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Roundup: Media's Take

A Newspaper That Missed the Civil Rights Movement

From the Lexington Herald-Leader (July 4 2004):

CLARIFICATION: It has come to the editor's attention that the Herald-Leader neglected to cover the civil rights movement. We regret the omission.

John Carroll, the editor of the Los Angeles Times, who edited this newspaper from 1979 to 1991, recently proposed a correction like the one above during a speech on journalism ethics. Today, as the nation celebrates its liberties and marks the 40th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, this report looks back at the hidden history of Lexington's civil rights struggle -- and how this newspaper covered it. Or failed to.

Nearly every detail is fuzzy in her memory now of that summer day in 1960 when Audrey Grevious took part in one of Lexington's first lunch counter sit-ins. But she vividly recalls one thing: the cold, wet shock she felt as a waitress poured a glass of Coca-Cola all over her, while the whites standing behind her hissed,"Nigger!" Kay Grimes Jones remembers a night in 1960 at the Ben Ali Theater, where she and others stood in line, fruitlessly waiting to buy tickets for the"whites only" section. A crowd of whites jeered and spat on them."That's when I decided to help out in other ways," said Jones, who'd studied non-violence as a member of the Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE."I wasn't sure I wouldn't spit back." The Rev. Thomas Peoples remembers the searing summer of 1968, after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Peoples, head of the local NAACP, joined city officials in a police car, driving around Georgetown and Deweese streets, begging people to stay calm as cities across the country exploded in rage.

These memories have made it into master's theses and oral histories as stories of Lexington's rich civil-rights struggle. But until now, they'd never made it into the local newspaper.- The people in charge of recording the"first rough draft of history," as journalism is sometimes called, ignored sit-ins and marches, or relegated them to small notices in the back pages. The omissions by the city's two newspapers, the Lexington Herald and the Lexington Leader, weren't simply mistakes or oversights, according to local civil rights leaders and former employees of the newspapers. The papers' management actively sought to play down the movement....