“If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”
—Malcolm X1
IN THE WAKE of the Watts uprising, the Los Angeles Times was shocked. Horrified by the events unfolding in the city, it minimized Black grievances: “What happened the other night may well have been symptomatic of more serious underlying conditions, which should and are being treated. . . . The police are doing their job and doing it well.”2 Later that week, the editors became even more agitated: “Terrorism is spreading.”3 Describing Los Angeles as a “civilized city,” by the end of the week, the lesson the editors had drawn from the events was to call for “an increase in the size of the police force.”4 While the paper had covered a growing movement in Los Angeles over the decade that had repeatedly challenged school segregation, housing segregation, job discrimination, and police brutality, sometimes on the front page, it now conveniently forgot it.
Well-known political commentator Theodore White took to the opinion page and encapsulated the “surprise” at the riots: “One must start, of course, with the beginning mystery, the most puzzling of all—why Los Angeles? For, in Los Angeles, Negroes have lived better than in any other large American city, with the possible exception of Detroit . . . and, up to now, [have been] treated better by their white fellow citizens than in any other city in the nation.”5 White described the city’s “open and easy tolerance,” where Black people had made “spectacular” progress.6 While endorsing dialogue between the Black community and the police department, a Los Angeles Times editorial similarly minimized Black concerns: “It is likely that Negro complaints hinge more around their resentment of alleged police attitudes and procedure, than outright brutality.”7 At the same time, the paper gave ample space to Police Chief William H. Parker and Mayor Sam Yorty, who claimed allegations of police brutality were “a big lie” and likened the rioters to “monkeys in a zoo.”8 Few Black activists were interviewed; the long movement challenging police brutality and calling for Parker’s resignation was ignored. Nonetheless, the Los Angeles Times would win a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the uprising.
Similarly, as school was set to open in 1974, and white opposition to court-ordered desegregation mounted, the Boston Globe was shocked by events unfolding in the Cradle of Liberty. The paper cast federal judge W. Arthur Garrity’s June decision ordering system-wide school desegregation in Boston as having come largely out of the blue. For twenty-five years, Black activists had organized meetings, organizations, rallies, boycotts, independent busing programs, independent schools, and candidacies for public office—all to draw attention to the inequalities endemic in BPS. And this decades-long struggle had encountered unyielding white resistance. A number of those actions had been covered by the Globe, occasionally on the front page. Yet, in its extensive coverage of school opening, the Globe framed the “crisis” around “busing,” and refused to grapple with the long history of school segregation in the city, the three decades of Black activism challenging it, and the vehemence of white resistance that had brought the city to that juncture. Paralleling the ways Southern papers obscured civil rights issues in their own backyards, the Boston Globe had long enabled many white readers to feel like the racial politics of the city were good overall, and it had contributed to the gap between a growing Black protest movement and the soothed consciences of many white Bostonians who felt entitled to protect their “neighborhood schools.”9 From the Globe’s coverage, it would be impossible to understand that white disruption and the violence the city faced at the opening of school was due to a long-standing, intentionally segregated school system that Black people had challenged relentlessly for a quarter century and that white citizens and public officials had endeavored relentlessly to protect and defend. The fact that students had been taking school buses for years to segregated schools without complaint from white parents was completely left out of the Globe’s coverage. Nonetheless, the Boston Globe would win a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the start of school desegregation in 1974.
In Los Angeles and Boston, the media seemed to possess an endless capacity for surprise at these “crises”: How is this happening here? Why are they so angry? It was a shock that stood in the way of a sober consideration of racial injustice in either city—a shock that ignored history and discriminatory city institutions and long-standing movements and instead legitimated the blinkered perspectives of many of its white readers. Looking at media coverage of the Black freedom struggle, particularly coverage of the movement outside the Deep South, reveals a sobering truth: the media often stood in the way of the struggle for racial justice.
In the national fable of the civil rights movement, the media gets a great deal of credit for the movement’s success. Journalists show up as courageous heroes who braved the South’s violent parochialism to shine a necessary light on the important struggle happening there. “If it hadn’t been for the media,” Congressman John Lewis extolled, “the civil rights movement would have been like a bird without wings, a choir without a song.”10 Thus, in popular understanding, journalists are the good guys who provided the needed amplification of the Southern struggle to force these places to change. “Sympathetic referees,” as Lewis termed them, they forced the nation to see what it hadn’t seen, and lifted up the work of Southern Black activists, offering a measure of protection to these struggles.
But while a number of journalists courageously left their homes to journey south to cover the “real struggle,” as they saw it in the decade from 1955 to 1965, their newspapers took a different approach toward inequality and struggle in their own backyards.11 They increasingly covered the Southern movement in serious, more righteous ways, while chiding local activists for not protesting in the right way, or they portrayed local movements as dangerous or disruptive. Using fewer photographs and often a paternalistic tone, these news outlets tended to treat local Black leaders as largely irrelevant or as troublemakers demanding too much too fast—functioning, as Stokely Carmichael put it, as “self-appointed white critics.”12 By covering local issues as individual protests or disturbances rather than as a movement, they devoted little space to what segregation looked like in their cities, how it functioned, and who the people who protected it were.
Southern Black people and the movements they built were increasingly covered as noble and necessary, while Northern Black people and the movements they built were deemed marginal, unreasonable, and disruptive. Or they were not pictured at all. Media historians Matthew Delmont and Mark Speltz both have found that coverage of race relations in Northern cities tended to focus on white backlash rather than Black protests—and on riots.13 As Speltz argues,
Ironically, Americans today are more likely to see news photographs of riot-torn Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, or Los Angeles than pictures of the many preceding demonstrations against discrimination, police brutality, and unjust incarceration. . . . The photographs of peaceful protests decades before uprising took place lend clarity to the causes underlying the problem. In this light, the civil disturbances look less like senseless violence and more like the consequences of mounting frustration in the face of chronic inaction.14
There was little history on their pages or evidence of the long trails of Black grievance that preceded them—these uprisings were pictured as coming out of nowhere.
Southern white politicians who protected segregation came under question on the pages of the nation’s most important newspapers by the 1960s, while Northern politicians not only escaped scrutiny but were often portrayed sympathetically for having to deal with these “unreasonable” Black people. Northern newspapers increasingly criticized Southerners for refusing to acknowledge their race problem but allowed Northerners to talk about “busing” and “racial imbalance” and “law and order” to cover up theirs. The nation’s leading print newspapers enabled the framing of civil rights and desegregation as Southern issues and helped to inoculate polite racism across the country. Northern segregation was treated as less systemic and more happenstance, and resistance to desegregation there as different and not as segregationist as Southern resistance.
Because much of the national media was located in the North, their myopia went largely unchecked. Black newspapers that covered these issues were regularly dismissed; Southern newspapers that highlighted Northern hypocrisy were easily disregarded as deflecting their own racism; and international news sources were considered “red” for exposing US race relations. Indeed, the myopia of the Northern press was often rewarded. In moments of crisis—such as the 1965 Watts uprising or court-ordered school desegregation in Boston in 1974—a number of these news outlets won awards for their coverage.
This celebration has continued, sewn into contemporary understandings of the civil rights movement in the scholarship and given epic weight in Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff’s 2006 Pulitzer Prize–winning book, The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation. Lionizing the role of the media, The Race Beat painstakingly detailed the process by which many Northern journalists came to see the importance of the Southern struggle and summoned the courage and resources to cover it. At the same time, Roberts, former managing editor of the New York Times, and Klibanoff, former managing editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, overlooked entirely the role of the media in the North, which would have provided a less heroic narrative.15 History as ABC Afterschool Special, their story of the scrappy journalists who helped push their news outlets to expose the South’s intransigence is ultimately a feel-good one—of good people who do the right thing. To have examined how their colleagues disregarded and legitimated racism in their own cities and regions raises more disturbing questions.
In a 2013 NPR interview, Klibanoff explained the Southern media’s reluctance to cover Black protest: “Publicly they would say . . . ‘We can’t be putting a lot of stories of ruffians on the street provoking violence.’ . . . What I think they also were trying to say and acknowledge without being able to say it is they really didn’t know how to cover the story. . . . Most news reporters at the time would not have had in their Rolodexes or address books the names of any African-Americans in town. They wouldn’t know who to call, by and large. . . . There’s no sense of ‘let’s live the lives of our readers.’”16 But this exact point could be made about the New York Times or Los Angeles Times regarding coverage of Black life and struggle in their own cities. These newspapers, too, saw Black residents as problems to be studied, as strange people with unusual culture, had few local Black contacts in their Rolodexes, and tended not to portray “lives of our [Black] readers.” When pressed by the NPR interviewer that many Southerners criticized the press for not covering the “race story” at home, Klibanoff acknowledged there was “some truth to it” but didn’t elaborate, much less take stock of the ways his own book didn’t cover the “race story” in the North either, and then returned to Watts as a signal moment.
While it is now generally accepted that Southern newspapers did not cover the civil rights movement fairly or accurately, there has been reluctance to examine the role that the national media, based largely in the North, played in struggles in its own backyard. With television news not yet fully dominant, these newspapers defined the important issues of the day. And editors invested fewer resources in investigating local racism than they had started to invest in the South. While a number of journalists showed real courage in the way they pushed for coverage of Southern struggles, by and large their newspapers were not necessarily equally courageous in questioning white prerogatives in their own cities (often using caveats to describe white families opposing desegregation like “however free from prejudice they might be”).17 When Northern papers did picture local racism, they typically did so by focusing on working-class whites, such as those in South Boston.18 While there were some important exceptions, many Northern journalists accepted the terms of their middle-class white readers: they liked their “neighborhood schools” (a term that didn’t arise till after Brown), didn’t want “forced busing” (even though many of their children were being bused to maintain segregated schools), were concerned for their children’s safety in “dangerous neighborhoods” (blaming Black communities for the conditions in schools), and had rights as “parents and taxpayers” (even though Blacks and Latinos were also parents and taxpayers with rights)—and this didn’t make them racist like Southerners. These papers naturalized the shock and disgust of many whites at Northern uprisings and under-covered Black perspectives—regularly downgrading Black protest, interviewing few Black people, and devoting few resources to investigating the structures of racial inequality in their cities.19 In so doing, the national press became another obstacle to racial justice, another form of protection for segregation and inequality in much of the country.
Boston was a case in point. While the Boston Globe covered many of the activities of Boston’s freedom movement in the two decades before Garrity’s decision, it tended to treat them as discrete and episodic protests—not a movement—that were at times problematic in their disruptiveness. Initially critical of the term busing when antidesegregation whites in the city first employed it, the Globe’s Robert Levey described busing as a “non-word that sets off flames of anger” and a “hobgoblin” because “of course the millions of children who take school buses every day as a matter of necessity are not considered to be in a ‘busing’ program.”20 Yet by the mid-1960s, the paper nonetheless took up the frame of “busing” to characterize white Bostonians’ opposition to school desegregation and, in part, to differentiate it from what was happening in the South.21 For the next decade, the Globe and other news outlets cast white opposition to Black demands for school equity and desegregation as mere opposition to having their kids “bused,” thus helping to inoculate the racism and the hoarding of resources this opposition to desegregation actually evidenced. Black activists found it hard to get their issues taken seriously, not only by the Boston School Committee but also by the Boston Globe. In 1966, troubled by the “liberal use of stereotypes, i.e., culturally deprived, agitators, forced busing,” by many Boston media outlets, Black leaders convened a roundtable meeting with media representatives to try to change how racial issues were covered.22 But the meeting produced little change.
The Globe did not raise sufficient attention to the long-standing and multivarious white resistance in the city that persistently sought to avoid the requirements of Brown. Nor did the New York Times. In a lengthy 1973 article on the Boston schools entitled “More Segregated Than Ever,” the Times likewise cast a benign eye: “The Boston area can boast a long record of good race relations . . . a spirit of tolerance that can be traced as far back as the eighteen-thirties, when the abolitionist movement took root in Boston. . . . The effects of segregated schools can only be surmised. For the most part, they [Black students] attend overcrowded and run-down schools, but the sociological evidence suggests that the quality of school buildings and facilities is not overly important to learning.”23 This culturalist explanation allowed the Times to frame the educational issues of Black students in Boston as somehow different and outside the mandates of Brown, which had decisively linked the quality of facilities to effective learning and constitutional equality.
When two decades of frustrated Black struggle prompted the NAACP’s filing of a federal lawsuit, that history was largely forgotten. Following Judge Garrity’s June 1974 ruling that ordered comprehensive desegregation, the Globe wrote a positive editorial calling the decision “balanced” and “like an operation to cure a long and crippling illness. The procedure may be painful but at least it is definite and the chances of healing are great.”24 But the frame of healing still sidestepped what was at stake: jobs, resources, access, and control. And many, many white people in Boston saw those stakes and objected. Leading up to the opening of school in 1974, the Globe obsessed about safety while revealingly referring to Garrity’s desegregation plan in a first-day-of-school editorial as the “opening of racially balanced schools” (the preferred Northern euphemism for desegregation), rather than the dismantling of more than a century of segregated schools in the city.25
An editorial the next week referred to the large-scale white boycott of schools as “legitimate,” never used the word “segregation” or “desegregation” in describing what was occurring in Boston, and called Boston a “city to be proud of.”26 Even as it prodigiously covered the violence and upheaval that occurred at the start of school in 1974, the Globe approached those resisting desegregation very gingerly. On September 27, it ran a fawning article on the antidesegregation group ROAR, entitled “Opposition to Busing Led by Publicity-Shy ROAR,” legitimating the utter fabrication that ROAR was media-averse (as opposed to being partly fueled by the media over the years).27 With the focus overwhelmingly on white resistance, the Black activists who had labored for decades to challenge the city’s entrenched segregation—Ruth Batson, Ellen Jackson, Muriel and Otto Snowden, Mel King, Melnea Cass—barely warranted a mention in the drama that would unfold on pages of the city’s most-regarded newspaper over the next months.
This fit with a broader pattern of coverage of school-desegregation issues. By the 1970s, television and newspapers dramatically overcovered white opposition to “busing.” While “busing” dominated news coverage, it was a key strategic distortion. In most Northern and Western cities, busing itself had long been a tool of segregation; for years, busing enabled white students to go to “white schools,” but that fact did not make it into the news stories. As Julian Bond would wryly note at a Boston rally: “It’s not the bus, it’s us.”28 If television news played an important role in framing Southern civil rights protests for a national audience in the 1950s and 1960s as righteous and necessary movements, according to historian Matthew Delmont, by the 1970s, television news offered frequent and sympathetic coverage of busing opponents in cities including Boston, Los Angeles, Denver, and Pontiac, Michigan.29 When massive prodesegregation events were organized, as they were in Boston between 1974 and 1976, they received far less coverage than “antibusing” protests.30 “We wanted to show that there are a number of people who have fought for busing, some for over 20 years,” explained Boston organizer Ellen Jackson. “We hoped to express the concerns of many people who have not seen themselves, only seeing the anti-busing demonstrations in the media.”31 But the coverage of these demonstrations, including a massive one in Boston in May 1975 where forty thousand marched in support of desegregation, was much slimmer than “anti-busing” leaders and events received; Black organizers, parents, and leaders, interviewed far less frequently. Through this inaccurate framing of “busing,” and by ignoring Black perspectives, journalists and political leaders succeeded in deeming system-wide desegregation a failed strategy in Northern cities.
Similar to the Globe, the New York Times in the 1950s and 1960s provided coverage of the movement for school desegregation and equity in its own hometown that ran from lackluster to paternalistic to dismissive—that was far different from the multiple front-page stories it ran nearly simultaneously on the Southern struggle. While acknowledging “integration is a nation-wide problem not just one that belongs south of the Mason–Dixon line,” the New York Times insisted in 1957, “there is of course no official segregation in the city,” despite the fact that New York school officials produced zoning maps that rendered the city’s schools segregated and hired few Black or Puerto Rican teachers.32 Repeatedly, the Times cast school inequality and segregation in the Big Apple as “entirely different from that in the South . . . The root is not in any systematic exclusion fostered by law or administrative policy but in neighborhood population patterns .”33 And again in 1963: “The problem of ‘desegregation’ in New York City is entirely different from that in the South, despite efforts by some Southern segregationists and some Northern integrationists to equate them. The city’s schools have always been integrated.”34
Coverage of escalating Black protest was tepid. The paper briefly covered Mae Mallory’s 1957 case against the New York City Board of Education (BOE), referring to it only as a case against a school-zoning system that is “now being attacked on the ground that the all-Negro schools in Harlem and elsewhere are inferior to the predominantly white schools”—as if the Supreme Court hadn’t already settled that matter of separate facilities being unequal in Brown v. Board.35 “If the zoning laws are declared unconstitutional,” the Times opined, “the entire school pattern would have to be altered dramatically.” While the Times understood that Brown would require dramatic changes for some school systems, the idea that New York school practices would also have to be altered dramatically seemed a bit absurd to the paper.
Echoing the New York Board of Education’s position (which sought to evade responsibility by blaming the problem on housing patterns), the Times, in a big 1963 story, referred to segregated school patterns in the city as “de facto segregation that is the product of economic status and housing discrimination,” though “the leaders of integration efforts say the effects are the same. They refer to it simply as segregation.”36 The coverage reified the idea of neighborhood schools as both true and naturally occurring. Referring to those pushing for school transfers as “militant groups,” the paper again wrote dismissively: “The groups pressing most vigorously for desegregation of predominantly Negro and Puerto Rican schools appear to be convinced that the educational quality in them will never be raised until a full measure of physical integration is achieved.” (As if the Supreme Court had not also said this.)
At the same time, few Black activists were pictured or quoted. Despite her many efforts around New York schools, Ella Baker did not make it into the pages of the New York Times till she died. The Reverend Milton Galamison made it into many stories, including a positive profile in 1963 that described him as “calm, reasoned” (and repeatedly as “urbane”). But in escalating negative terms, Times articles subsequently described him as possessing “unpardonable irresponsibility,” said he was “callous, disgraceful and utterly illegitimate,” and called his group “militant” and “insurgent.”37
After nearly a decade without progress on school desegregation in the city, the Times took pains in 1963 to note that New York City school officials were “sympathetic” to Black demands but that Black people were “unlikely to be satisfied with the pace.”38 After years of parent organizing that got nowhere with the BOE, and with no progress toward transforming individual schools, activists called for a citywide school boycott. In the days before the February 1964 boycott, the Times repeatedly editorialized against it. It lambasted the protest as a “violent, illegal approach of adult-encouraged truancy,” dismissed civil rights demands, including the expectation that the city should create a comprehensive desegregation plan, as “unreasonable and unjustified,” and claimed that “few things could be more destructive to the welfare of all of the city’s children.”39 Just as the New York Times condemned the proposed school boycott as “violent,” other Northern media outlets often framed disruptive protests in their own cities and states as “violent,” even when there was nothing violent about the intentions nor any damage to persons or property. Calling them “violent” legitimated public fear of disruptive Black protest while discrediting the protest before it even began.
In a scathing op-ed entitled “A Boycott Solves Nothing,” the Times described the planned school action as “reckless” and “utterly unreasonable and unjustifiable,” and referred to activists as possessing a “stubbornly closed mind.”40 The day after the boycott, while acknowledging the significant numbers of students who stayed out, the Times still called the boycott “misguided” and referred to Black students as “the socially and economically deprived.”41 The paper claimed school segregation resulted from “barriers of the housing pattern and composition of the population,” but then suggested that money was the real barrier to systemic change. It instructed civil rights activists “who have been harassing and admonishing the school authorities [to] bend their energies to the search for the required dollars.”42 Like its Southern counterparts, the Times chided protest leaders for being impatient and overly demanding, and it sympathetically quoted city leaders: “We’re asking them to wait a little longer.”43 The February school boycott was the largest civil rights demonstration of the era (the numbers far outstripping the March on Washington the previous August)—but you wouldn’t have known it from the Times’s coverage.
Coverage of a much smaller protest of white mothers over the Brooklyn Bridge the following month amplified the perspectives of white parents opposing desegregation. In March 1964, more than ten thousand white New Yorkers, most of them mothers, marched over the bridge to protest very modest plans to desegregate forty elementary schools and twenty junior high schools by pairing schools. The New York Times did not call it what it was—a march to defend New York City’s segregated schools. Under the headline “More Than 10,000 March in Protest of School Pairing,” the opening sentence read: “Thousands of demonstrators, many of them homeowners from Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens, marched on the Board of Education and City Hall yesterday, shouting that they wanted to preserve the tradition of neighborhood schools.”44 Conveniently forgetting that excusing segregation as “tradition” was a move out of the Southern newspaper playbook, the paper’s reporting departed from the more critical tone it was using to cover white parents protesting in the South.45
In September of that year, when 275,000 white parents kept their kids home to protest limited plans for desegregation, the New York Times criticized the boycott timidly. It called for “neighborliness, for concern for those among us who for too long have been left back,” and qualified its criticism of white parents who protested desegregation as “however free from prejudice they may be.” Ten years after Brown, the New York Times treated the city’s school segregation as unfortunate but not illegal or immoral, and it made even small efforts at desegregation seem like a favor, rather than the law of the land. In a move straight out of Montgomery (where city leadership had equated White Citizens’ Councils with Black leadership organizing the bus boycott), it equated the white boycott with the February Black school boycott: “When this current demonstration is over we hope there will be no more of these boycotts, whether sponsored by white or Black. They succeed in nothing except to make a good many New Yorkers a little ashamed of their city.”46 How different the Times’s tone was here compared with the more sharply critical ways it covered the white protests—and George Wallace’s actions—in Birmingham opposing school desegregation the year before.47 How implicitly comfortable it was with New York’s school segregation, as it wished for no more boycotts “white or black,” feeling little responsibility to expose or change the deep inequities of the city’s schools. Indeed, the nation’s most prestigious newspaper covered the struggles in its own city very differently than it covered Southern ones, shining a light on Southern segregation and the noble movement that fought it while obscuring segregation at home and the movement within New York City that challenged it.
There is no way to understand how segregation endured across school systems in the “liberal” North and West without understanding the role the news media played. Had the media—from the outset—written stories that assumed the Brown decision applied to schools in their cities and exposed the effects of segregation in terms of school quality and the material benefits white families gained from such inequality, and treated those pressing for change as serious and their demands urgent, New York officials would have felt watched. Had these newspapers started to cover the movement in their own cities with similar methods and the same intrepidness and humility they brought to coverage of the Southern ones—understanding that equating positions of “both sides” benefits the status quo, that injustice requires exposure by bold reporters willing to question prevailing wisdom, that decent people do indecent things—the movement’s wings would have had more power. Had they covered a growing Black movement in the city as a righteous movement, as they were increasingly doing in their coverage of the South, it would have increased the pressure on school officials to act. Instead, they let those officials off the hook.
This kind of coverage was not confined to school desegregation but characterized the coverage of other racial matters, particularly before the uprisings of the mid-1960s. As with school segregation, the New York Times did not take seriously the issue of police brutality in the city and rarely covered it. According to historian Clarence Taylor, the paper covered policing from the police point of view and rarely wrote about police brutality or took the point of view of the Black victim. As the Times relied on police and prosecutors for sources, perhaps it saw costs to the paper if its coverage was too critical. By the early 1960s, in places such as Birmingham, the Times was taking a more jaundiced view of what police and public officials were saying, in part because it came to see those sources as slanted and in part because it had less to lose by alienating Southern politicians or police departments.
The New York Times put a negative frame around growing protests over racial inequity in city life. By 1964, Brooklyn CORE had grown frustrated with the lack of change in the city. It had protested unequal sanitation services in the borough and been told Black people needed to learn to use trash cans; it had exposed housing segregation and the ways real estate agents steered away Black renters and buyers, with only modest change to the housing practices; it had protested businesses like Ebinger’s Bakery, which didn’t hire Black people (CORE managed to secure two jobs); and it had engaged in protests at Downstate Medical Center because of discrimination in the construction trades and come away with promises, rather than actual hiring. Frustrated with the lack of change in the city, Brooklyn CORE decided it needed to disrupt business as usual to force people to see what they refused to see. Fed up with “empty promises and pious pronouncements,” it called for a stall-in on the first day of the 1964 New York World’s Fair unless Governor Nelson Rockefeller formulated a “comprehensive plan . . . which will end police brutality, abolish slum housing, and provide integrated quality education for all.”48
Describing the proposed stall-in as a “mischievous scheme,” the Times decried: “The World’s Fair has been discriminating against no one.” Ignoring how the fair was the brainchild of Robert Moses, the city public works czar and construction coordinator, whose policies had contributed to the neglect of Black neighborhoods across the city, the Times claimed it had “no authority to bring about civil rights reforms or correct wrongs in the social order [and] sympathy with the just aspirations of all peoples.”49 Moses had vetoed plans to extend the subway out to Flushing because the park, to him, was not designed for low-income people of color. The original plans for the stall-in focused on five roadways: the Grand Central Parkway, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the Belt Parkway, the Interboro Parkway, and the Van Wyck Expressway—every one of them built or refurbished thanks to Moses’s policies.50
Moses himself used his connections at various newspapers to persuade them to write editorials condemning the stall-in.51 The city went to court, and a state supreme court judge issued an injunction against CORE. A number of protesters were arrested as some blocked subway entrances. “It is worth noting,” historian Craig Wilder writes, “that the authority of the state could be marshaled so easily and effectively to stop a protest of racial inequalities but was not available to prevent those injustices . . . for, not only did white New Yorkers dominate social resources, they also determined the appropriate moments, venues and methods for the airing of grievances.”52 That included the New York Times.
Alongside the lackluster ways they covered Black protests were the ways these papers of record promptly forgot long-standing protests of racial inequality amidst crises like the Watts uprising. By dismissing Black grievances and disparaging Black protest, they had helped to maintain a segregated status quo in the North and a recurring “shock” about Black anger. Unwilling to hold politicians to account for ignoring these grievances, they didn’t examine their own coverage (and lack of coverage) for answers about where these uprisings had come from. While challenging Southern surprise at the sit-ins and demonstrations rippling across the South, most media organizations proved unwilling to challenge this Northern shock and cloak of deniability. How different the understandings of the 1965 Watts and 1967 Detroit uprisings would have been if journalists had actually questioned public officials and local residents about the ways they had dismissed Black grievances and discredited movements in their cities for years—or even provided that broader context in their articles as essential background for understanding how long people had tried to raise these injustices to no avail.
The Los Angeles Times was a case in point in convenient amnesia. The paper had covered, however tepidly, the protest movement that emerged in 1962 after the police killing of Ronald Stokes, the unarmed secretary of the Nation of Islam whose death, as the Los Angeles Times reported, resulted in the creation of a blue ribbon committee. But that committee produced little change in police practices. In 1964, the Times noted growing Black calls, from CORE and the United Civil Rights Council, for Chief William H. Parker’s resignation. Yet, despite years of activism and a six-day uprising, the Times was unwilling to acknowledge a pattern of police brutality in Los Angeles, let alone call the city to account for ignoring for so long Black grievances involving police misconduct. Instead, the paper continued to question the existence of LAPD brutality in the first place and called for the hiring of more police.
Similarly, in Detroit, the mainstream newspapers, the Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press, had refused to cover incidences of police brutality before 1967. While the city’s Black newspaper, the Michigan Chronicle, detailed incident after incident, Detroit’s major newspapers, according to NAACP Detroit branch leader Arthur Johnson, “had a standing agreement not to cover issues of police brutality.”53 Much like Southern newspapers, Detroit’s major newspapers overwhelmingly kept coverage of police mistreatment of Black people out of the paper. Faced with exposure by the People’s Tribunal of police brutality during the 1967 uprising, the papers again turned the other way. The Detroit Free Press had promised a big story and sent people to cover the tribunal. “That’s another reason I wanted to do it,” organizer Dan Aldridge explained, “because I was promised by the head of the Free Press to make it a big story.” But nothing appeared in the paper. “I was so angry. I charged down to Free Press and got in [the reporter’s] face and he told me, he said, ‘Dan, the editors would not let us put it out there. I got the full story, had my full staff, and the editor said that they were going to squash the story,’ and they did. There was nothing I could do about it.”54
The surprise expressed by many white citizens and city officials should be understood in part as the surprise of intransigence—a willful shock nourished by the news media to deny the long-standing nature and significance of those grievances and obscure the history of a protracted struggle within the city. The framework of Southern exceptionalism, evident in the differential coverage between Los Angeles (or Detroit) and Birmingham, enabled this blind spot. The papers had refused to see years of protest in Los Angeles as a movement with authentic grievances, unlike the ways it had come to treat Black movements in the South. And like Southern newspapers, the Los Angeles Times took a measure of self-satisfaction in thinking Black Angelenos were largely content and white Angelenos largely open and fair. The news media did not force public officials to account for the fact that a decade-long civil rights movement in the city had produced little change in schools, housing, most job structures, or police practice (which certainly fueled the frustration that spurred the uprising) because it too had constructed Los Angeles’s movement as different from the righteous Southern movement.
An examination of the Black newspapers the Los Angeles Sentinel and the California Eagle in the years leading up to the Watts uprising illuminates what the city’s mainstream (white) newspapers refused to see: the variety of actions in the years before the uprising and the interconnections between various strands of the movement often viewed as divergent—for example, the NAACP and the Nation of Islam. Nearly every week, often on the front page, they detailed numerous grassroots actions happening within the city. By highlighting the systems of racial injustice in the city that people were contesting, this reporting disrupted the notion of Los Angeles’s liberalism and challenged the ways Black people were blamed for conditions they faced in the city. But national news outlets preferred a different story, one that didn’t highlight long-standing Black grievances but portrayed the rioters as riffraff, angry and alienated, and different from the good Black people in the South. As one Times staffer put it, “Ordinarily when there was trouble in the ghetto, the Times desk men downplayed it.”55 The Los Angeles Times didn’t have a single Black reporter on staff before the uprising.56
When King came to town, even though he had been in Los Angeles multiple times before the uprising highlighting issues of racial inequality in the city, reporters made it seem like this was his first visit. They repeatedly highlighted an interaction between Martin Luther King and a young rioter who told him, “We won. . . . We made them pay attention to us,” to highlight the disjuncture between the good civil rights leader and alienated ghetto youth. But the interaction reads much differently in the context of a protracted civil rights struggle in the city that had long been dismissed. In addition, nearly incessantly at first and for years following the uprising, journalists repeatedly asked King about Watts; highlighting his shock—in other words, working the frame that most journalists brought to the subject—gave King more room to expound on the racial problems endemic to American capitalism and democracy that he had been talking about before the uprising. These outlets had discovered the interlocking issues of racism, poverty, and state violence so they cast it as new, when in fact they hadn’t been listening before.
And as King increasingly made connections between racism, war, and poverty, these news outlets grew increasingly critical, publishing editorials condemning him. After King was assassinated in 1968, singer and longtime civil rights supporter Harry Belafonte grew angry at a New York Times reporter standing next to him at the funeral: “I could not help but tell him that this grievous moment was in part the result of a climate of hate and distortion that the New York Times and other papers had helped create. . . . Just coming to grieve the loss was no cleansing of guilt.”57
A new vein of reporting, intersecting with trends in urban social science, arose by the mid-1960s that furthered “cultural” explanations for inequality. Reporters journeyed to the “ghetto” to provide their readers a snapshot of “real” Black life—treating Black Angelenos (or Detroiters or Milwaukeeans) as some foreign culture to be observed, studied, and commented on. Their reporting could have taken Black life seriously, investigating the structures of segregation in the city and the community and religious organizations that had grown to challenge and survive it. But through the culture-of-poverty frame many employed, they portrayed Black people in these cities as a kind of foreign population possessing a distinct and often dysfunctional set of cultural practices. Such cultural framings corresponded to paradigms city officials and residents already employed to deflect Black demands for change. As poet and author Maya Angelou, living in Los Angeles at the time, observed, reporters who descended on Black Los Angeles after the riot maintained a familiar set of cultural stereotypes, noting that one journalist “wrote an account of the Watts riot allowing his readers to hold on to the stereotypes that made them comfortable while congratulating themselves on being in possession of some news.”58
Renowned novelist Thomas Pynchon’s much-vaunted 1966 article for the New York Times Magazine, “A Journey into the Mind of Watts,” was a case in point. Pynchon traveled to “the heart of L.A.’s racial sickness . . . the coexistence of two very different cultures: one white and one black.”59 According to Pynchon, “Black culture is stuck pretty much with basic realities like disease, like failure, violence and death, which the whites have mostly chosen—and can afford—to ignore. “He claimed, “These kids are so tough you can pull slivers of [glass] out of them and never get a whimper. It’s part of their landscape, both the real and the emotional one: busted glass, busted crockery, nails, tin cans, all kinds of scrap and waste”—missing all the joy, humor, care, and tenderness that characterized Black life in Watts. Making a nod to political struggles in a self-satisfied way, Pynchon observed: “The only illusion Watts ever allowed itself was to believe for a long time in the white version of what a Negro was supposed to be. But with the Muslim and civil-rights movements that went, too.” Such a culturalist approach treated Black urban communities as a problem to be studied; portrayed urban Black kids as some sort of different, toughened kind of person; cast inequality through a lens of cultural difference; and disregarded the movement as made up of blustery illusion-breakers. Pieces like this provided a palatable way for liberal readers to make sense of visible disparities in the city without having to do anything about them.
The uprising did prompt the Los Angeles Times to run many more stories about poverty, racial injustice, housing and school inequality, and underserved neighborhoods. In certain ways, it discovered the problem of racial inequality in Los Angeles; in a 1967 article, it claimed that “the summer of 1965” was “when the white community abruptly discovered what Negroes already knew—that Negro area schools were less than equal.”60 While the Times had covered Black protests around school segregation in the early 1960s, it took the uprising for the paper to actually acknowledge it was a problem. In many ways, the Los Angeles Times would provide the template for covering the uprisings over the next few years: “surprise” at the uprising and alarm at Black anger, followed by discovery of patterns of inequality in the city (which had been pointed out for years), with little to no acknowledgment of the long history of organizing and Black grievances beforehand.
This was accompanied by mounting fear about Black Power and calls for more law and order. As historian Peter Levy has observed, “The national media not only helped undermine the struggle against [Northern] Jim Crow, it helped fuel the cry for ‘law and order’ and the politics of white resentment. . . . Disinclined to look for racism in their own backyard, the ‘national’ media, which was located in the North (and West) framed [Black Power] as an illegitimate offspring of the civil rights movement.”61 Indeed, because many of these news outlets discovered the problem only after the riots and conveniently dismissed any organizing beforehand, they framed Black Power as having come out of nowhere and were fearful of rising Black militancy. They wondered why people didn’t go through the proper channels, even though had they looked back, even to their own pages, they would have seen how Black efforts to go through the proper channels had been dismissed and disparaged by local officials and their own reporters.
And these outlets embraced the need for more policing and continued to be reticent in covering police misconduct and violence. For instance, in the days and weeks after Chicano and Black high school students walked out of school in spring 1968, police attacked many of the Chicano students. But most of that footage did not make it into the news. Decades later, Moctesuma Esparza, who played a key role in the walkouts, explained:
The coverage was extraordinarily censored, on a corporate level following the lead of the district attorney and the mayor and the power structure. They self-censored. . . . CBS and NBC and all of these corporate stations that had tremendous news coverage capability and were there, and all of these photographers that were there for the LA Times and the Herald, they did not publish or show or comment on the police violence. And the police violence was extreme.62
Because of these ongoing silences, Black activists increasingly pointed to the media as a key problem and highlighted the need for Black people to create their own media. The Black press had long covered issues in these cities far differently than white counterparts did. From Malcolm X’s creation of Muhammad Speaks to the Black Panther newspaper to Reverend Cleage’s Illustrated News to Richard and Milton Henry’s Afro-American Broadcasting Company, Northern activists created new venues for even more hard-hitting and expansive coverage. Cleage had started the Illustrated News in 1961 as “a radical counterpart to Detroit’s three black newsweeklies” and targeted Detroit’s white liberals as part of the problem propping up system of segregation.63 Taking its own pictures, framing its own stories, the Black Panther newspaper, started in 1967, published articles, photos, and art from branches around the country; it chronicled happenings both at home and abroad, according to historian Robyn Spencer. As one Panther put it, “The beautiful thing about it is that all you have to do is show it like it is.”64 It also documented police brutality and harassment of the Panthers and critiqued government policies.65 In other words, it became an outlet to challenge the kind of reporting happening in the country’s mainstream newspapers. The Black press had long played this role—and this new set of more revolutionary papers aimed to go further. Particularly given the conduct of law enforcement and the state, Black activists saw the need for new outlets that would take on this policing and the politics of law enforcement.
Fast-forward a half century, and a handful of Southern newspapers have reassessed their coverage of the civil rights movement. “40 Years Later Civil Rights Makes Page One,” the New York Times headline read, detailing how the Lexington, Kentucky, Herald-Leader began a process of taking responsibility for its coverage (and lack thereof) of the movement, noting how in the 1990s the Jackson, Mississippi, Clarion-Ledger had acknowledged the bias of their coverage against the civil rights movement. But as the Times observed unselfconsciously, “Few newspapers, if any, have taken critical looks at what was the less egregious, but more common, practice of simply disregarding civil rights protests in their hometowns.”66
The New York Times framed the need for others to do this kind of soul-searching but largely eschewed it for itself. In 2015, it broke a series of stories about battles relating to rezoning and desegregation in both the Dumbo neighborhood of Brooklyn and the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Its approach bore a sharp resemblance to the articles the Times published in the 1950s and 1960s. In a 2015 article, “Race and Class Collide in a Plan for Two Brooklyn Schools,” the reporter acknowledged that “New York by some measures has one of the most segregated school systems in the country.” Nonetheless, as it had done fifty years earlier, the newspaper’s coverage naturalized the perspectives of upper-middle-class parents opposed to rezoning, who asserted their rights as homeowners and taxpayers and claimed they weren’t racists. It quoted UCLA professor Gary Orfield stating that residents who opposed the rezoning “aren’t racists. . . . They just don’t want to be in a ghetto.”67 Despite mentioning school segregation, the article placed the issue outside of a long history of inequality in the city and sixty years of white efforts to prevent desegregation and rezoning in the city. Similarly, it ignored equally long-standing organizing by Black and Latino parents and community groups in the city. This blinkered coverage was repeated in articles on zoning struggles in District 3 in Manhattan, where long-standing organization by immigrant and Black families through the Parent Leadership Project barely drew a mention in the Times.68 In a long story entitled “Harlem Schools Are Left to Fail as Those Not Far Away Thrive,” their organizing was never mentioned.69
As Boston marked the fortieth anniversary of Garrity’s decision, the Boston Globe took a similar approach, framing the story largely around “busing,” not around segregation. It ran a piece entitled “Still Deciding What Busing Gained and What It Cost,” forgoing a more honest title like “Still Deciding What Segregation Gained and What It Cost.”70 A lengthy feature reflecting on the fortieth anniversary of court-ordered desegregation, “History Rolled In on a Yellow School Bus,” began and ended the story in 1974. It was framed singularly around the experiences and perspectives of person after person (Black student, white student, Black mother, white mother, bus driver, cop) involved in busing between Roxbury and South Boston in September 1974.71 Another retrospective column, entitled “Did Busing Slow Boston’s Desegregation?,” examined lasting racism in Boston but talked about racism largely in terms of personal relationships and maintained the myth that busing hadn’t existed in the city for years prior to 1974, with no objection from white parents.72 Readers would have gotten a much different sense of the city’s history if the Globe had detailed what segregation looked like in the decades before Garrity’s decision (meager, overcrowded classrooms; racist textbooks; language exclusion; few teachers of color) and how the city used busing before 1974 to maintain segregated schools. Had the newspaper included a section on the various movements and tactics Black and Latino community leaders and parents employed to challenge Boston’s segregated and unequal schools, or examined the massive and unrelenting opposition they encountered that ultimately led to the federal lawsuit in 1972, its anniversary coverage would have gone a lot further to grapple with the city’s history. Instead, it focused on the “busing crisis,” and the upheaval that ensued in the mid-1970s with court-ordered desegregation was treated as perhaps unnecessary, while the enduring educational inequity in the metro area was unfortunate but largely unchangeable.73
The few attempts by Northern outlets to go back and analyze their previous coverage have still tended to avoid the question of the Northern civil rights movement. In a lengthy and substantive fiftieth-anniversary piece reflecting on Los Angeles Times coverage of the Watts uprising, Doug Smith raised significant questions about the paper’s handling of the events: “My first reaction was, ‘How could this coverage have won a Pulitzer Prize?’”74 Smith criticized how “a flurry of one-source stories failed to challenge Parker and Yorty’s now obvious efforts to deflect responsibility for the continuing violence” but didn’t investigate the coverage before 1965, when the paper had honed that style over a period of years. He claimed, with a similar myopia, that fifty years later, “it’s unthinkable that reporters or editors would show such unskeptical deference to public officials.” Smith praised how, two months later, the Los Angeles Times pledged an “open and frank communication with the people of Watts, not just its leaders but the people themselves, including the rioters . . . to explore the kind of thinking, the kind of passions, the kind of despair and apathy, that led to an explosion of hatred that rocked a great city and shocked the entire world,” and how the paper began to explore “the resentment over lack of jobs, loan redlining, bungled anti-poverty programs and educational failures that fueled the rage.”
But Smith did not critically examine the pathologizing tone often employed in these stories, and he included no analysis of how the Times had covered a growing protest movement in Los Angeles in the decade before the uprising that it promptly forgot when the upheaval happened. While Smith claimed “the riots made The Times a better newspaper—and . . . this journalistic evolution was good for Los Angeles, as well,” he still replicated one of the most glaring omissions of its coverage: the absence of the fact of long-standing Black organizing and the ways that city had ignored and disparaged nonviolent Black protests for years prior to the uprising, as well as after.
A similar problem exists today. While uprisings in Cleveland, Baltimore, and Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 and 2015 prompted much reporting on the nature of injustice in law enforcement, municipal policy, and court practices, few stories focused on the groups in these cities that had highlighted such problems for years. Such silences are comfortable. It is easier to castigate protesters as “thugs” unwilling to work through the proper processes than for media outlets to hold accountable neighbors and public officials who didn’t listen when they had. It is easier to cast the people who rose up as the problem, rather than focus on the readers who stayed silent for years amidst police injustice after injustice.
The myth of the media as the good guys lets the role news outlets played as maintainers of injustice off the hook. It assumes that if you have a righteous struggle, news outlets will cover it, when they often didn’t. Or that when people work through the “proper channels,” the media would take note, which they often didn’t. Many times, these news organizations treated nonviolent protests in their own backyards as silly, unreasonable, or even violent. Other times they ignored them. While they came to see Southern surprise at Black protest as contrived, they largely did not question white surprise at Black grievances in their own cities. The humility and bravery many journalists exhibited in covering the Southern struggle was fundamentally not replicated in the ways their news outlets covered racial issues in their cities. Largely, they proved unwilling to shine a significant light on the racial inequities embedded in their city’s schools, policing, or municipal structures—or to challenge the “but I’m not a racist” claims of many middle- and upper-class Northerners who labored mightily to preserve segregated and unequal structures in their hometowns.
The media’s willingness to name injustice when they saw it in the South—and the corresponding realization that simply covering both sides risked upholding inequality—proved easier there. At home, this would have required turning the light on the racial politics of their own communities and challenging the “fantasy of self-deception and comfortable vanity,” as King put it in 1967, that most white Americans who “consider themselves sincerely committed to justice” lived within.75 Unfortunately, it was easier for these papers of record to maintain the fantasy.