Maynard Institute archives

Civil Rights Battle Shaped Halberstam

by richard0538

“Going Back, I’d Pay Money to Do That Now”

David Halberstam, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist who died in a car crash Monday at age 73, chronicled the Washington press corps, the Vietnam War generation and baseball. But his career was molded as a young reporter in Nashville covering the civil rights movement for the Tennessean, and he later wrote a book about those who participated in the movement, “The Children.”

 

 

 

“It was thrilling. It is —it was my first big story,” Halberstam told Ray Suarez on National Public Radio’s “Talk of the Nation” in 1998, “and I think the wonderful combination of what drove these young people, who were the first sit-in kids, this is in Nashville in 1960, and then my own role — they were incredibly innocent. And I think, of course, I was innocent . . .

“And there I was, on this really quite thrilling expedition into the future that these young people were taking, and I just loved every bit of it. I mean, I couldn’t wait to go to work even though it was often fairly dangerous and [had] gotten more dangerous.

“It really was the one part of the country where you had state-sanctioned injustice, state-sanctioned racism,” Halberstam said of the South. “I mean, certainly we have racism in every aspect of the society across the board and it’s difficult and it’s often insidious, but nowhere else, and certainly not now, did the state[s of] Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee say to one group you are superior, and to another, you are inferior; you can’t drink here; you can’t eat here; you can’t vote; and you can’t go to our school.

 

 

 

“And so, the shock of that for when I first went down to the South, I was only 21 and freshly minted as a reporter out of Harvard. The shock of those water fountains, the shock of restrooms that said ‘white only’ it still had the capacity to — it was like a slap in the face.”

SUAREZ: “You were everything that the wildest fantasies of the people who wanted to keep things the way they were in the South would feed into — an outsider, a college boy, and a Jew, three for three.

HALBERSTAM: “And wore glasses and looked different. I mean, I — there was no way I could hide who I was. And yet I had this extraordinary experience, I had gone to work first for a very small paper in West Point, Miss., the smallest daily in the state — the Daily Times Leader, and I had an extraordinary year there until the editor, who I think I made very nervous by dint of being so aggressive and tough-minded a reporter, told me that it was time to leave, he said you are free, white, and 21, and he said, ‘by the way, I’ve hired your replacement, he’s getting here in about two hours, and I’d like you to be gone.’

“. . . my time was running out. I had written a number of articles for the old Reporter magazine, which was a liberal biweekly, and then one day I had written a story that had angered him [“Daily Times Leader editor Henry Harris] greatly. . . . It was right before a primary. And it was the local Democratic county machinery was meeting in an open meeting, and I went to cover it.

“And the head of the county pol — Democratic Party, T.J. Tubb, Thomas Jefferson Tubb, said to the meeting at large, ‘Now if any’— and he used the ‘N’ word — ‘if any niggers come out here, you boys know what to do with them, take ’em out in back and we’ll take care of them.’ So I put it in my story and my editor—

SUAREZ: “That’s a quote.

HALBERSTAM: “. . . Henry Harris said, ‘It’s got to come out.’ And I said, ‘Henry, it can’t come out, he said it.’ And then he looked at me, he said, ‘well, could you put in that he was trying to help them?’ And I said, ‘Henry, I don’t think he was trying to help them . . .’

(LAUGHTER)

“So, that cut off that — that shortened my career there. But, I was lucky. I went from there to a very good paper in Nashville, Tennessee, and it was while working —in the fourth year for the paper in Tennessee that I was fortunate enough, privileged enough to cover the story. And I really think of it as a privilege for a young reporter to cover a — what I think is a luminescent moment in American democracy. That’s a privilege. I mean, going back, I’d pay money to do that now.”

When “The Children” was published in 1998, Patricia Reid-Merritt wrote in Black Issues in Higher Education that she approached reading the nearly-800 page book “with a great deal of trepidation. Here was yet another book written by a White journalist, that focused attention on some of the most significant events in the early Civil Rights Movement. As a lifelong student of the Black struggle, and as a scholar firmly grounded in an African-centered perspective, I doubted that I could gain any new insights from this volume’s nearly 800-page retelling of the Movement. I was wrong. . .

“A colleague of mine suggested that we should develop a course around this book. That, perhaps, we should use this book to teach a generation of young people about the power of student activism, social idealism, and a collective commitment to social justice and equality,” she concluded. “What a magnificent idea.”

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On VT Story, Columnist Has to Outdo “the Big Boys”

Shanna Flowers’ column in the Roanoke (Va.) Times normally runs three days a week. But last week, it ran Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Sunday. It’s “that competitive spirit,” and “knowing that the big boys are in my backyard,” she said.

 

 

All the columns were on the shootings at Virginia Tech, which left 33 dead, including the gunman. Virginia Tech is in the Times’ circulation area, only 30 miles away, Flowers said. But the clincher, she told Journal-isms, was when she discovered she had interviewed one of the student who died. “That made it personal for me,” she said.

“I didn’t find out until 24 hours after the shootings that William Fleming High School graduate Henh Ly had been among the fatalities,” Flowers wrote on Thursday.

“I had interviewed Henh a year ago. He was one of five seniors with whom I chatted for about 45 minutes, about high school students applying to colleges. Henh sat to my immediate right. . . . So when I learned Henh was among the dead, I wept. Not because I knew him well. But because of society’s loss.”

Elsewhere in the state, Michael Paul Williams, a reporter who usually writes three times weekly for the Richmond (Va.) Times- Dispatch, filed four columns since the massacre. The first one came on Monday, when he was asked to write one in 35 minutes for an extra the Times-Dispatch published, he said.

Desiree Cooper, Detroit Free Press: Even a peaceful mountain valley is not safe

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Tribune Co. Plans 250 Job Cuts in L.A., Chicago

“Tribune Co. executives announced a total of about 250 job cuts in Chicago and Los Angeles on Monday as the Chicago-based media conglomerate continues to struggle with declining advertising and circulation revenues,” Michael Oneal reported Monday for the Chicago Tribune.

“The Chicago Tribune Media Group will eliminate 100 jobs through a combination of buyouts and layoffs and the Los Angeles Times will cut between 100 and 150 positions using the same methods.

“In both cases, executives said they would try to first accomplish their goals through buyouts that would give qualified employees one week of salary and benefits for every six- month period they have worked for the company.

“Layoffs would follow to the extent they are needed. The Los Angeles Times will also consider letting employees switch to a four-day workweek for 80 percent of their pay and limited benefits.”

Tighter Scrutiny for Hip-Hop After Imus Firing

As rap lyrics came under closer scrutiny and greater attack in light of the firing of radio host Don Imus, hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons said Monday that the recording and broadcast industries should consistently ban “bitch,” “ho” and “nigger” from all “clean” versions of rap songs and the airwaves, Marcus Franklin reported for the Associated Press.

“Such epithets are currently banned from most clean versions, but record companies sometimes ‘arbitrarily’ decide which offensive words to exclude, Simmons said,” according to the story.

Two writers argued in the Los Angeles Times on Monday that, “none of the critics who accuse hip-hop of single-handedly coarsening the culture think to speak with members of the hip-hop generation, who are supposedly both targets and victims of the rap culture. They might be surprised at what this generation is saying.”

 

 

 

Meanwhile, CBS-TV’s “60 Minutes” raised the ante on Sunday with a piece by Anderson Cooper that said:

“In most communities, a person who sees a murder and helps the police put the killer behind bars is called a witness. But in many inner city neighborhoods in this country, that person is called a snitch. . . . As a result, police say, witnesses are not coming forward. Murders are going unsolved. Reluctance to talk to police has always been a problem in poor, predominantly African American communities, but cops and criminologists say in recent years, something has changed. Fueled by hip-hop music, promoted by major corporations, what was once a backroom code of silence among criminals is now being marketed like never before.”

In the L.A. Times, Jeff Chang, editor of “Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop,” and Dave Zirin, author of the forthcoming “Welcome to the Terrordome: The Pain, Politics and Promise of Sports,” argued, “much of the criticism of commercial rap music — that it’s homophobic and sexist and celebrates violence — is well-founded. But most of the carping we’ve heard against hip-hop in the wake of the Don Imus affair is more scapegoating than serious.

“Who is being challenged here? It’s not the media oligarchs, which twist an art form into an orgy of materialism, violence and misogyny by spending millions to sign a few artists willing to spout cartoon violence on command. Rather, it’s a small number of black artists — Snoop Dogg, Ludacris and 50 Cent, to name some — who are paid large amounts to perpetuate some of America’s oldest racial and sexual stereotypes.”

Some commentators, such as the Washington Post’s Colbert I. King and National Public Radio’s Scott Simon, questioned why presidential candidates are accepting money from those who profit from misogynistic lyrics. But on AOL Black Voices, entertainment columnist Jawn Murray wrote that “Hip-hop music is about as responsible for Imus’ racist and sexist remarks towards the Rutgers University women’s basketball team as Elton John and George Michael are for Isaiah Washington using a gay slur against his ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ co- star.”

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Thomas to Direct Morehouse Sportswriting Program

Ron Thomas, former sportswriter for the San Francisco Examiner and author of 2002’s “They Cleared the Lane: The NBA’s Black Pioneers,” has been selected as director of Morehouse College’s new sports journalism program.

 

 

As reported last fall, filmmaker Spike Lee raised $721,000 to begin the program. Lee and the late sportswriter Ralph Wiley proposed the idea in 1999, saying black journalists should be as represented in sports as black athletes are. Lee, a Morehouse alumnus, is also on the board of trustees.

“Over the next few years, it will grow from a concentration in English to a minor that will offer about a half dozen journalism courses. I was hired as an Administrator/Adjunct Professor who will teach classes, develop courses, hire other faculty members, set up a speakers series and eventually we’ll produce our own sports-related publication,” Thomas said.

Twelve students are in the basic newswriting class now, according to Paul Wiebe, chairman of the English Department, and there is space for up to 50 students in the fall.

Thomas was selected from among 20 to 25 applicants, according to Robert Wilson III, chair of the Department of Health and Physical Education and a member of the selection committee. He said the plan is for sports journalism eventually to become a major.

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