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Decent coverage of the movement was found in a handful of cities in the South, including Macon, Ga., Nashville, Louisville, Little Rock, Lexington and Greenville, Miss.,
Anniston, Ala., and Miami. A few black southern papers braved threats from advertisers and other white adversaries and supported the movement, weeklies in Memphis, Oklahoma City, Louisville and New Orleans among them. Joining the Daily World in opposition were weeklies in Albany, Ga., and Jackson, Miss., and numerous subsidiaries of the World in such cities as Chattanooga, Birmingham, Macon and Columbus, Ga.
On the other hand, national black weeklies were instrumental in keeping African-American communities fully informed and outraged about every detail of the movement, as they had done since their births. The Baltimore Afro-American relied principally on Moses Newsom and Jimmy Hicks (until he moved to the New York Amsterdam News); Jet and Ebony magazines
dispatched numerous reporters and photographers, including Simeon Booker, Alex Poinsett, Maurice Sorrell and Moneta Sleet. Trezzvant Anderson, of the Pittsburgh Courier, set up shop in the small, normally hot-sheet house Royal Motel, which was squeezed between our offices at the World and Big Bethel AME Church.
But, confirming John Lewis' opinion, the big guys, the national media in particular, carried the day during the early phases of the movement. The daily television dose of white cops and the white establishment coming down hard on mostly young blacks, assisted by mobs and sometimes Ku Klux Klansmen in full regalia, wielding billy clubs and unleashing snarling German shepherds, touched the hearts and minds in this country and around the world. The sight of children being knocked about by the powerful force of fire hoses in the hands of white firefighters prompted hordes of students of all races from across the nation to flock south to be a part of history.
There was a simple explanation for Scott’s and the World’s opposition to the movement. He was part of the old-line black leadership that included the Rev. M.L. King, Sr., which partnered with the white establishment that wanted to keep a lid on protests in Atlanta. The city was trying to impress major league sports organizations that it was ready for the big leagues; city fathers, black and white, agreed that they would do their best to prevent demonstrations, as long as possible, and if there were protests, they would not be the violent resistance seen in Birmingham, New Orleans, Mississippi, etc. Atlanta’s slogan was, “the city too busy to hate.” Eventually, the city experienced protests, but violence was kept to a minimum and staunch segregationist leader Lester Maddox, became governor (the state was predominantly white) but never mayor. And Atlanta got its major league teams.
Richard Valeriani, of NBC News, pointed out a bit of luck that accompanied the action, noting that the timing could not have been more perfect for the movement: network news, rich and competitive, was in its infancy and needed the big story and accompanying visuals of great pictures that the movement provided in abundance. Had there been another major competing story, say, Vietnam or anti-war protests, the civil rights movement might not have been covered the way it was, might not have had the impact it did, and might have turned out to be a completely different story, he said.
Even before the big guys from the North made their way south, some white journalists in Atlanta realized what was going on, that they were onto an historic venture. I was acquainted with many of them as we covered some of the same local events; much of their reporting was fair and accurate, a few even sympathetic to the movement, but almost all understood that they were covering the unraveling of a way of life. Some of them went on to more prominence at bigger organizations, John Palmer, Frank McGee, John Roberts, Doug Kiker, Fred Powledge, Walter Rugaber, Al Kuettner, John Pennington, John Herbers, Reg Murphy, John Chancellor and Bruce Galphin among them.
Some southern editors and columnists provided excellent coverage and opinion writing: Ralph McGill and Eugene Patterson, Atlanta Constitution; Pat Watters and Margaret Long, Atlanta Journal; John Siegenthaler, Nashville Tennessean; Bill Baggs, Miami News; Sylvan Meyer, Gainesville, Ga. Times; Buford Boone, Tuscaloosa News; Reg Murphy and Hal Gulliver, Macon Telegraph; Harry Ashmore, Arkansas Gazette; the Hodding Carters, Greenville, Miss. Delta Democrat-Times, Hazel Bannon Smith, Lexington, Miss., Advertiser, and P.D. East, the Petal Paper.
The movement also enhanced the reputations and credentials of a number of journalists already employed by major news organizations. Among them, to name only a few, besides Valeriani, were Charles Moore, Karl Fleming, Eugene Roberts, John Herbers, Claude Sitton, Haynes Johnson, Jack Nelson, Herb Kaplow, Harrison Salisbury, Calvin Trillin, Sander Vanocur and Reese Cleghorn.
Until Britt moved to Chicago to become managing editor of Jet, we enjoyed good, normal, collegial relations with most of our white fellow journalists. Surely, there were some racists and segregationists among them, but the motivating factor seemed to be concern about their careers and futures. We socialized with a few, sharing drinks and house parties, violating Georgia’s segregation laws some of the time. I was at a party at Bud Trillin’s pad one night when several of us decided to integrate the downtown Piedmont Park. Under cover of darkness, his former Yale schoolmate, Hal Gulliver, and I batted around a few tennis balls. Had the cops arrested us, who knows how our personal histories would have turned out.
The only southern paper with a black reporter at the time was the Nashville Tennessean, but he did not cover the movement. Britt and I tried to integrate the Atlanta papers, but were turned down. Neither Ralph McGill nor his successor, Eugene Patterson, was bold enough to break the racial barrier at the Constitution - we knew the conservative Journal was out of the question. But, when I was approached by the Dayton, Ohio, Daily News, also owned by Cox Publications, I was interviewed by editors at the Constitution who gave me high marks and I left Atlanta for Dayton in September 1963, the movement still in full swing.
Dayton was my first real daily newspaper job. I did not cover civil rights there, but wrote a lot of rights stories as the movement spread to the North. I covered SNCC’s training session that prepared its young workers for the 1964 Mississippi Summer project. The gathering was held at Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio, near Dayton, where three of them – James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman – departed and went to their deaths in Philadelphia, Miss.
Another personal moment for me occurred during my final days at the World, prior to Scott firing me a few days before Christmas, 1961. It was a lesson in journalistic ethics. As mentioned, I had made many friends in the movement and helped them set up their publications, even writing for them after work, stories the World would not print, yet an ethical no-no. Julian Bond was editing my first big story for page one. He called me at home to ask what byline he should use for me.
“Julian,” I told him, “You’re a smart college kid, you come up with something.”
The byline the next day on the top story read, “By P. Delano Lane.” He, Charlayne Hunter-Gault and a few others from those days still jokingly greet me by that moniker. Others helping out student journals included M. Carl Holman, brothers James and John Gibson and Jondell Johnson. Holman would later serve as staff director of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission with John Gibson on the staff; James Gibson would head the Atlanta Branch NAACP, followed by Jondell Johnson.
All journalists, regardless of color, risked their lives every day they spent covering the civil rights wars, especially at the beginning as momentum picked up across the South, and eventually beyond the region's borders. As the movement was overcome and overshadowed by other issues - Vietnam, urban rioting, poverty, the women's movement - some of the battles seem futile, in retrospect. School segregation is nearly as much of a problem today as it was pre-1954. Historian John Hope Franklin, in a very honest interview with me, was notably dejected; he acknowledged that rights leaders made a huge mistake after the Brown decision.
"In our enthusiasm, we naively assumed that whites would accept the decision of the Supreme Court, the law of the land, as we did," he commented. "We didn't think they'd oppose it so violently and for so long. We misjudged them; we should have seen it coming and prepared ourselves for the longer crusade."
In fact, the advanced use of technology has permeated all aspects of operations at the UWI. The university’s most recent strategic plan adopted the Balanced Scorecard system as a means of streamlining processes and systems for greater regional coordination across all campuses with the expectation that this will result in an enhanced impact on national and regional development.
As a result, the university has identified six different “perspectives’’ from which it views its operations:
• Financial
• Employee Engagement and Development
• Internal Operations
• Teaching, Learning and Student Development
• Research
• Innovation and Outreach
For the past 60 years, the UWI has made considerable gains in achieving its mandate to act as an engine of development for the English speaking Caribbean. Critical to this journey has been a consistent expansion of its reach and impact.
The university is currently organized into a four-campus system, which operates from 16 Caribbean islands, offering blended learning opportunities to students from small islands with limited access to options for tertiary training.
Each perspective has a number of ‘themes’ that encapsulate various projects and programs designed to produce a numerous outcomes.
For a university that is spread geographically across the Caribbean Sea, this is critical. For many years the region was plagued with a monopoly in its telecom infrastructure which forced high telecom and connectivity costs. The UWI was forced therefore to attempt many different approaches to satisfy its
White reporters knew recognized a historic story and capitalized on interviewing celebrities and movement leaders, including Sammy Davis Jr., left, and the NAACP's Roy Wilkins.