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Author discusses 'The Race Beat' By Matt Shaw | Daily Times Staff Writer GOLDSBORO -- For decades, blacks were treated as second-class citizens, or worse, across the South, and most of the nation was ignorant or apathetic. But, in the 1950s, images of black children and adults being confronted, spat upon, even beaten by white mobs began being beamed into people's living rooms. "Suddenly, the whole American position on race changed," said Gene Roberts, a Pikeville native and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. The media coverage, particularly on television, of the fledgling Civil Rights era did not mean instant changes in how blacks were treated in the U.S., but it did stir anger and outrage among whites and blacks alike, Roberts said in Goldsboro Friday. Roberts, author of "The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation," spoke at Wayne Community College as the concluding program for this year's Wayne County Reads campaign. Roberts shared stories from his own reporting days. His speech came on the 40th anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and he recalled covering a speech by King at a North Carolina church not long after black college students had conducted a sit-in at a Greensboro luncheon counter. The church was packed with middle-aged blacks, most of whom were employed in menial jobs, and they dug change and dollars out of their pockets to pay for King's ministry, he said. "I left that church convinced for the first time in my life that we would see massive change," Roberts said. "The sentiment among blacks ran far deeper than the white community ever knew." But most of the media didn't report on racial issues until 1955, he said. That's when Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Chicago resident, was beaten and shot to death in Mississippi after he allegedly whistled at a white woman. Till's mother insisted on holding an open-casket funeral in Chicago and "tens of thousands" of people attended a viewing to see the body, Roberts said. That was too big a story for the national media to ignore. Reporters from the nation's largest newspapers covered the trial and acquittals of the men who then admitted to Till's murder to a reporter from Look magazine, Roberts said. Following that, the media closely followed the Little Rock, Ark., school integration in 1957. As mobs confronted black students, TV camera crews filmed, and that footage was on the news that night, Roberts said. "In two years, the nation went from getting almost no news on race to a massive amount of coverage," Roberts said. Roberts began his journalism career at the Goldsboro News-Argus and then reported for newspapers in Norfolk, Va., Raleigh and Detroit. He was editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer during a period when it won 17 Pulitzer Prizes and was then managing editor of the New York Times. mshaw@wilsontimes.com | 265-7878
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