LITTLE ROCK, Ark., (Sept. 23) Reporters who covered the Little Rock crisis of 1957 have stressed the importance of free media in alerting citizens to the seriousness of the situation and in galvanizing the then infant Civil Rights Movement.
They spoke at a symposium on media coverage of the events of 1957. The meeting was sponsored by the Society of Professional Journalists and the Arkansas Press Association.
The state's two major newspapers the Gazette and the Democrat (now combined into one) gave full coverage to the events without interference from the state or federal governments, the reporters said. There were, however, acts of intimidation by some citizens and a boycott by a number of individuals and businesses. The Arkansas State Press, a statewide black newspaper, also covered the crisis.
The reporters emphasized that their responsibility was not to take sides in the conflict, but to report fully what was happening. "My instruction was to cover everything," said Bill Shelton, city editor of the Gazette in 1957.
Shelton conceded that press coverage of the mobs surrounding the nine black students trying to enter the school generated sympathy for the cause of integration in Little Rock and around the country.
Asked about the significance of the coverage, Keith Fuller, then Little Rock bureau chief for the Associated Press, said, "We knew that these events had global significance partly because of the number of national and international correspondents who were here. But we didn't think too much about it. We just covered everything we could. At times, we were overwhelmed."
"It was the lead story in many newspapers around the world and the U.S. was receiving a propaganda lambasting from the Soviet Union," because it showed flaws in democracy, said Bob Douglas, a Gazette editor in 1957. But he stressed that did not stop, and should not have stopped, the media from covering the story.
In addition to the print coverage of the crisis, both local and national, the major television networks sent their top correspondents to the city. They filed stories seen around the nation and the world. All the participants in the symposium stressed that this was the first big civil rights story covered by television and its impact was enormous.
The network pictures of the mob surrounding the nine black students were said to have strongly influenced President Eisenhower's decision to send federal troops to Little Rock to ensure their admission to Central High..
"All the top network correspondents were here, including Chat Huntley and John Chancellor for NBC," said Jerry Dhonau, a reporter then for the Gazette. "It wasn't live continuous coverage for technical reasons, as it would be today, but the story received prominent coverage on all the major newscasts."
Gene Harrington, then city editor of the Democrat, stressed the importance of the news media's role in combating false information and rumor. Then Governor Orval Faubus "used reports of carloads of armed men heading to Little Rock from eastern Arkansas to stop integration in order to justify his decision to deploy the state national guard around Central High to prevent the nine, black students from entering the school." But the reports were largely false, he said.
The news media "did not do a good enough job in reporting that," said Roy Reed, a former local and New York Times reporter, whose biography of Faubus has just been released. "We simply didn't know this at the time and should have done a better job in finding out," he remarked.
Although much of what the media reported showed "the uglier side of Arkansas. It was not a proud moment," Reed noted, the positive result was that it weakened opposition to integration here and around the country. "It was the beginning of the end of massive resistance," he said.
The change in the hearts and minds of the people happened "amazingly quickly," after the challenge to segregation in 1957, Reed said. "Polls in 1956, prior to the crisis, showed that 85 percent of the people of Arkansas supported segregation. But a decade and a half later, about the same percentage supported integration," he said.
In addition to the reporters who appeared at the symposium, photojournalists and political cartoonists also spoke of the importance of still visuals in covering the crisis. Will Counts, then a photographer for the Democrat, showed some of the memorable photographs and cartoons that appeared in both the local and national press.
Although all the journalists stressed the straight reporting of the story rather editorializing about the justice of the integration cause, there is no doubt the tone of much of the coverage, local as well as national, was in sympathy with the nine, black students trying to enter the school.
That is as much true today, as it was then. On one of the many national broadcasts remembering the crisis ABCs Nightline anchor Ted Koppel paid tribute to the Little Rock Nine. "To the degree that there is racial harmony in America today," he said, "a great many of us, black and white, are standing on the shoulders of those nine, youngsters. All of their lives were changed by the events in Little Rock that long ago September."
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