For southern newspapers and southern readers, the social upheaval
in the years following Brown v. Board of Education (1954) was, as
Time put it in 1956, ""the region's biggest running story since
slavery."" The southern press struggled with the region's
accommodation of the school desegregation ruling and with black
America's demand for civil rights. The nine essays in The Press and
Race illuminate the broad array of print journalists' responses to
the civil rights movement in Mississippi, a state that was one of
the nation's major civil rights battlegrounds. Three of the
journalists covered won Pulitzer prizes for their work and one was
the first woman editorial writer to earn that coveted prize. The
journalists and editors covered are Hodding Carter, Jr. (Greenville
Delta Democrat-Times), J. Oliver Emmerich (McComb
Enterprise-Journal), Percy Greene (Jackson Advocate), Ira B.
Harkey, Jr. (Pascagoula Chronicle), George A. McLean (Tupelo
Journal), Bill Minor (New Orleans Times-Picayune), Hazel Brannon
Smith (Lexington Adviser), and Jimmy Ward (Jackson Daily News).
Their editorial stances run the gamut from moderates such as Minor,
Smith, and Carter, Jr., to openly segregationist editors such as
Ward and Greene. The Press and Race follows the press from the 1954
Brown v. Board of Education decision to 1965, when Congress passed
the Voting Rights Act. Those years saw some of the most important
events of the civil rights movement-the South's resistance to
school desegregation throughout the 1950s and 1960s; the Freedom
Rides of 1961; James Meredith's admission into the University of
Mississippi in 1962; the assassination of Medgar Evers in 1963; and
the events of Freedom Summer in 1964. These essays present an
in-depth analysis of the editorials, articles, journalistic
standards, and work of Mississippi newspaper reporters and editors
as they covered this tumultuous era in American history. While a
handful of Mississippi journalists openly defended blacks and
challenged the state's racial policies, others responded by
redoubling their support of Mississippi's segregated society. Still
others responded with a moderate defense of black Americans' legal
rights, while at the same time defending the status quo of
segregation. The Press and Race reveals the outrage, emotion, and
deliberation of the people who would soon be carrying out the
nation's command to end segregation. The journalists discussed here
were southerners and insiders in a crisis. Their writing made
journalism history. David R. Davies is chair of the department of
journalism at the University of Southern Mississippi in
Hattiesburg. A former reporter for the Arkansas Gazette, he has
been published in American Journalism, the Chicago Tribune, and the
Journal of Mississippi History.
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