The civil rights movement in the United States caused important but difficult journalism. Taking place from the mid-1950s until the late 1960s, protesters aimed to end racial segregation in America and to get more legal rights for African-Americans. Many journalists who covered the civil rights movement were threatened and attacked as they reported on racial injustices.
Moses Newson is a black reporter who covered some of the civil rights movement’s most important events, including the Emmett Till murder trial, the Little Rock school desegregation and the 1961 Freedom Rides for The Tri-State Defender in Memphis, Tennessee. Gene Roberts is another influential journalist from the civil rights movement; as a correspondent for The New York Times, he covered the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Roberts also won 17 Pulitzer prizes, one of which went to his co-authored book “The Race Beat” about covering the civil rights movement.
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Moses Newson, a journalist who covered the Civil Rights movement for black-owned newspapers, remembers riding on a bus of black and white "Freedom Riders" in 1961 as they traveled through the South and encountered violence in Alabama.
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Gene Roberts, former newspaper editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer and author of "The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation," the Pulitzer Prize-winning book on press coverage during the Civil Rights struggle, talks about the importance of the black press as the conscience…
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In August 1955, a 14-year-old black boy named Emmett Till from Chicago visited his relatives in Money, Mississippi, and was brutally murdered by whites, who said he whistled at a married white woman. Moses Newson, an African American reporter, covered the Till trial and subsequent not-guilty jury verdict. Newson says…
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Gene Roberts attended a speech given by Martin Luther King Jr. on February 16, 1960 at White Rock Baptist Church in Durham, N.C., where he realized the struggle for equality would not just cause token change in race relations and civil rights.
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Moses Newson remembers covering the 1957 desegregation of Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas where he and fellow black reporters were assaulted by an angry white mob outside the school.
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Moses Newson reported on the enrollment of black student James Meredith at the University of Mississippi in 1962 that, according to Newson, brought the United States close to civil war.
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Charles Lewis talks with journalist Jerry Mitchell about his investigation and reporting on Edgar Ray "Preacher" Killen.
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Charles Lewis interviews journalist Jerry Mitchell about how his reporting on Bobby Cherry brought the ex-Klansman to justice for the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.
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Historical Timeline
Click on individual events to expand items one by one, or click the expand all button to view the entire contents of the timeline.
1954
- Brown v. Board of Education
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May 17, 1954
The U.S. Supreme Court hands down a unanimous decision in the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka case, opening the door for the civil rights movement and ultimately racial integration in all aspects of U.S. society. In overturning Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the court rules that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”1
1955
- Emmett Till
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August 28, 1955
Fourteen-year-old African-American Emmett Till is brutally murdered after reportedly flirting with a white woman while visiting relatives in Mississippi. Both black and white reporters cover the trial epitomizing “one of the most shocking and enduring stories of the twentieth century.”2 The white defendants, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, are acquitted by an all-white jury in only 67 minutes; later they describe in full detail to Look magazine (which paid them $4,000) how they killed Till.3 His mother insists on an open casket at the funeral, and the powerful image of his mutilated body sparks a strong reaction across the country and the world.
The Emmett Till Murder 
The Emmett Till Murder - Rosa Parks
-
December 1, 1955
The arrest of Rosa Parks, a 42-year-old African-American seamstress and civil rights activist who refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger, sets off a long-anticipated bus boycott by residents of Montgomery, Alabama. The 13-month protest and ensuing litigation eventually make it to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declares that segregation on public buses is unconstitutional.4 The Montgomery bus boycott brings the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his nonviolent approach to social change to the forefront of the civil rights movement.
1957
- Little Rock
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September 4, 1957
Three years removed from the Brown v. Board of Education decision, Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus orders the National Guard to stop nine black students from attending the all-white Little Rock Central High School. President Dwight D. Eisenhower intervenes by federalizing the National Guard and deploying Army troops to protect the students, stripping the state of power. Media coverage of the physical and verbal harassment the black students were subjected to is reported and broadcast around the world. In the end, they successfully integrate Central High. 5
Reporting Little Rock 
Reporting Little Rock 1961
- Freedom Rides
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May 4, 1961
The first of many civil rights “Freedom Rides” leaves Washington, D.C., for New Orleans. The Freedom Riders want to test the validity of the Supreme Court’s decision to outlaw racial segregation in bus terminals and through interstate bus travel.6 Angry white mobs — with the blessing of Alabama law enforcement — meet the convoy in Anniston and Birmingham, brutally beating the Freedom Riders and firebombing one of the buses.7
The Freedom Rides 
The Freedom Rides 1962
- Riots In Mississippi
-
October 1, 1962
Federal troops are brought in to quell a riot in Oxford, Mississippi, after a court order demands that the state allow James Meredith to become the first African American student to enroll at the University of Mississippi. More than 3,000 troops eventually subdue the crowd with tear gas and rifle shots, but not before two people are killed — one a 30-year-old journalist, the other a 23-year-old jukebox repairman. Press accounts describe the riot as "the most serious Federal-state conflict since the Civil War."26
1963
- University of Alabama and Medgar Evers
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June 11, 1963
Gov. George Wallace stands in the doorway of the University of Alabama to physically and symbolically block two black students from enrolling. President John F. Kennedy federalizes the National Guard and forces Wallace to yield.8 Shortly after 8 p.m., the president announces on national television that he will be sending comprehensive civil rights legislation to Congress: “We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the Scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution. The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated.” Hours later, civil rights leader Medgar Evers is assassinated just outside his Jackson, Mississippi, home. A prime suspect, Ku Klux Klansman Byron de la Beckwith, is set free after two mistrials when all-white juries deadlock. Reporting by Jerry Mitchell of The (Jackson) Clarion Ledger 25 years later prompts authorities to reopen the case, and in 1994, Beckwith is convicted and sentenced to life in prison. 9
- ‘I Have a Dream’
-
August 28, 1963
In one of the largest gatherings in the nation’s capital and one of the first to be broadcast live on national television, at least 200,000 civil rights protesters stage a March on Washington concluding at the Lincoln Memorial. The march is dedicated to jobs and freedom and takes place 100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation. The highlight of the event is the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic “I Have a Dream” speech.
The Black Press 
The Black Press - ‘Bombingham’
-
September 15, 1963
A dynamite bomb detonated in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, and kills four young black girls, 11-year-old Denise McNair and 14-year-olds Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley. President Kennedy says, “I know I speak on behalf of all Americans in expressing a deep sense of outrage and grief.” No white city officials attend the girls’ funerals in the city known pejoratively as “Bombingham” because of the 20 unsolved bombings against civil rights leaders’ homes or sanctuaries in the preceding seven years.10 Though the FBI identifies four Ku Klux Klansmen within days as the perpetrators, no one is prosecuted for 14 years. Eventually, between 1977 and 2002, three men — Robert Chambliss, Thomas Blanton and Bobby Frank Cherry — are convicted; the fourth suspect, Herman Cash, was deceased.
1964
- Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner
-
June 21, 1964
Three civil rights volunteers participating in Freedom Summer efforts to register African-Americans to vote — two white and one black — are stopped and arrested in Philadelphia, Mississippi, by Neshoba County Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price, a Ku Klux Klan member who had followed their car. Hours later, they are released and then re-arrested by Price, who turns them over to fellow Klansmen. The bodies of James E. Chaney, who had been savagely beaten, and Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, who had been shot, are not found by the FBI until Aug. 4. The FBI arrests 18 men, but state prosecutors say there is not enough evidence to charge them. Three years later, the suspects are tried on federal charges of “conspiring to violate the civil rights” of the victims; seven are convicted, and none serves more than six years. Decades later, through the efforts of Illinois high school teacher Barry Bradford, his students and reporter Jerry Mitchell of The (Jackson) Clarion Ledger, new information about the slayings is uncovered. In June 2005, Edgar Ray Killen, who was considered the ringleader and who by then was 80 years old, is convicted of three counts of manslaughter and sentenced to 60 years in prison.11 12
- Civil Rights Act
-
July 2, 1964
President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964, mandating equal opportunity employment, and complete desegregation of schools and other public facilities. It also outlaws unequal voter registration requirements.13 Though it would take years for these changes to take effect in communities around the country, the law is a monumental victory for the civil rights movement.
- Nobel Peace Prize
-
October 14, 1964
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize; at 35, he is the youngest recipient.
1965
- Assassination of Malcolm X
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February 21, 1965
Malcolm X, a Muslim minister and an advocate of black nationalism, is fatally shot in Manhattan’s Audubon Ballroom. He had publicly broken with Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad a year earlier; three Nation of Islam members, Talmadge X Hayer, Norman 3X Butler and Thomas 15X Johnson, are later convicted in the assassination.14
- ‘Bloody Sunday’
-
March 7, 1965
Hoping to promote equal voting rights, civil rights leaders John Lewis and the Rev. Hosea Williams lead more than 500 marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge (named for a Confederate general) in Selma, Ala., en route to the state capital of Montgomery. Awaiting them on the other side of the bridge are Alabama state troopers on horseback, who proceed to attack them with billy clubs and tear gas; Lewis, the future congressman, is hospitalized with a fractured skull. The events are captured on television and broadcast to a horrified national audience. Demonstrations follow in 80 U.S. cities to protest the “Bloody Sunday” beatings, and hundreds of people begin streaming into Selma to march anew.15
- Second Selma March
-
March 9, 1965
The second Selma march is led by King and consists of roughly 2,000 marchers, including hundreds of clergymen who came from around the nation. They go to the Pettus Bridge, site of the Bloody Sunday beatings, where once again state troopers are waiting. The marchers sing “We Shall Overcome,” kneel and pray, and then, in compliance with a federal injunction, turn back. King’s decision to make the march symbolic is criticized by more militant civil-rights activists who were prepared for confrontation. That night, one of the clergymen who had come to Selma to march, James J. Reeb of Boston, a white Unitarian minister, is brutally beaten by local white segregationists. He dies two days later.
- The Selma March
-
March 21, 1965
The third attempt to march from Selma to Montgomery, which follows a nationally televised speech by President Johnson and federal Judge Frank Johnson’s lifting of the injunction, begins. More than 100 journalists from all over the world came to Alabama to cover the dramatic and dangerous event.16 Johnson had authorized that the marchers be federally protected with helicopters, light planes, 1,800 National Guardsmen, 2,000 soldiers, 100 FBI agents and 100 federal marshals. The march is led by King, his wife, Coretta Scott King, Rosa Parks, John Lewis and other leaders of the civil rights movement. Walking with King was Cager Lee, the octogenarian son of a slave who had been wounded when his grandson, Jimmie Lee Jackson, a church deacon, was shot and killed by a state trooper after a voter rights demonstration just weeks earlier.17
- Viola Liuzzo
-
March 25, 1965
By the fifth day of the march, the ranks of the 3,200 original protesters have swelled to almost 20,000, including such celebrities as Harry Belafonte, Dick Gregory, Lena Horne and Joan Baez, who entertain the marchers in the evenings.18 The marchers stop at the white domed and columned Alabama state Capitol, with its state and Confederate (but no American) flags flying above, and where Jefferson Davis had been sworn in as president of the Confederacy in 1861. Inside, from an office above, Gov. George Wallace watches the unprecedented spectacle, “peeking out through the drawn blinds.” King delivers what turns out to be his final nationally televised speech: “They told us we wouldn't get here. And there were those who said we would get here only over their dead bodies. ...But all the world today knows that we are here. And we are standing before the forces of power in the state of Alabama, saying, “ ‘We ain’t going to let nobody turn us around!’ ”19 On the last night of the march, Viola Liuzzo, a mother of five from Detroit who had come to Alabama to protest, is shot while helping shuttle marchers between Selma and Montgomery. She is ambushed by a carload of Ku Klux Klansmen upset to see a white woman and a black man in a car together. She dies instantly, her car rolling into a ditch. Her passenger, covered in her blood, survives. One of the passengers in the Klansmen’s car turns out to be a paid FBI informant.20
- Voting Rights Act
-
August 6, 1965
Thanks in part to the courage and heavy news media coverage of the Selma marchers, President Johnson signs the historic Voting Rights Act. It prohibits states from using biased procedures or preconditions such as literacy tests to disqualify citizens from voting.21 In his televised address to the nation, Johnson says, “Today is a triumph for freedom as huge as any victory that has ever been won on any battlefield. Yet to seize the meaning of this day, we must recall darker times. Three and a half centuries ago the first Negroes arrived at Jamestown. They did not arrive in brave ships in search of a home for freedom. ... They came in darkness, and they came in chains. And today we strike away the last major shackle of those fierce and ancient bonds. Today the Negro story and the American story fuse and blend.”22
1968
- The Death of Dr. King
-
April 4, 1968
After years of death threats, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., while in Memphis in support of striking black sanitation workers, is shot and killed on the balcony of his Lorraine Motel room a day after delivering his prophetic “I've Been to the Mountaintop” speech.23Informed of the assassination a few hours later, Sen. Robert Kennedy announces King’s death at a previously scheduled presidential campaign rally of 1,000 people in the poorest section of Indianapolis. He calls upon America to resist divisive reactions and instead unite in “love, wisdom and compassion.”24 The news, however, leads to rioting in more than 100 American cities, resulting in 40 deaths.25 Escaped convict James Earl Ray is convicted in King’s assassination and sentenced to 99 years. Two months later, on June 5, Kennedy himself was assassinated in a Los Angeles hotel after winning the California primary.
Covering King 
Covering King Recommended References
BOOKS
- Arsenault, Raymond. Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice. New York: Oxford University, 2006.
- * Blackmon, Douglas A. Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. New York: Doubleday, 2008.
- * Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988.
- * Branch, Taylor. Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-65. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998,
- * Branch, Taylor, At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years 1965-68. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006.
- Egerton, John. Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation before the Civil Rights Movement in the South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.
- * Garrow, David J. Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. New York: William Morrow, 1986.
- Halberstam, David. The Children. New York: Random House, 1998.
- Kotz, Nick. Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Laws that Changed America. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005.
- Lemann, Nicholas. The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991.
- Lewis, John with Michael D’Orso. Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998.
- * McWhorter, Diane. Carry Me Home; Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001.
- Myrdal, Gunnar. An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, Volumes 1 and 2. (Originally published by Harper & Row, 1944.) New Introduction by Sissela Bok. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2007.
- * Roberts, Gene, and Hank Klibanoff. The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.
- * Pulitzer Prize-winning book
FILMS AND DOCUMENTARIES
- Eyes on the Prize. Exec. Prod. Henry Hampton. Fourteen hours of PBS documentaries broadcast in 1987 and 1990.*#=^
- 4 Little Girls. Dir. Spike Lee.+&^
- *Emmy Award Winner
- #Peabody Award Winner
- ^Academy Award Winner
- &Emmy Award Nominee
- +Critics Choice Award Winner
- =DuPont-Columbia Award Winner
ONLINE
- Birmingham Civil Rights Institute
- Civil Rights Movement Veterans
- The Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute
- The National Civil Rights Museum
- The National Voting Rights Museum and Institute
- The Rosa Parks Library and Museum (Troy University Montgomery Campus)
- Southern Poverty Law Center
ENDNOTES
- 1 Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).
- 2 Roberts, Gene, and Hank Klibanoff. The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006: 87.
- 3 Ibid., 89. The Look writer was William Bradford Huie.
- 4 The Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute. Stanford University.
- 5 Roberts and Klibanoff, 163-64.
- 6 Boynton v. Virginia, 364 U.S. 454 (1960).
- 7 Roberts and Klibanoff, 244-45.
- 8 “Wallace in the Schoolhouse Door.” NPR. 11 June 2003.
- 9 Kotz, Nick. Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Laws that Changed America. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005: 62.
- 10 Branch, Taylor. Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-65. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998: 138.
- 11 Kotz, 156-88.
- 12 Wikipedia entry on James Chaney
- 13 The Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute. Stanford University.
- 14 Wikipedia entry on James Chaney
- 15 Lewis, John with D’Orso, Michael. Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998: 331-38.
- 16 Roberts and Klibinoff, 320.
- 17 Lewis with D’Orso, 342.
- 18 Ibid., 320-25. Roberts and Klibanoff, 389-90.
- 19 Branch, 162-68.
- 20 The next day, President Johnson announces from the White House that the FBI has already solved the case, reading the names of the already arrested, accused killers to the national news media. For more information, see May, Gary, The Informant: The FBI, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Murder of Viola Liuzzo (Yale University Press: New Haven: 2005), pp. 287-315.
- 21 Transcript of Voting Rights Act (1965).
- 22 Kotz, 337.
- 23 “Say It Plain: A Century of Great African American Speeches.” American Public Media.
- 24 “Robert Kennedy: Delivering News of King’s Death.” NPR. 4 April 2008. Also Guthman, Edwin O., and C. Richard Allen. RFK: Collected Speeches. New York: Viking, 1993: 355-56.
- 25 The Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute. Stanford University.
- 26 Sitton, Claude. "Shots Quell Mob; Enrolling of Meredith Ends Segregation in State Schools." The New York Times A1, 1 Oct. 1962.