'I thought it was the biggest story of my life'
Jorge Valencia
Issue date: 5/1/07 Section: News
During the 18 years Gene Roberts was executive editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, he transformed the paper from near rags to winning the Pulitzer Prize 17 times.
It was a feat, especially for an organization that in the 1950s and 1960s was considered one of the worst big-city newspapers in the country.
Roberts, a journalism professor at the university, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize last month for his own work, The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation. Penned with Hank Klibanoff, managing editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the book delves into how journalists reported the civil rights movement in the 1960s and 1970s, which Roberts covered as a reporter for The New York Times.
When he joined the faculty in 1991, he was regarded as one of the most endeared and prolific of American newspaper editors of his lifetime.
Roberts, a North Carolina native, still speaks with a rich southern drawl and recently began commuting once per week from his Manhattan home to teach for two days.
He talks here in a question and answer session with The Diamondback about how the American consciousness was too late to learn the lessons of the civil rights movement, danger on the job, and what important issues news organizations may be missing today.
The Diamondback: In your book, you argue mainstream, white press took too long to cover the civil rights stories in the 1950s. What was the importance in that coverage to create social change?
Gene Roberts: Some covered the civil rights movement, and some covered it in a distorted fashion.
In 1955, the two papers in Jackson, Miss., were so segregationist that when a black minister tried to organize a voter registration drive and was assassinated in a drive-by shooting, they ran a story without even doing the most rudimentary reporting. They accepted the sheriff's story that the shotgun pellets in his face were tooth fillings.
Only the black press covered it well, but most white America did not know there was a black press. The local press distorted it.
It was a feat, especially for an organization that in the 1950s and 1960s was considered one of the worst big-city newspapers in the country.
Roberts, a journalism professor at the university, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize last month for his own work, The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation. Penned with Hank Klibanoff, managing editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the book delves into how journalists reported the civil rights movement in the 1960s and 1970s, which Roberts covered as a reporter for The New York Times.
When he joined the faculty in 1991, he was regarded as one of the most endeared and prolific of American newspaper editors of his lifetime.
Roberts, a North Carolina native, still speaks with a rich southern drawl and recently began commuting once per week from his Manhattan home to teach for two days.
He talks here in a question and answer session with The Diamondback about how the American consciousness was too late to learn the lessons of the civil rights movement, danger on the job, and what important issues news organizations may be missing today.
The Diamondback: In your book, you argue mainstream, white press took too long to cover the civil rights stories in the 1950s. What was the importance in that coverage to create social change?
Gene Roberts: Some covered the civil rights movement, and some covered it in a distorted fashion.
In 1955, the two papers in Jackson, Miss., were so segregationist that when a black minister tried to organize a voter registration drive and was assassinated in a drive-by shooting, they ran a story without even doing the most rudimentary reporting. They accepted the sheriff's story that the shotgun pellets in his face were tooth fillings.
Only the black press covered it well, but most white America did not know there was a black press. The local press distorted it.
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