Black Lives Matter and the Press

This is not to say I was ignorant of racism, or isolated from it. Around 1962 my parents took a family trip to Washington, DC. The route took us over the Chesapeake Bay, then a two-and-half-hour ferry ride. The water fountains were segregated, labeled white and colored. According to my mother, either my sister or I asked if we could drink the “colored” water saying: “We want to know what color it is!” I have never forgotten my mother’s reply: “When you are in a foreign country, you do what the locals do.”

The South, I decided, was a foreign country with its own rules and customs.

A more complicated answer rests in my experience in special education. After my brother became severely disabled as a teenager, my parents fought the local school system and the state to obtain educational services for him. This was before national laws were adopted guaranteeing the rights of children and adults with disabilities. The local school superintendent told my parents that because my brother was 16, he should drop out, and refused to meet with them again.

Dissatisfied with this answer, my parents continued their quest. A friend gave them a copy of the state constitution guaranteeing every child a “free and appropriate education.” That was all it took. My father walked the four blocks down the street from our house to the home of the superintendent, sat on his front porch steps and waited for the superintendent to come home from work. The superintendent’s reply? “Where did you get a copy of the state constitution! You have no right to have it. My decision stands.”

My parents subsequently approached the state Board of Education, followed by other meetings with state education officials. The result was an education plan that met my brother’s needs until he turned 21.

When my own son was diagnosed with severe autism, I followed my parents’ example serving, and continuing to serve, as his advocate. The law was on my side. When he was still in school, I filed several due process motions against my local school district (all settled in my son’s favor rather quickly). I continue to advocate for my child’s rights under state and federal law as he still receives government-funded services as an adult.

That is not the whole story but part of my path. I am sharing these stories for several reasons. The work of civil rights activists opened the doors for the inclusion of people with disabilities in society.

Simply put, same church, different pews.

But cover the story I did. The demonstrators were arrested on weapons charges before the rally began, whereas a peace rally across town was allowed to continue.

In 1981 I moved to Memphis, where I recoiled at Confederate flags brandished on businesses, homes and vehicles. For the next twenty-odd years I was forced to deal with rampant racism in the Deep South.

By 2002 I was a faculty member at the University of Mississippi. That year, the university installed a statue commemorating James Meredith’s enrollment in 1962. Meredith was the first African American admitted to the university, as well as the first admitted to any public school in Mississippi. President John F. Kennedy was forced to federalize the National Guard and call out the U.S. Army to quell the subsequent campus riot. The statue installed in 2002 arrived with controversies of its own. Meredith was opposed to the statue’s very existence and at its unveiling was not invited to speak. For me the statue controversy was the beginning of a lifelong preoccupation with the 1962 riot at Ole Miss.

I soon learned about the murder of Paul Guihard, an Agence France-Presse reporter slain on campus during the riot. I was incensed that his story merited little more than a paragraph in the books I read. Researching his story and the stories of the more than three hundred reporters who covered the protests of Meredith’s enrollment brought me to where I am today. First, my 2011 academic article about Guihard’s murder was published in Journalism History. Similar publications about Claude Sitton, the legendary New York Times civil rights reporter, and Sidna Brower Mitchell, the editor of the student newspaper in 1962, followed. In my book We Believed We Were Immortal (Yoknapatawpha Press, 2017), I wrote about the experiences of 12 of 300-plus reporters at the 1962 riot. In 2022, as a University of Mississippi committee member for the sixtieth anniversary of James Meredith’s enrollment, I edited a collection of essays entitled James Meredith: Breaking the Barrier (Yoknapatawpha Press, 2022). The book opens and closes with essays written by Meredith.

What does this have in common with the Black Lives Matter movement and media coverage of crimes committed against African Americans?

Everything.

Just as the YWCA recognized the inclusion of diverse voices in its programming beginning in 1915, just as Jim Crow Laws were deemed unconstitutional in 1964, and just as my parents called on the state of New Jersey to honor its own constitutional provision for educating all students, so do today’s Black Lives Matter activists demand justice and equal treatment by the media.

Steven Hallock puts the events leading to what became known as the Black Lives Matter movement into perspective. He views the 2014 murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, as the beginning of the movement, whereas other scholars point to the 2012 fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin in Florida as the origin. It was Brown’s murder that catapulted the issues of questionable police shootings into a national narrative. The Washington Post began counting incidents in 2015, recording more than 5,000 by 2022.

Hallock examines the “how, when and why” of national Black Lives Matter coverage. Some cases are dealt with in greater depth than others, but the same narrative runs through all: unarmed Black people shot by police with varying degrees of newspaper coverage.

In this book, Hallock adheres to classic agenda-setting and framing theory. He pinpoints where the media coverage succeeded and where it failed, noting that the criminal justice system, and thus subsequent reporting, initially followed that same pattern.

Like most movements, the Black Lives Matter movement had a rocky start. A movement is not a movement at the beginning. Events are islands within a larger sea of news coverage.

Until someone like Hallock begins to quilt incidents and issues together into a historical garment with a proper unifying message, a movement can wither and fade. As the media assimilated historical background, the issues of Black Lives Matter became more clearly delineated. As Hallock notes, the patterns became clearer as the voices of the activists gained strength. Stories moved from victim-blaming to questioning official accounts. On some days, Black Lives Matter received minimal coverage. On others, as Hallock notes, the media responded with deeper stories.

Historically, the cares and concerns of minority citizens were overlooked in the news narrative. Editors, and especially Southern editors, struggled to find Black sources to respond to climactic news stories such as the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education school desegregation decision. Black reporters were barred from covering Meredith’s 1962 enrollment at the University of Mississippi. The 1964 Freedom Summer volunteers entering Mississippi were greeted by a one-word headline: “Insurrection.”

As the Black Lives Matter movement gained traction, I found myself debating the issue over breakfast at a Southern hotel. The dining room was busy that morning. I was sharing a bar-height table that seated eight people. A middle-aged white man seated next to me noticed that I was reading a front-page newspaper story about Black Lives Matter. “What right do they have to block bridges?” he demanded. “Don’t white lives matter?” he added.

This is where media coverage comes in.

News coverage allows the general public to make informed decisions about issues. The media are responsible for providing social, economic and political historical context.

Hallock shows how the BLM movement developed, changed and matured through newspaper coverage, how an emphasis on BLM coverage developed over time, and yet some Southern newspapers, he notes, had a “lesser agenda” than their peers in other regions, a position reiterated by Charles Wilson in The American South (Oxford University Press, 2021): “In the twentieth century, the South’s pronounced traditionalism in customs and value was in tension with the forces of modernization that only enforced change.”

Tension is another word for resistance.

Where does this leave journalists, historians and scholars? The Black Lives Matters Moment continues to be fueled by police shootings of unarmed Black people. It has been diffused amid social media and COVID pandemic stories. Only further research can determine if the movement has peaked, if police reforms designed to reduce police brutality are successful and if news coverage adapts a model of reportage based on the Hutchins Commission call for honest reporting of the day’s news.

Steve Hallock has provided critical information to start the conversation among journalists and the public. His insights should be heeded.

–Kathleen W. Wickham, 2023

Kathleen W. Wickham, Ed.D., is a professor of journalism at the University of Mississippi and the author of James Meredith: Breaking the Barrier (2022) and We Believed We Were Immortal: Twelve Reporters Who Covered the 1962 Integration Crisis at Ole Miss (2017). Before entering academia, she was a reporter in New Jersey for ten years at the Newark Star-Ledger and the Press of Atlantic City.