Media 2070 FINAL - Flipbook - Page 52
X. The Struggle to Integrate Media
GOVERNMENT INTERVENES TO DISRUPT A HISTORY OF WHITE CONTROL
Resistance met efforts to integrate the nation’s
newsrooms. Few Black journalists had worked in white
media outlets when the Kerner Commission issued its
report. The report noted that:
The journalistic profession has been
shockingly backward in seeking out, hiring,
training, and promoting Negroes. Fewer
than 5 percent of the people employed by
the news business in editorial jobs in the
United States today are Negroes. Fewer than
1 percent of editors and supervisors are
Negroes, and most of them work for Negroowned organizations …
The [com]plaint is, ‘we can't find qualified
Negroes.’ But this rings hollow from an
industry where, only yesterday, jobs were
scarce and promotion unthinkable for a man
whose skin was black. Even today, there are
virtually no Negroes in positions of editorial
or executive responsibility and there is
only one Negro newsman with a nationally
syndicated column.1
It wasn’t until 1950 that a Black woman was hired to
write full time for a mainstream white-owned newspaper:
that was Marvel Cooke, who joined The Daily Compass
in New York. That year she published an updated series
called “The Bronx Slave Market,” which detailed the
unjust treatment of the city’s Black domestic workers. She
coauthored an earlier version of the series in 1935 with
civil-rights leader Ella Baker for Crisis Magazine.2
Meanwhile, in 1961 Dorothy Butler Gilliam became the
first Black woman to work as a reporter at The Washington
Post, where she faced difficult challenges. In a 2019
interview, she said that issues of race were never discussed
at the Post unless an editor made a negative remark
about Black people. She also noted that she could have a
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conversation with a colleague in the newsroom only to
only have that same coworker ignore her if they crossed
paths on the street.3
But Butler Gilliam had a long career at the Post. She also
served as the president of the National Association of
Black Journalists and as a founding board member of
the Maynard Institute, which continues to fight systemic
racism in newsrooms today.4
•••
In 1964, the passage of the Civil Rights Act resulted in
the creation of a Department of Justice agency called the
Community Relations Service (CRS), which often worked
behind the scenes to alleviate racial tensions. During its
early years, two of the areas the CRS focused on were
integrating newsrooms and addressing the news media’s
role in inflaming racial tensions in the United States.5
Former CRS Associate Director Bertram Levine, author of
a book on the agency’s history, notes that the CRS sought
to “improve the depth and quality of reporting” about
communities of color and to encourage newsrooms to hire
more journalists of color.6
“The nation’s leading opinion molders were asked to
consider how their failure to depict the Negro people
as normal human beings reinforced the myth of white
superiority, and how the persistence of that myth made
peaceful acceptance of new legal standards more difficult,”
Levine writes.7
In 1965, CRS Director LeRoy Collins, a past president
of the National Association of Broadcasters, addressed a
gathering of the American Society of Newspaper Editors.
There he criticized U.S. leaders — including the media
— for failing to support the Supreme Court’s Brown vs.
Board of Education decision.8 He noted that “little or no
national effort was made to lead the American people
to understand why racial discrimination is unjust and
unconstitutional.”9
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