The Race Beat

An unprecedented examination of how news stories, editorials and photographs in the American pressand the journalists responsible for themprofoundly changed the nation's thinking about civil rights in the South during the 1950s and '60s. Roberts and Klibanoff draw on private correspondence, notes from secret meetings, unpublished articles, and interviews to show how a dedicated cadre of newsmenblack and whiterevealed to a nation its most shameful shortcomings that compelled its citizens to act. Meticulously researched and vividly rendered,The Race Beatis an extraordinary account of one of the most calamitous periods in our nation's history, as told by those who covered it. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Gene Roberts is a journalism professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. He was a reporter with the Goldsboro News-Argus and The Virginian-Pilot, and a reporter and editor with The News & Observer and the Detroit Free Press before joining The New York Times in 1965, where until 1972 he served as chief southern and civil rights correspondent, chief war correspondent in South Vietnam, and national editor. During his eighteen years as executive editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, his staff won seventeen Pulitzer Prizes. He later became the managing editor of the The New York Times.

A native of Alabama, Hank Klibanoff is the managing editor for news at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He is a former metro reporter, national correspondent based in Chicago, business editor, and deputy managing editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, where he worked for twenty years. He was also a reporter for three years at The Boston Globe and six years in Mississippi for The Daily Herald, the South Mississippi Sun (now the Sun Herald) and the Delta Democrat-Times.


From the Hardcover edition.