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.
The Diamondback: When did the mainstream begin reporting on civil rights and race violence?
Roberts: The first real instance was Emmett Till. He was a black 14-year-old who was taken from his uncle's home and his body was found in a river. Another was Authorine Lucy, who stood at the door of the University of Alabama. And then there were the Montgomery bus boycotts, and Little Rock.
The Diamondback: The New York Times hired you in 1965 to cover the south and the civil rights movement. Why did that interest you?
Roberts: Because I thought it was the biggest story of my life, and I still think that.
I grew up in the south in a segregated society, and I knew how deeply passions ran on both sides of the issue, and thought racial change had to come. The question was whether it would be sweeping change or token change. And for a long time, the change looked like it would be token.
The Diamondback: Jim Purks, an Associated Press reporter who covered the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham that killed four black girls, is on the cover of your book. He faced many dangers on the beat. Were there any times when you feared for your life?
Roberts: One of them was in Bogalusa, La., in 1965. Demonstrations were being carried out there, and police would stand by the peaceful white demonstrators.
On one weekend those demonstrations weren't scheduled, and several of us reporters stuck around. We were in a scruffy motel, and a Klansman showed up handing out business cards, introducing himself as the Grand Klaxon, which is Klan-speak for public relations person.
He said he was tired of "the n-----s getting all of the publicity," and invited us to a Klan rally across the river. When we got there, there was a huge mob of about 2,000 or 3,000 screaming men, women, children, and the Klan was the only semblance of order in the place.
The Klan announced from the podium they had invited the press out to tell the white people side of the story. Then they started telling racist jokes, and I had heard them already, so I stopped writing. People started kicking me in the back, saying, "Look at that son of a bitch. He ain't taking it all down."
With that, the crowd sort of started to swarm us, so we decided to see if we could walk to our cars, and we couldn't.
We came back and started looking for the guy who invited us. Jack Nelson, a friend of mine from the Los Angeles Times, said, "Remember you invited us here because you wanted some good publicity?" And the guy said, "Yes." Jack said, "Well, you're about to get some bad. They're about to beat the hell out of us, and if they do you ain't gonna want to read the Los Angeles Times tomorrow."
So the Klansman gets on the phone and said "Send us a couple of people to get these reporters out of here!" And we said two weren't enough. Then he said, "Change that. Send flying wedge." And about 10 minutes later, 10 Klansmen came in a V formation and got us out of there.
The Diamondback: Are there any beats you would suggest the mainstream press is missing today?
Roberts: One of those is the medical crisis in the country. People write about it, but I don't see the kind of sustained week-in, week-out coverage that the situation calls for.
You read now and then about the crisis in the emergency rooms and how many Americans are uninsured, but it isn't really set up as a beat, so you have different reporters switching in and out of a story and you don't get the expertise and the continuing coverage that would have if more reporters covered it as a beat.
A lot of things in Washington are not covered as beats, and they should be. The Interior Department isn't really covered the last time I checked by anyone except for the AP and a couple of Western newspapers. You have national forests, our park land, our sea shores - it's all governed by the Interior Department. The FDA, the Food and Drug Administration, is another one not well reported by newspapers. The whole question about how rapidly and safely drugs get out to the public is another thing that is going uncovered.
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