This gripping account of how America and the world found out about the Civil Rights movement is written by two veteran journalists of the "race beat" from 1954 to 1965. Building on an exhaustive base of interviews, oral histories, and news stories, the authors provide a fresh account of the events.

Publisher Comments

An unprecedented examination of how news stories, editorials and photographs in the American press--and the journalists responsible for them--profoundly changed the nation's thinking about civil rights in the South during the 1950s and '60s.
Roberts and Klibanoff draw on private correspondence, notes from secret meetings, unpublished articles, and interviews to show how a dedicated cadre of newsmen--black and white--revealed to a nation its most shameful shortcomings that compelled its citizens to act. Meticulously researched and vividly rendered, "The Race Beat" is an extraordinary account of one of the most calamitous periods in our nation's history, as told by those who covered it.