Essay Series: From School Desegregation to School Integration

Forged and Sustained by Four Days of Television

The Civil Rights Act of 1964, sweeping legislation since the Reconstruction Era after the Civil War, prohibited discrimination in public places and declared employment discrimination illegal. It also aimed to integrate schools, giving rise to education news. One particular publication was the Race Relations Reporter, produced from 1970 to 1974 by the Race Relations Information Center (RRIC) in Nashville, Tennessee.

The RRIC emerged in 1970 from the former Southern Education Reporting Service (SERS), a nonprofit organization established in fall 1954 with a $75,000 Ford Foundation grant as a news service to examine the shift from segregated to non-segregated schools.[1] The SERS produced two different publications throughout its tenure. First was the Southern School News, a monthly state-by-state summary of developments regarding desegregation of education in the southern and border states following the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision. The second was the Southern Education Report, a bi-monthly magazine that published comprehensive information on pioneering efforts and developments that sought to expand educational opportunities for socially- and economically-challenged communities in the Southern states.

In 1970, the RRIC began publishing the Race Relations Reporter, a semimonthly magazine that ran from February 1970 until November 1974. Unlike its predecessor, the RRIC broadly focused on civil rights that extended to issues and topics beyond education. The Reporter contributed to education news, but the content evolved from coverage of school desegregation—the nexus of the Southern Education Report—to the exploration of topics that promoted school integration. This essay argues that the Race Relations Reporter practiced literary journalism techniques to frame integration in the schools through news angles not pursued in the mainstream news media.

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Despite the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passage, schools experienced unresolved racial problems throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Although textbook and curriculum changes were approved and diverse faculty were hired, district administrative offices were staffed mostly by white people. Such changes were criticized as inadequate and inequitable for the non-white minorities. This conflict is reflected in the two overarching topics covered in the Reporter—busing and white flight. While these topics were covered in the mainstream press, which relied on conventional journalistic styles of writing such as the inverted pyramid and Wall Street Journal formula,[2] the Reporter used literary journalism approaches to frame the issues differently. Literary journalism combines factual reporting with narrative techniques. Sometimes called narrative journalism, literary journalism allows the writer to navigate complex, difficult subjects through interpretation, a personal point of view, and an experimentation with structure and chronology as a way to make it understandable. Another essential element of literary journalism is its focus. Rather than emphasizing institutions, literary journalism explores the lives of people affected by institutions.[3] Literary journalism has surfaced many times in media history. Prominent in the late 1800s, the genre enjoyed success in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s as a way for journalists to report societal ills.

From January 1972 to September 1974, the Race Relations Reporter filled 87.75 pages with enterprising education news coverage that explored or analyzed issues and efforts dealing with school integration efforts. In the January 1972 issue, coverage among three news articles focused on integrated busing efforts in various school districts.[4] One story particularly concentrated on a forced busing plan’s impact on families in Chinatown in San Francisco. The story begins describing a city “where a pagoda roof arches easily over its Spanish adobe walls, where black bodies thump and bend to pounding bass guitars in a Chinatown nightclub, where Japanese-Americans, returning from internment camps in Colorado and Oklahoma, resettled side by side with migrant Southern blacks who surged into Japantown during the war.”[5] This sets up San Francisco as “the ultimate American monument” to the “tarnished and battered dream of an ethnic melting pot” worsened under an integrated busing plan that stipulated percentages of each racial and ethnic group for each school.[6]

Similar literary treatment was found in another story pertaining to integration efforts, this one spotlighting the Native American outlook. In preparing the story, titled “’We’ll Do It Our Own Way Awhile,’” Frye Gaillard—who previously wrote for the Southern Education Report—talked with government and Native American Indian leaders in Washington, D.C., and Colorado, attended several meetings of a new coalition of Indian-controlled schools, and visited reservation schools in New Mexico and Wyoming. While the report was filled with factual and accurate information to provide the necessary context, the story centered on the experiences of the Native Americans as a literary technique to frame the story. For years, this population “tried integration, and they have tried segregation, and both have failed” because they “were compelled to submit to white control and white educational values. And what many of them are saying now is, ‘No, thank you. We will do it our own way for a while.’”[7]

In addition to busing and other integration initiatives, white flight was a consistent topic among the education news stories published in the Reporter, especially in one of the two series that gave comprehensive attention to the history of the Brown case. Stories rich with anecdotal information and sources, plus vivid descriptions of communities not reported widely in the mainstream press, characterized these pieces. For the first series, published in May 1972—eighteen years after the landmark Brown case—the Reporter published a five-story package about education systems in five districts covered in the Brown lawsuit.[8] Problems of white flight were prominent in this coverage, and this issue would resurface in subsequent stories. For instance, in the immediate years after the Brown court case, full integration in Washington, D.C., went into effect but was quickly marred by white flight to suburbs, leaving the district 95 percent black.[9] In 1965, a lawsuit was filed against the D.C. school system, charging de facto segregation remained and that the same quality of education given to whites was not provided to the black, inner-city schoolers. The court ruled that the district unconstitutionally deprived the black schoolers. A series of comprehensive coverage came in May 1974 when the publication produced eight stories in one edition. These stories focused on the original plaintiffs, the statistics and what the data said, Northern integration in its early stages, the view from students, conversations with teachers, and reflections on where the courts and twenty years have left Americans.[10]

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After twenty years of collecting information on the problems of minorities, the Race Relations Information Center abruptly closed its doors in November 1974 because of a fund shortage. The closing was announced in the final issue of the Race Relations Reporter in December 1974. In an editorial in the issue, the center’s executive director, James Leeson, was critical of the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation of New York, which had funded the organization for the last two years of its existence when all other financial sources were lost. Foundation officials told The New York Times that the RRIC failed to move toward a fundraising capacity to sustain the center.[11]

In two decades, 1954 to 1974, education news coverage shifted from a concentration on desegregation to one of integration. The Race Relations Reporter initiated deeper conversations on education and race, specifically on various themes and topics of integration. To do this, the Reporter constructed narratives of integration efforts in schools and communities, reflecting literary journalistic practices. The traditional reporting approaches that the mainstream news media practiced led to the Reporter’s shaping coverage that might have been missed or not reported fully. In the twenty-first century, diversity, equity, and inclusion have been challenged by federal and state policymakers on their social media accounts, with those perspectives amplified by mainstream and alternative news media on their online sites. Perhaps the Race Relations Reporter could be a source of renewal for education news as a way to channel productive dialogue using the narratives of real people as the heart of the matter.

About the Author

Dr. Melony Shemberger is a professor of journalism and mass communication at Murray State University. Her research interests include journalism and media history, the scholarship of teaching and learning, community journalism, media literacy, sunshine laws, crisis communication, and other public relations topics.

Photo: President Lyndon Johnson shakes hands with Martin Luther King Jr. after presenting him with one of the pens used to sign the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The law banned discrimination in public places and in employment, and provided for the integration of schools and other public facilities. In a television address after signing the Civil Rights Act, Johnson said of segregation: “It cannot continue. Our Constitution, the foundation of our Republic, forbids it. Morality forbids it. And the law I will sign tonight forbids it.” (Library of Congress), U.S. Embassy The Hague on Flickr.

Notes

[1] “The Press. Unsegregated News,” Time magazine (June 14, 1954). Online: http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,935176,00.html.

[2] The inverted pyramid style of writing follows a pattern in which the reporter tells the most important information first within the first few grafs. This way, the reader has the basic information. With the Wall Street Journal formula style of writing, the reporter uses a soft news lede to hook the reader, with the main idea of the story appearing in the second or third grafs. Both styles of writing encourage a succinct writing flow.

[3] Jan Whitt, Women in American Journalism: A New History (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press), 2008.

[4] The three articles are William Steif, “A Panic in the Hall of Congress,” Race Relations Reporter 3, no. 1 (1972), 15-17; Min S. Yee, “Busing Comes to Chinatown,” Race Relations Reporter 3, no. 1 (1972), 18-21; and Frye Gaillard, “’We’ll Do It Our Own Way Awhile,’” Race Relations Reporter 3, no. 1 (1972), 21-27.

[5] Min S. Yee, “Busing Comes to Chinatown,” Race Relations Reporter 3, no. 1 (1972), 18.

[6] Yee.

[7] Frye Gaillard, “’We’ll Do It Our Own Way Awhile,’” Race Relations Reporter 3, no. 1 (1972), 27.

[8] This series included the following news articles: “18 Years Later: Reports on the Brown Cases,” Race Relations Reporter 3, no. 6 (1972), 8; John Egerton, “Unresolved Racial Problems in Topeka,” Race Relations Reporter 3, no. 6 (1972), 8-11; Judy Luce Mann, “D.C.: Getting Together After Strife,” Race Relations Reporter 3, no. 6 (1972), 11-15; Jack Bass, “Massive White Flight in Summerton,” Race Relations Reporter 3, no. 6 (1972), 15-17; Larry Markley, “Dual Schools in Prince Edward County,” Race Relations Reporter 3, no. 6 (1972), 17-19; and Jim Miller, “Delaware: Seeds of Violence Remain,” Race Relations Reporter 3, no. 6 (1972), 19-20.

[9] Judy Luce Mann, “D.C.: Getting Together After Strife,” Race Relations Reporter 3, no. 6 (1972), 12.

[10] This series included the following news stories: William Greider, “Winners and Losers,” Race Relations Reporter 5, no. 9 (1974), 19-22; Jim Leeson, “What the Statistics Say …,” Race Relations Reporter 5, no. 9 (1974), 21; William R. Grant, “Northern Integration,” Race Relations Reporter 5, no. 9 (1974), 23-25; Robert McClory, “Massive Resistance Northern Style,” Race Relations Reporter 5, no. 9 (1974), 26-27; Cynthia Jo Rich, “The Case of New York City,” Race Relations Reporter 5, no. 9 (1974), 27-28; Eleanor Clift, “As the Students See It,” Race Relations Reporter 5, no. 9 (1974), 29-30; John Egerton, “Mississippi Conversations,” Race Relations Reporter 5, no. 9 (1974), 31-33; and Reese Cleghorn, “Reflections on the Last Twenty Years,” Race Relations Reporter 5, no. 9 (1974), 34-36.

[11] “Race Data Center Closes Abruptly,” The New York Times (December 10, 1974), 25.