3 posts tagged “the race beat”

The Race Beat: The Press, The Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff (Knopf, 2006). Steven Ivory did a Black History Month Pop Quiz for the last NPR story for the event yesterday. The key question is a trick question that should be an obvious one. It's sad that it isn't. I confess that, while I know my Booker T. Washington  from my George Washington Carver and have strong feelings about Frederick Douglass, I too was stumped by "Who is Carter G. Woodson?" outside of some nebulous connection to the Lauryn Hill solo project "The Mis-education of Lauryn Hill". I should bow my head in shame.

The truth is we need more history in our lives and more Black history in particular. The Race Beat provides an excellent breakdown of the civil rights struggle and the significance of journalism, television news, and general media coverage to the time. It gave me a new hero, L. Alex Wilson, one of many casualties to the time. In the context of the last few weeks I've had, burying my grandfather, being back in Omaha with 5 generations of my family, hearing the stories they tell today, remembering the stories I've been told, it was a reminder that for many Americans, this time is still fresh in their minds even though we have a tendency to think of it as long ago.

My mother was born 7 years before the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The year she was born, most of the South was still segregated and still fighting tooth and nail to keep it that way. My grandparents had lived nearly a third of their lives in a world where what they could do, who they could be, and where they could go was severely limited. The prevailing notion of the American White Southerner was that Blacks were, obviously, an inferior race. The prevailing notion of the American White Northerner was that Blacks weren't inferior, necessarily, but we sure don't want them moving next door. In fact, as the newspapers of the time before the movement points out, Northern papers didn't write about the negro, mostly because they rarely saw them while Southern papers didn't write about the negro because editors didn't find them important. The Negro Press was the only place to get Black news.

What's amazing about The Race Beat is how it re-creates the world in which these well known stories live in. After reading, I understand the black and white images that shocked us in elementary school history class and how amazing and direction changing they were for the time. You truly get the power of Martin Luther King, the amazing significance of Brown v. Board, and all the big and little stories during that era. You understand the threats, the pressure, the danger, the uniqueness of the moment, the effect of television and the growth of all new ways to write and report news, to change your world, and to make a difference.

I read, often with my mouth agape, marveling at what is, truly, even more than the Civil War, the most incredible time in our country's brief history.

Read it, people. Like yesterday.

I woke this morning with this song in my head. I've listened to it four times throughout the day. This is the fifth. It has been a weekend of intense solitude. I've been locked in with my thoughts and my music, The Race Beat, and Zelda. My communication tool of choice has been almost exclusively one-way: Twitter. Outside of a few brief conversations with my parents and a random IM chat here and there, I've played observer when out in the world and self-analyst when in my home.

I've switched iTunes to repeat. This is play number six.

There have been several eureka moments while reading The Race Beat, many of them about how journalism effected the Civil Rights movement and how the conservative buzzwords and tactics of the time are co-opted in today's political rhetoric. I've learned several words and concepts that I didn't know before and found some new heroes but I'll save all that information for when I actually finish the book.

One statement has stuck with me since I read it on Saturday: Write every day. Stephen King says as much in On Writing but this is just some matter-of-fact advice given by a grizzled 40s era editor to a cub reporter and for some reason it struck a chord. Perhaps it was because I was sitting outside of Psychobabble in Los Feliz as an aspiring artist talked to his friend about an old Gypsy myth and the man responding to the tale by noting that his own hair was kinky...like a Black.

Spin number eight. I'm taking replay off but reserve the right to return.

"Like a Black," I thought. "I've got to write about that one." Los Feliz is hipster heaven. Every person walking by, young and old, is dressed in shabby chic. Designer hobos, if you will. I was reminded of Laina's commentary about the sociocultural ignorance of hipsterism and connected it to another eye-popping quote from The Race Beat,

"In the South, whites would say to Negroes, 'Come close, but don't go too high.' In the North, whites would say, 'Go high, but don't come too close.' "

That lack of proximity is what creates the space in which that common hipster douchebaggery is free to grow unfettered even in 2007.

I watched the last hour or so of The Color Purple over the weekend. I caught it as Shug and Miss Celie have happened on the letter from Nettie and go on their search for the rest of them. I cried. I straight bawled my eyes out for the remainder of the film -- a movie that I have probably seen 25-30 times since I saw it with my mother and her friend in the theatre over 20 years ago.

They were tears for my grandfather.

That's a simplification. They weren't tears for my grandfather. I'm not one for mourning the dead. I mourn for the living. They were tears for my grandmother who lost her partner of 54 years. They were tears for my mother, who wanted more time with him, more time to prepare for life without him. They were tears for me. The frightened me. The one who has dreaded phone calls from the 415 area code for 2 years, fearing every time that it was the "death call". The one who would avoid calling so as not to hear his tired, wheezy voice and worry that was the last time. The one filled with -- guilt isn't the right word -- regret that I didn't take every opportunity I had to be in his presence.

I head to Nebraska in just over a day. I'm tasked with speaking about the man. To raise my voice out into the universe. Raise my mind beyond the planets and the sun. Spread my message everywhere.

Stand tall.

Raise.