Participate
James Hicks and the Black Press
In The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation, Gene Roberts and Hank Kilbanoff argue that press coverage of the civil rights movement forced white America to confront the brutalities of Jim Crow. This was necessary for the civil rights protests to succeed, they claim: by appealing to their consciences, the mainstream press stirred whites to demand change.66
It wasn't just white owned-and-operated media outlets, however, that covered the movement, and it wasn't only whites who followed the news. Black reporters from publications like the Baltimore Afro-American, the New York Amsterdam News, and Jet Magazine reported the story for a Black readership that spanned the country. "The critical role of the black press in the civil rights movement has not received the attention it deserves," writes veteran reporter Dorothy Butler Gilliam, who covered the integration of Little Rock Central High School and the University of Mississippi. For Gilliam, Black reporters did more than tell the story of civil rights; they "put their bodies in danger so the sacrifices of activists would not go unnoticed."67 In this way, they not only reported the movement; they were a part of it.
One reporter who put his life on the line to tell the civil rights story was James Hicks. Hicks served as the Washington, DC, Bureau Chief of the National Negro Press and is today regarded as one of the era's best investigative reporters.
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Hicks's interview frames Eyes I's account of the Emmett Till murder trial. The coverage of the trial was a turning point in civil rights reporting. While it was rare for white reporters from northern papers to write about racial violence in the Jim Crow South, at least fifty reporters from across the country descended on the tiny town of Sumner, Mississippi (population 550) to cover the story. "White and Negro reporters worked in the same room covering the same story with virtually the same amount of access and opportunity," write Roberts and Kilbanoff.68 Hicks, however, that the Black press was relegated to a bridge table in the back of the courtroom while white reporters sat at the front. And as both Hicks's interview and the stories he recounts in his investigative reporting on the Till trial make clear, Black journalists faced dangers that white journalists did not in covering the case.
Hicks also discusses media coverage of the integration of Little Rock Central High School. A white mob attacked Hicks, L. Alex Wilson of the Tri-State Defender, and Moses Newson with the Baltimore Afro-American while they reported from Little Rock. "The white press did not pick up on the fact that Faubus would not let the Black press into his press conferences," Hicks recalls. "The three of us represented the Black press. That was all. And we were kicked around by the mob; my clothes were torn off." Hicks says television failed to capture the brutality of events that day in Little Rock.
The Interviews
The Blackside film crew interviewed the following journalists, broadcasters, and media professionals:
Joseph Azbell: City editor at the Montgomery Advertiser during the Montgomery bus boycott
Hodding Carter III: Reporter and editor who advocated for civil rights through his work at the Delta-Democrat Times in Greenville, Mississippi
Carl Daniels: Birmingham, Alabama, radio and television journalist
James Forman: Covered the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School for the Chicago Defender
Wendell Harris: Worked for WAPI radio and television networks in Birmingham, Alabama
James Hicks: Washington Bureau Chief for the National Negro Press; editor of the New York Amsterdam News
William Bradford Huie: Interviewed Emmett Till's killers for Look magazine after they were acquitted; in their interview, they confessed, but because of double-jeopardy, they could not be retried
Erle Johnston: Public Relations Director, Missouri State Sovereignty Commission
John Seigenthaler: Reporter and editor of the Tennessean in Nashville from 1949 to 1972
William J. Simmons: Editor and publisher of The Citizen, a Citizens' Council publication; also served as the white supremacist group's spokesperson on local and national television
Richard Valeriani: Correspondent with NBC News
Thomas R. Waring: Editor of the News and Courier, a newspaper in Charleston, South Carolina; author of the article, "The Southern Case against Desegregation"
Robert Williams: Hosted a radio program, "Radio Free Dixie," in Cuba from 1961 to 1965, published the newsletter The Crusader beginning in 1962, and wrote the book Negroes with Guns, published in 1965
