Drafting history of America’s Second Revolution: Civil Rights

REPORTING CIVIL RIGHTS, PART ONE: AMERICAN JOURNALISM 1941-1963

Edited by Clayborne Carson, David Garrow, Bill Kovach and Carol Polsgrove

Library of America, $40, 996 pages, illus.

REPORTING CIVIL RIGHTS, PART TWO: AMERICAN JOURNALISM 1960-1973

Edited by Clayborne Carson, et al

Library of America, $40, 986 pages, illus.

REVIEWED BY ANNETTE GORDON-REED

Journalism is often characterized as a rough draft of history — sending signals (if not always sure ones) of what issues in a given era will likely have resonance for coming generations of scholars. Now comes a draft of the history of what has been called the Second American Revolution: the modern Civil Rights Movement that occupied much of the last half of the 20th century.

In two Library of America volumes of essays, columns, speeches, and news articles, “Reporting Civil Rights, Part One: American Journalism 1941-1963” and “Reporting Civil Rights, Part Two: American Journalism 1963-1973” the books chronicle America’s journey from a land where blacks were second class citizens by law to a country transformed by the obliteration of de jure segregation.

This massive (and masterful) work — almost two thousand pages — edited by Clayborne Carson and others, provides fascinating eyewitness accounts of the Civil Rights Movement unfiltered by the passage of time and the benefit of hindsight.

Of course, historians and other commentators have already begun to assess the meaning of the Civil Rights — even as those meanings keep unfolding. A basic outline of the story has emerged, centering largely on iconic persons, moments and images: Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, (the “anti-King,” Malcolm X), Brown v. Board of Education, and the March on Washington. American school children learn of Ms. Parks’ defiance and the young people who integrated Southern schools. Dr. King’s birthday is a national holiday, and the March on Washington has become the gold standard of citizen activism.

Even Malcolm X has his own postage stamp. The Movement that emerges from these treatments seems far less radical than it actually was. “Reporting Civil Rights” reminds us of the very contingent nature of the struggle, and what was up for grabs as the Movement progressed.

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