On the Contribution of the Press to the Civil Rights Movement

I have often said that without the media the Civil Rights Movement would have been a bird without wings. I am not certain where we would be today as a nation, if the American public had not been made to acknowledge the struggles we faced in the American South. The non-violent protests of the sixties used peaceful means to demonstrate the senseless injustice of de facto and de jure segregation, the inhumanity and indignity of the Jim Crow South, and the extraordinary persecution American citizens suffered trying to exercise their constitutional rights. Without the media's willingness to stand in harm's way and starkly portray events of the Movement as they saw them unfold,
Americans may never have understood or even believed the horrors that African Americans faced in the Deep South.