Deep South Dispatch

Memoir of a Civil Rights Journalist

John N. Herbers, Anne Farris Rosen

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781496828194
• eBook ISBN: 9781496816757
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Biographies de journalistes

Former New York Times correspondent John N. Herbers (1923-2017), who covered the civil rights movement for more than a decade, has produced Deep South Dispatch: Memoir of a Civil Rights Journalist, a compelling story of national and historical significance. Born in the South during a time of entrenched racial segregation, Herbers witnessed a succession of landmark civil rights uprisings that rocked the country, the world, and his own conscience. Herbers's retrospective is a timely and critical illumination on America's current racial dilemmas and ongoing quest for justice.Herbers's reporting began in 1951, when he covered the brutal execution of Willie McGee, a black man convicted for the rape of a white housewife, and the 1955 trial for the murder of Emmett Till, a black teenager killed for allegedly whistling at a white woman. With immediacy and first-hand detail, Herbers describes the assassination of John F. Kennedy; the death of four black girls in the Birmingham, Alabama, church bombing; extensive travels and interviews with Martin Luther King Jr.; Ku Klux Klan cross-burning rallies and private meetings; the Freedom Summer murders in Philadelphia, Mississippi; and marches and riots in St. Augustine, Florida, and Selma, Alabama, that led to passage of national civil rights legislation.This account is also a personal journey as Herbers witnessed the movement with the conflicted eyes of a man dedicated to his southern heritage but who also rejected the prescribed laws and mores of a prejudiced society. His story provides a complex understanding of how the southern status quo, in which the white establishment benefited at the expense of African Americans, was transformed by a national outcry for justice.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Chapter 1. An Old Secret Revealed
• Chapter 2. A Small-Town Cocoon
• Chapter 3. Spilled Seed
• Chapter 4. Lessons of War
• Chapter 5. The Mystery of Mississippi
• Chapter 6. Death Bolted Swiftly through His Body
• Chapter 7. A Rare Work Environment
• Chapter 8. “Sumner: A Good Place to Raise a Boy”
• Chapter 9. “Thar He”
• Chapter 10. Living with Political Insanity
• Chapter 11. Overcoming Pressures
• Chapter 12. Out of Mississippi
• Chapter 13. Bombingham
• Chapter 14. A Brewing Storm
• Chapter 15. Dallas: Dark Night of the Soul
• Chapter 16. End of a Long Year
• Chapter 17. Justice Delayed: The First Beckwith Trial
• Chapter 18. A Long, Hot Summer of Discontent
• Chapter 19. Bloodshed at the Beach
• Chapter 20. Purifying Prelude
• Chapter 21. A Hooded Society of Bigots
• Chapter 22. Paradox in the South
• Chapter 23. “I’ve Got Bitterness in My Heart”
• Chapter 24. “I’m Innocent”
• Chapter 25. The War in Men’s Souls
• Chapter 26. Hope in Selma
• Chapter 27. Pulling at the Fiber
• Chapter 28. A Wild and Woolly Night
• Chapter 29. Bloody Sunday
• Chapter 30. A Second Attempt
• Chapter 31. What Killed James Reeb?
• Chapter 32. A Climactic End
• Chapter 33. Still Standing
• Acknowledgments
• Index