Chasing Newsroom Diversity: From Jim Crow to Affirmative Action
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Chasing Newsroom Diversity: From Jim Crow to Affirmative Action
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252094644 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 03/16/2013 |
| Series: | The History of Media and Communication |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 264 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chasing Newsroom Diversity
From Jim Crow to Affirmative Action
By GWYNETH MELLINGER
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2013Board of Trustees of the University of IllinoisAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-07894-1
Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Manning the Barricade
Maintaining the White Prerogative in the Face of Change, 1954–67
In 1957, members of the American Society of Newspaper Editors were invited to participate in a Civil War reenactment of sorts, a North-South tennis tournament to be played during the annual ASNE convention. The incoming ASNE president, Virginius Dabney, editor of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, and Grover C. Hall Jr., editor of the Montgomery Advertiser, issued the challenge. "It would give the Hall-Dabney Confederate ... team exquisite pleasure to trounce the best combination the dam-yankees can put into the field," Dabney wrote in the ASNE Bulletin, the organization's newsletter. Hall, who insisted "the Confederate Constitution was written in Montgomery, probably on an Advertiser letterhead," was in charge of scheduling the matches. A few months later, the outcome of the doubles tournament was loosely reported in the Bulletin, accompanied by a Chick Larsen cartoon showing a Confederate tennis player with his foot on the neck of his vanquished Northern foe. While the account of this first tournament was decidedly tongue-in-cheek—"it was not Pickett's charge, it was not Chancellorsville; it was not, at times, even good tennis"—the tennis event became an assertion of Confederate identity that Southern editors repeated annually into the 1960s.
That this tournament emerged at this moment in the ASNE's history is no coincidence. The impact of the Supreme Court's 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education was not confined to school desegregation; its profound challenge to the racial status quo had extended into other areas of American life and, for the first time, members of the ASNE began to confront questions about the organization's identity as a racially homogenous and exclusionary professional enclave. Moreover, issues related to race began to appear on the ASNE's annual convention program, and members expressed a range of opinion during open sessions, from segregationist ranting to criticism of the all-white composition of the organization. In this respect, the ASNE replicated the fissures and shifts occurring in American culture. Ultimately, however, many ASNE members resisted change within the organization and, by extension, the daily newspaper industry. Although many editors conceded and even welcomed the inevitability of integration in American society at large, the ASNE would weather the 1950s with its all-white identity challenged but intact. Despite integration's growing support in the North throughout the 1950s, notably on the editorial pages of many daily newspapers, the ASNE accommodated the segregationists within its ranks and declined to integrate its own membership. Viewed in this context, the tennis tournament became both a metaphor for and a subtle validation of the segregation challenged by Brown.
In the 1950s, white identity was so much a part of the organization's fabric that it functioned as a norm and frequently escaped notice. Within the ASNE, racial inequality often was reaffirmed through supposedly race-neutral means that were ostensibly tied to merit or journalistic principles, such as objectivity and professionalism. For example, when the possibility of admitting African American members was broached during the 1950s, the ASNE could interpret its daily newspaper requirement—by then established as a threshold of professional merit—to exclude an editor of a black weekly and maintain an all-white membership. This rubric allowed ASNE members to blame the failure of nonwhites to meet professional standards, rather than a long-standing pattern of racial exclusivity, for the organization's all-white and predominantly male profile. This pretense of colorblindness not only institutionalized the white norm, but it allowed the white editors of the ASNE to construct themselves and their organization as racially neutral.
But the validation of racial difference during the 1950s relied not only on covert and systemic inequality but also, at times, on the prominent display of white supremacy. In the wake of the historic challenges to Jim Crow entailed by both the Truman Administration's civil rights initiatives and the Brown decision, the ASNE accommodated blatant expressions of racism in convention sessions during 1955 and 1956. In this important respect, racism within the ASNE was incarnated differently during the 1950s than it had been in the previous decade and would be in the future. Prior to the 1950s, when white superiority was a given, political, social, and economic barriers segregated American daily life and maintained a comfortable distance between white and nonwhite, and race was rarely mentioned during ASNE conventions and in its publications. But that changed when Brown's perceived assault on the social order unsettled many white editors of the ASNE. As a few members began to suggest the integration of the ASNE, it became clear that desegregation was not a controversy that would play out only in public schools and on city buses. Sooner or later, the crumbling social barriers between the races would become an issue for the ASNE and the profession of journalism.
ASNE members granted standing to the segregationist perspective, no matter how frankly it was articulated, by casting it as a requirement of journalistic objectivity. By treating the views of segregationists as one side of a news story that had to be told impartially and equitably, the ASNE granted these perspectives legitimacy, even as the culture at large was writing strident racism out of its social norm. Instead, overtly racist utterances were treated as matters of members' First Amendment rights, eclipsing the question of human rights. This neat bit of rationalization appeared to raise the all-white ASNE above the controversy, as will become clear in this chapter's analysis. Even without explicitly endorsing blatant racism, the ASNE facilitated it and granted it legitimacy.
This chapter brackets the period from 1954, when the ASNE was forced by the evolving legal status of nonwhites to engage the issue of civil rights, until just before the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, also known as the Kerner Commission, excoriated the news media for their role in perpetuating racial inequality in the United States and for failing to integrate newsrooms. Following the Supreme Court's decision in Brown, race emerged as a flashpoint for the ASNE, bringing attention to a North-South divide within the organization. This was an extraordinary moment in American history. Although the ASNE as a matter of policy did not take positions on issues outside the scope of the organization's journalistic mission, its members, whose newspapers were covering the race story directly or through the wire services, were immersed in the social uncertainty created by desegregation.
By 1955, the year after the school desegregation ruling and the point at which this analysis begins, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been arrested for the first time in connection with his civil rights activism and the names of Rosa Parks, the Montgomery, Alabama, seamstress who refused to surrender her bus seat to a white man, and Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old African American brutally lynched in Mississippi, had become icons of the civil rights movement. In the years that followed, newspapers chronicled confrontations over the integration of schools, voter registration efforts, and such civil rights marches and initiatives as the Freedom Rides to integrate interstate bus transportation and the lunch-counter sit-ins to integrate public accommodations. The violence that was a running theme during these years, punctuated by such atrocities as the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963, which killed four girls attending Sunday School, and the murders of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1964, ensured that race, the most compelling news story of the postwar era, remained a fixture on front pages across the country.
Eventually, the activism of the 1950s and early 1960s provided the momentum for passage of federal civil rights legislation. Congress passed the landmark Civil Rights Act in 1964, which outlawed, among other things, segregation in public schools, public accommodations, and federally assisted programs. It was followed a year later by the Voting Rights Act, which guaranteed all Americans the right to vote. Though members of ASNE did not realize it then, Title VII of the 1964 law, which prohibited discrimination in employment based on race and gender, had set the stage for the organization's own activism on behalf of equal opportunity. Nor did they recognize that riots in the Watts neighborhood in Los Angeles in 1965, as well as uprisings in other American cities, would set the ASNE on a circuitous path toward affirmative action. If Title VII provided a legal justification for Goal 2000, the riots, which triggered the 1968 Kerner Commission report chastising the press for its segregated newsrooms, offered up the moral imperative.
Policing the Boundaries in a New era of race
Prior to the 1950s, whiteness had been a taken-for-granted and usually unnoticed feature of the ASNE. Without specifically mentioning race in its official conversations about membership, the ASNE nonetheless had established itself as an organization for whites at the top of their profession. Through the exclusiveness of its membership structure, which limited participation to directing editors of daily newspapers deemed worthy of ASNE affiliation, the ASNE inadvertently ensured that nonwhite editors, almost all of whom worked for weekly newspapers, would remain ineligible for regular membership for years to come. Yet even as the ASNE continued to view the world from the vantage of the white professional norm, the Brown decision signaled for some members that the white prerogative was under challenge.
Although the integration controversy had dominated headlines both before and after the Supreme Court ruling in May 1954, ASNE members did not make the organization's all-white demographic a convention topic until 1955. During a session titled "How Is the Press Reporting School Desegregation?" the discussion turned to whether coverage of desegregation was serving the needs of blacks as well as whites, yet no blacks were present to answer on their own behalf. A. M. Piper of the Council Bluffs (Iowa) Nonpareil noted, "I have been a member of the ASNE for about 15 years. I have not seen any Negroes at our conventions. Has there ever been an application from one? Perhaps we might make a beginning right here, to solve the problem." In response, ASNE President James S. Pope of the Louisville Courier-Journal asserted that the daily publication requirement, not race, was a barrier to membership for African American editors. "To my knowledge there has never been an application," he said. "I believe most Negro newspapers are weeklies. There is a daily in Atlanta; I don't know what its circulation is. I'm not sure, but I don't believe there would be more than one Negro editor, or maybe two, in the country who would be eligible." ASNE leaders would use this line of reasoning repeatedly over the years to justify marginalization of women and nonwhite men from membership and ASNE leadership. In this way, the ASNE could claim that the privilege of participation was tied to journalistic merit and attribute any exclusion to the perceived shortcomings of those who were not white and male.
This brief and rather nonchalant exchange followed a white supremacist screed by Frederick Sullens of the Jackson (Miss.) Daily News, who argued that "mixed schools mean mixed marriages and mixed marriages mean a mongrel race" and warned that "if an effort is made anywhere in Mississippi to put Negro children in white schools, it will mean bloodshed." During the same discussion, members briefly debated whether photos of black brides should be published, and one editor, Wallace Carroll of the Winston-Salem (N.C.) Journal & Sentinel, announced that he had hired a black reporter. It is significant that a single discussion at an ASNE convention could include such profoundly racist remarks as those offered by Sullens and leave them unchallenged alongside Carroll's disclosure that he had an African American on staff or Piper's simple inquiry about integrating the ASNE. In that moment, in which racism was both tolerated as well as questioned, the American social dilemma crystallized.
Race erupted as an issue again during the 1956 convention, in the context of another, more contentious plenary discussion about news coverage of Brown's aftermath. During a protracted racist diatribe, Harry Ayers, editor of the Anniston (Ala.) Star, argued that "many Negroes are dirty, are unreliable, are liars," and were disproportionately afflicted with venereal disease. Moreover, Ayers harangued, it was "the consuming desire of every Negro to possess a white woman." Just as it had been in 1955, the racist polemic was juxtaposed with a progressive point of view when James Wechsler of the New York Post again raised the issue of the ASNE's all-white membership. He said, "I would think that a Society like ours ought to have in its ranks representatives of Negro newspapers so that we are not talking about these people as if they were the outcasts and second-class citizens of our society. I certainly hope before the next convention to sponsor the admission of at least some representatives of the Negro press." In response, Talbot Patrick of the Rock Hill (S.C.) Evening Herald noted the dearth of nonwhite editors who would meet the ASNE's membership guidelines, suggesting that the mono-racial composition of the ASNE resulted from circumstance, namely the failure of blacks to qualify, and was none of the organization's own doing.
Kenneth MacDonald of the Des Moines Register, the ASNE president, also invoked the membership guidelines. His detailed rationalization is worth considering at length.
There is no policy of discrimination whatever in the Society's membership procedures and, so far as I know, there never has been. The Society has not had an application from a Negro editor, and this is easy to understand when you remember that the membership regulations require that a person be the editor of a daily paper.
I am not certain I know the facts at the moment, but the last time I had any reason to check, there was not more than one daily in the country with a Negro editor, and I believe that may still be true. In the one case that I definitely know of, the man who is responsible for running the paper, I have been told, is primarily interested in the business side rather than the editorial side and, at any rate, has never applied for membership in the Society.
I am sure that, if application were made, the Board of Directors would consider it very carefully. I feel confident there is no discrimination because of race or any other reason in selecting members of the Society. I do not think anybody here implied that there has been discrimination. But I would not want that misunderstanding to arise out of this discussion.
Notably, MacDonald and Wechsler both assume the perpetuation of a segregated newspaper industry when they see black newspapers as the only potential sources of nonwhite members. The concept of integrating ASNE members' own newsrooms is not yet part of the conversation. Moreover, in this rationalization, MacDonald distances himself from the black press by expressing disinterest in specific details about black dailies, which he would not ordinarily have "any reason to check" and which would come to him only as secondhand information. However, amid the heat of the session on news coverage after Brown, the significance of the membership issue appears to have registered for only a small number of editors.
the Colonel's last stand
The Ayers incident at the 1956 convention sent the ASNE leadership scrambling for cover. While the Colonel—as Ayers was called, in acknowledgment of his World War I and National Guard service—had editorialized during the 1940s in favor of the right to vote and for improved education and employment opportunities for Alabama's blacks, he had been an intransigent supporter of segregation. In particular, Ayers had stridently editorialized about the threat of amalgamation, warning that integration of the schools would lead to race mixing and would place white women in harm's way. While such comments may have been unremarkable in the Deep South of the 1950s, their utterance in mixed company—a national convention attended by editors from all regions of the country—amplified their impact.
As a result, the 1956 convention and the fallout from Harry Ayers's commentary about African Americans appeared to establish a line for the ASNE between what was an acceptable public discussion of race and what was not, although those who found Ayers's racist language objectionable were not necessarily persuaded of the injustice of segregation. Importantly, Ayers's comments were distinguished not only by their extremity but also by being reported in the Washington newspapers, to the supreme embarrassment of the ASNE. By comparison, Frederick Sullens's unreported and equally racist comments a year earlier had not drawn similar objections. In its coverage of the 1956 convention, the Washington Post and Times-Herald offered a mild summation of Ayers's remarks.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Chasing Newsroom Diversity by GWYNETH MELLINGER. Copyright © 2013 by Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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