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 Look Back in Anger The shameful coverage of civil rights in the 60s shouldn't be lost to history. Bracing John H. Johnson's conviction that a national market existed for a middle-class black press was a white press where condescension reigned. When Emmett Till was murdered in 1955 a Sun-Times editorial that began, "A revolting crime against humanity has been committed in Mississippi," ended with a pitying reflection: "A man cannot help it if his skin is black, but a man whose black heart leads him to lynching has only himself to blame for his crime." Forty-two years ago this week white papers viewed the great march on Washington with foreboding. "Today is a day to breathe a prayer for peace in Washington," wrote the Sun-Times on August 28, 1963. "This is the day of the march for civil rights in the nation's capital and the dread specter of possible violence hangs over the proceeding." The Sun-Times, "of course, approves of the fundamental cause of civil rights. It does not, however, approve of the march as a method to dramatize that cause." The risks were too great. Daily News columnist Raymond Moley wrote that the "apprehensions" of labor leaders that the march would get out of hand "are shared by most informed people." The Tribune, the paper of Lincoln, cited French sociologist Gustave Le Bon to the effect that "like the savage and the child . . . the crowd is intolerant of anything interposed between its desires and their realization. . . . The organizers of the Washington march know all this, yet they have persisted in carrying forward this combustible affair." The paper begged for a "rediscovery of reason." After the march the Tribune let out a sigh of relief. "The planners and participants can consider their job well done, and the residents of the capital, who had to put up with a day's inconvenience, are entitled to acknowledgment of their patience. Such oratory as there was was less superheated than might have been expected." (The oratory included the "I have a dream" speech of Dr. Martin Luther King.) Around 300 marchers returned to Chicago and demonstrated outside the Sun-Times. They'd expected better from that paper. "It was quite obvious that the [Washington] rally was composed largely of responsible and substantial people who were in control," the Sun-Times editorial page allowed. Nevertheless, "the time has come for the demonstrations for civil rights to be taken off the streets and into the conference rooms." The paper hoped that among the march's leaders "were some who agree with this advice for the future conduct of the civil rights crusade." Two years ago the Library of America published a two-volume anthology Reporting Civil Rights, a history of race in America from 1941 to 1973 as written on the fly by journalists. The anthology's one shortcoming is that it misrepresents civil-rights coverage. The journalism it presents is distinguished. A vast amount of the journalism it omits was dismal. Eighteen days after the 1963 march four black girls died when a church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama. "Only criminal insanity can explain such a despicable act," said the Tribune editorial page. But the right to live is one thing, the right to vote another. In March 1965 President Johnson asked Congress to pass a voting rights bill. "To those who like that sort of thing," snorted the Tribune, "Johnson was credited with hitting a note of high emotion. We suggest that the legislative process works best when emotion is wrung out of the discussion. There is far too much emotion already about what are called 'civil rights.'" In the Tribune's view the right to vote was a so-called civil right. "In coupling mass voting with the ideal society," the editorial continued, "Mr. Johnson again presented himself as a miracle man who will bring about the reformation of mankind's soul, spread brotherhood to the farthest shore, educate and make everyone healthy, wealthy, and wise. This is a brand of socialistic nonsense which even such medicine men as Upton Sinclair never had the temerity to preach in their palmiest days." If the price of a free black vote was socialism, America would be nuts to pay it. "Poverty is overcome by men able and intelligent enough to hold a job," the Tribune lectured. "It is overcome as the post-war West Germans overcame it -- by working harder, while their neighbors, the British in especial, hit the featherbed. It is not overcome by beatnik lie-ins and the riots of mobs in cities and on campuses. Nor will it be overcome by visionary boondoggles, politically inspired." This blather is evidence of how far the Tribune has come since. Federalism has come a long way too. In the 60s it grew fat on segregation, taking up the states' rights argument for allowing jim crow to die in bed. The Tribune couldn't countenance the Birmingham bombings, but William Buckley's National Review, which would champion Barry Goldwater for president the following year, was able to. "Let us gently say," it said, "the fiend who set off the bomb does not have the sympathy of the white population in the South; in fact, he set back the cause of the white people there so dramatically as to raise the question whether in fact the explosion was the act of a provocateur -- of a Communist, or of a crazed Negro." The magazine said some evidence supported this possibility. "And let it be said," the National Review declared, "that the convulsions that go on, and are bound to continue, have resulted from revolutionary assaults on the status quo, and a contempt for the law, which are traceable to the Supreme Court's manifest contempt for the settled traditions of Constitutional practice. Certainly it now appears that Birmingham's Negroes will never be content so long as the white population is free to be free." |
