canon. The essays really are far far better than any of his novels, in my opinion. While some of them are less than excellent journalistic pieces (A Fly in the Buttermilk about school integration), the best ones are, well, the best.

Warmly recommended.

Editorial Review:

Originally published in 1955, James Baldwin's first nonfiction book has become a classic. These searing essays on life in Harlem, the protest novel, movies, and Americans abroad remain as powerful today as when they were written.

"He named for me the things you feel but couldn't utter. . . . Jimmy's essays articulated for the first time to white America what it meant to be American and a black American at the same time."
-Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Nigger - The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word

Randall Kennedy

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Total reviews: 67 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Nigger: it is arguably the most consequential social insult in American history, though, at the same time, a word that reminds us of “the ironies and dilemmas, tragedies and glories of the American experience.” In this tour de force, distinguished Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy—author of the highly acclaimed Race, Crime, and the Law— “put[s] a tracer on nigger,” to identify how it has been used and by whom, while analyzing the controversies to which it has given rise.

With unprecedented candor and insight Kennedy explores such questions as: How should nigger be defined? Is it, as some have declared, necessarily more hurtful than other racial epithets? Do blacks have a right to use nigger even as others do not? Should the law view nigger baiting as a provocation strong enough to reduce the culpability of a person who responds violently to it? Should a person be fired from his or her job for saying nigger? How might the destructiveness of nigger be assuaged?

To be ignorant of the meanings and effects of nigger, says Kennedy, is to render oneself vulnerable to all manner of peril. This book brilliantly and sensitively addresses that concern.

The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, Revised and Expanded Edition (Haymarket)

David R. Roediger

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Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

A Working Definition of Race 4 out of 5 stars.
79 of 88 people found this review helpful.

David Roediger examines the growth and social construction of racism as it was related to the working classes of the ninteenth century. His scholarship earned him the Organization of American Historians Merle Curti Prize for US Social History in 1991. This work is brief, but dense in analysis, argument and scholarly interpretations.

The book basically explores how white workers (with an emphasis on Irish Americans) sought after a "wage" for their color, by placing on Black Americans the mantle of "other", objectifying and stratifying blacks into an object of prejudice and discrimination.

After a lengthy discussion of the historiography of labor and race issues, Roediger writes eloquently of the cultural formation of words such as slave, servant, hired hand, freeman, white slave, master and boss. All of which, he argues, were used to diferentiate between blacks and white laborers. He is careful to point out that it was the workers themselves who created the terms as a means to divide the races and elevate whites on the hierarchy of social status. It is a convincing arguement. The text concludes with an enlightening discussion of "black face" and the social struggles of the Irish, whom many felt in the majority viewed as "white negroes."

This book is scholarly and a read that demands one's attention.

Editorial Review:

David Roediger's widely acclaimed book provides an original study of the formative years of working-class racism in the United States. In a lengthy new introduction, Roediger surveys recent scholarship on whiteness, and discusses the changing face of labor in the twenty-first century.