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Introduction
During the coming year, the Maynard Institute will post selected video clips from The Robert C. Maynard Oral History Collection. Culled from interviews with some of the nation's most prominent journalists, the collection serves as a reminder of the important contributions made by journalists of color at a time when newsroom diversity is under siege.The collection is part of the Maynard Institute History Project, an on-going effort to document and preserve the stories of those courageous African American journalists who broke into general circulation media during the turbulent 1960s and 1970s.
Social Upheaval
The 1960s: Civil rights demonstrators challenged Jim Crow and de facto segregation. Cities burned, bodies buckled under whirling batons and high-pressured hoses. But the spirit of determination rose along with the promise of change, real change. Between 1963 and 1968, perhaps the most tumultuous span of years in the 20th century within the borders of the United States, Americans watched as their society – in both the north and south – transformed socially and politically.
History made itself with the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the September bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the Selma-Montgomery March, the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the protests against police brutality in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Los Angeles Watts riots that same year, the assassination of Malcolm X, the murder of civil rights workers in the south, Stokely Carmichael's call for black power, the image of gun-toting Black Panthers storming the California Legislature, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, and street battles between police and protestors outside the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.
The Kerner Commission
When the streets erupted with rebellion and rage, mainstream news organizations awoke to the realization they needed to integrate their newsrooms, at least until calm returned. Black journalists who had not been able to break through to the mainstream suddenly became essential news gatherers for print, television and radio news operations, going where few white journalists dared or were permitted to enter.
The series of riots that rocked urban centers around the country led to the appointment of the Kerner Commission, President Lyndon Johnson's panel charged with examining the root causes of racial unrest. In 1968, the commission found several reasons for the racial divide, but charged the news media with unbalanced portrayals of blacks that disenfranchised them even more. Some media outlets responded by hiring more black journalists.
Getting It Right
It was a unique time in newsrooms across the country, when many black reporters began to trust their unique perspective of news events. They believed their responsibility to share this perspective was part of the civil rights cause – to make sure that white America got it right.
The Robert C. Maynard Oral History Collection and the Maynard Institute Web site is made possible through major funding from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.