CHAPTER 2 JOURNALISM AND CIVIL RIGHTS My young adulthood corresponded with the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. I was in my first year at Williams College when the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that racial segregation in public education in the United States was unconstitutional. I graduated from Williams in June of 1957. The following fall President Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered U.S. Army troops into Little Rock, Arkansas, to forcefully racially integrate Central High School. In February of 1960, while I was a graduate student in political science at Johns Hopkins University, the college sit-in movement to protest racial segregation was launched in Greensboro, North Carolina. In 1964, after I had received my Ph.D. degree from Johns Hopkins, I worked in the United States Senate as a legislative staff assistant to Senator Thomas H. Kuchel, the Republican floor leader for the bill that subsequently was enacted as the Civil Rights Act of 1964. RACIALLY-SEGREGATED NEWS REPORTING The summer of 1957 found me with a freshly-minted bachelor’s degree from Williams College, located in western Massachusetts. My diploma noted that I had graduated as a Bachelor of Arts “with honors in political science.” As with so many things in my life, or so it seemed

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to me, my diploma was good but not quite perfect. Careful inspection of the diploma revealed that, while Phinney Baxter, the then-president of Williams College, was signing my diploma, his pen had run out of ink. One could clearly see where the presidential pen had gone dry. It was right after the “x” in Baxter. One could also clearly see where Phinney Baxter had started over with a fresh load of ink. I also possessed that summer of 1957 a letter of acceptance to do graduate work in political science at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Graduate school would not start until the fall, however, so I began searching for a summer job. Having been editor of the student newspaper when in high school, I decided to “try my hand” working as a newspaper reporter. In 1957 there were two newspapers in Baltimore. The best-known was the Baltimore Sun, a newspaper with intellectual pretensions that published both a morning and evening edition. The Sun was particularly popular in the Baltimore suburbs, where upscale “status seekers” doted on its wealth of foreign and national news and its slightly left-of-center editorials. Having read the Sun throughout my early life growing up in Baltimore, I decided to start my quest for a newspaper job there. Things did not go well for me at the Baltimore Sun. First off, the Sun was unionized. The “Guild,” as the reporters’ union was called, did not approve of hiring temporary summer help. Also, the editor who interviewed me at the Sun indicated in an ever-so-sophisticated manner that he was turned-off by my total lack of “professional” newspaper experience. The Baltimore Sun only hired experienced reporters who had previously learned their trade at smaller newspapers in less-important cities than Baltimore. As I walked dejectedly down the steps and stood on the sidewalk in front of the Sun building in downtown Baltimore, I recalled there was another daily newspaper in my hometown. It was the Baltimore NewsPost. It was an afternoon newspaper. My father, Walton W. Loevy, I, often bought it on the street downtown while walking to the parking garage to get into his automobile to drive home from his job at an insurance company. The News-Post was a Hearst newspaper. The Hearst papers were a national chain of newspapers named for founder William Randolph

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Hearst. They specialized in presenting news to the public in a flashy, interesting, and sensational style. After a quick look in a telephone directory at an outdoor telephone booth, I had the address of the News-Post. Shortly thereafter, I was parking my car on a street adjacent to the Baltimore waterfront. Baltimore was a classic East Coast port city. It was where “the rails meet the sea.” Ocean-going ships made their way up the Chesapeake Bay to Baltimore and unloaded their cargoes into waiting railroad cars. The railroads then hauled the goods to other cities in the American Midwest and South. Baltimore also had major shipyards in which ocean-going ships were constructed and repaired. There also was a Chevrolet automobile assembly plant, a Bethlehem Steel plant, and a Western Electric telephone manufacturing plant. Baltimore in the summer of 1957 was a typical United States “working-class” city, with little else to recommend it except for the many useful things that were manufactured there. The News-Post building was located on Pratt Street, which ran eastwest along the north side of the Baltimore harbor front. It was a typical newspaper building of the early 20th Century. The lower floors were filled with the mammoth, noisy, rumbling and rattling metal machinery that printed the News-Post each day. On the upper floors were the offices in which the newspaper was written and edited, and where the advertisements, the economic lifeblood of the newspaper, were designed and composed. I rode up the elevator and found myself in the editorial “space” at the Baltimore News-Post that was known as the City Desk. It was a “space” because there were very few private offices or cubicles for the onehundred or so persons who were writing and editing the newspaper that day. They all worked in a large room filled haphazardly with a variety of desks, typewriters, and telephones. It thus was a highly communal place, both physically and mentally. The visible signs of intense activity were made all the more compelling by a cacophony of busy sounds. Typewriters were clattering, telephones were ringing, and editors were busily assigning stories.

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One of the first persons I saw as I walked into the “space” was a middle-aged man wearing a green-plastic eyeshade. He was talking into an old-style vertical telephone. The man’s mouth was right up to the telephone’s mouthpiece. The separate earpiece, at the end of its own short stretch of telephone cord, was jammed into the man’s ear. “Is he dead yet?” I was taken aback when I heard the man in the green eyeshade say that into the telephone. After a brief pause, I heard the man add: “Don’t bother to call me back unless he dies.” After taking in this jumbled, hectic, and somewhat archaic scene, I asked to speak with the city editor. I was directed to Edward Ballard, a short, heavy-set man with dark hair who was the top person in charge of gathering and editing the local news for the Baltimore News-Post. He looked me over and said: “What d’ya want, kid?” I would soon learn that Edward Ballard addressed all his young reporters with the appellation “kid.” I also would find in Edward Ballard, addressed by people his age as Ed or Eddy, that perfect mixture of gruffand-caring which, according to newspaper lore, is the essence of the older city editor guiding the developing career of a young cub reporter. For the next seven summers, and on weekends throughout the remainder of the year, the News-Post became my principal means of economic support for getting myself through graduate school at Johns Hopkins University. The News-Post was, however, much more than just an additional source of money to add to my all-too-meager graduate fellowship. It became the place where I learned about the city of Baltimore. I interviewed both the city’s best citizens and its worst citizens. I chased stories in the city’s best neighborhoods and its worst neighborhoods. Above all, the News-Post was where I learned to write what I came to call “Hearstese,” that fast-reading, hard-hitting, patriotic, common-person-loving style of newspaper writing for which the Hearst papers were duly famous and infamous. I started out as a police reporter for the Baltimore News-Post. It was my job to get in my car and cruise from one Baltimore police station to another, picking up small stories about petty crimes, such as fistfights,

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purse snatches, and burglaries. These minor crime stories were not significant in themselves, but they came in handy when it was time for the city editor to make up the next edition of the newspaper. If there was an empty space in a newspaper column about one or two-inches long, the space could easily be filled with one of these short crime stories. These minor crime stories were referred to by the nickname “shorts.” Both the News-Post and the Baltimore Sun had telephones in each of Baltimore City’s police stations. I dutifully kept the telephone operator at the News-Post informed as to which police station I was inhabiting at any given moment of my working day. That way, when the city editor wanted to give me a special assignment or send me to cover a fast-breaking crime story, the telephone operator could track me down at a police station and connect me to the city editor as quickly as possible. One Saturday I was working the Eastern District police station when the News-Post telephone rang demandingly. It was one of the assistant city editors giving me an assignment. It must have been a slow news day, because the instructions to me were brief and to-the-point. “I want you to get me every ‘short’ there is in the city of Baltimore. Even if an old black man falls down and skins his knee, I want it for the paper.” Thus did I begin to learn that the newspaper business in the city of Baltimore in the 1950s was racially-segregated. Neither the Sun nor the News-Post routinely covered social or business news about black people. As far as the major newspapers were concerned, the black community in Baltimore, fully one-third of the city’s population, did not exist as a news source. The only way a black person could get his or her name or photograph in the paper was by committing a crime against a white person. When the assistant city editor said he would take a story about an old black man skinning his knee, he was being highly-sarcastic. I was surprised about myself and a little bit angry with myself. Throughout my junior high school and high school years, I had read the Baltimore Sun virtually every day and occasionally looked at the NewsPost. It had never dawned on me, in all that time, that there was no news about black people, other than criminal news, in my daily newspaper. That fact became obvious to me, of course, once it was pointed out to me.

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For years, I realized, I had been blissfully unaware that any favorable news about African-Americans was being carefully edited out of my hometown papers. One day I was sitting at the Northwestern District police station. Northwestern was located in the center of Baltimore City’s black ghetto, a racially-segregated section of the city populated only by black people. Violet Hill White, a black policewoman who handled women’s and children’s cases in the Northwestern District, came up to me and gave me what she thought was a good tip. “We just arrested a mother and father who, for the past three years, have kept their five children locked in the basement of their home,” policewoman White explained. “The children have been neglected. They have never been allowed to go to school or to go out and play with the other children in the neighborhood. One of them was actually chained to his bed for a number of months for being disobedient and trying to escape out of the basement.” Policewoman White showed me a copy of her police report on the incident and allowed me to take all the notes I wanted. The police report included photographs of the children as they appeared when police officers liberated them from their basement prison. Armed with what I thought was a very good story, I raced to the News-Post telephone in the Northwestern District station house and called the City Desk. The telephone was answered by one of the older assistant city editors. In an excited voice, I described the incident and suggested that the NewsPost should get a photographer up to the family home to try to get a photograph of the children’s basement prison. The assistant city editor listened quietly while I explained the situation. When I finished my animated description of this potential story, the editor said curtly: “Is this story white or black?” Having seen the police photographs of the children in their basement prison, I quietly replied: “The children are black.” The assistant city editor’s response was pointedly derogatory. “Who cares about a bunch of dirty black kids in a basement?” He then abruptly ended the phone call, leaving me standing there with a pile of notes on

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a story that was never going to get in the Baltimore News-Post. I wondered what policewoman Violet Hill White must have thought when she picked up that afternoon’s News-Post and saw there was no coverage of a story which, if it had involved white children, would have received top local news coverage. Once again, the “message” had been delivered to an educated, talented, caring, and successful black person. Violet Hill White was graphically and directly reminded that she and her people were not of interest to the white community. She and her people did not matter. The news columns of Baltimore’s daily newspapers were a world that black people were not permitted to enter, unless they committed a crime against a white person. The squelching of the story of the five black children locked in a basement had a profound effect on me. I was struck by the power which the news media in Baltimore, particularly the daily newspapers, wielded over “objective truth” as presented to the general public. I later learned the process is called “filtering the news” or “mediating the news.” The news media do not control or make the news, but they definitely choose the news, shape the news, and define the news. There were many interesting news stories generated each day in a city the size of Baltimore, but every story could not be given the front-page, banner-headline treatment. The news-media picked out, for their readers and viewers and listeners, the stories that were important. In Baltimore, Maryland, in the mid-1950s, non-crime stories about black people were unimportant and consistently edited out of the newspaper. This led to the promulgation of Bob Loevy’s First Law of the News Media. “It is only important if the news media says it is important.” One can put it in the vernacular. “If it ain’t in the newspapers, it didn’t happen.” THE SIT-IN AT MONDAWMIN One Saturday afternoon in the late 1950s, I was sent up to Mondawmin, one of the first regional shopping centers constructed in the Baltimore area. Mondawmin was located in northwest Baltimore. It was

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immediately surrounded by all-white neighborhoods. Just a few blocks away, however, was the outer edge of the largest black community in Baltimore, a black community that was constantly growing larger and progressively expanding into nearby white areas. In Baltimore at that time, there was a chain of small restaurants called the White Coffee Pot. These restaurants all had tables and chairs, booths, and a long counter with stools. The food was nourishing, occasionally tasted good, and was quite modestly priced. A wide range of social classes ate at the White Coffee Pot. The restaurants were conveniently located in a variety of places around town, and everyone from a bum to a businessperson could get a decent meal there in a relatively short time. There was a brand-new White Coffee Pot in the brand-new Mondawmin Shopping Center. Similar to all the other White Coffee Pots, it had a white tile floor, white-painted walls, and white tabletops and counter tops. The overall color theme was white, pure-white. Something else was all-white. In the traditional manner of restaurants and snack bars in the southern United States, the White Coffee Pot did not serve black people. Baltimore and Maryland, of course, were not technically in the South. During the Civil War, Maryland had been a Border State, a state immediately adjacent to the South but which remained in the Union during the Civil War. Technically, a Border State is a state in which slaveholding was legal but which did not secede from the United States at the time of the Civil War. The Border States, from east to west, are Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri. West Virginia split off from Virginia, a slave state, during the Civil War and became a free state. West Virginia is often considered a Border State. In the years following the Civil War, Maryland chose to follow the southern example, rather than the northern example, and segregate the two races. That meant that most restaurants, snack bars, hotels, motels, amusement parks, and swimming pools in Maryland were open only to whites and were strictly off-limits to blacks. “Get up to Mondawmin,” my city editor, Eddie Ballard, said to me. “A group of protesters is sitting at the tables and demanding to be served.

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The White Coffee Pot won’t serve them, and the protesters are refusing to leave until they do get served. Apparently some of the protesters are blacks, but others are white.” At that point, City Editor Ballard apparently detected my thinlydisguised enthusiasm for getting to cover a story about black people and write it up for the News-Post. He smiled at me and then gave me the real scoop on what was happening. “Look, kid,” the city editor explained, “all we want you to do is keep an eye on things. We’re not going to do a story unless there is a riot, or something like a riot. Right now it’s pretty quiet, but we need to have someone up there if it doesn’t stay quiet.” I hurriedly rode down the elevator in the News-Post building, jumped in my car, an alpine blue 1951 Ford Victoria hardtop convertible, and drove out to northwest Baltimore. After parking my car in the shopping center parking lot, I walked into the center and had no trouble finding the White Coffee Pot. There was a small group of pickets, about six, walking up and down in front of the restaurant, quietly holding signs calling for racial integration of the White Coffee Pot. The pickets were nicely racially-integrated. About half of them were white, and the others were black. The pickets were making no effort to prevent anyone from entering the White Coffee Pot to get a meal. Inside the White Coffee Pot, eight protesters were sitting down trying to get served some food. Four were sitting in a booth, and four others were sitting at a table. These protesters also were racially-integrated. Some were white and some were black. A number of them, confident they would not be served, had brought along books or magazines and were quietly getting a little reading done. The management at the White Coffee Pot was simply ignoring the protesters, not serving them anything to eat or drink but, at the same time, not making any attempt to physically force them to leave. A small number of white persons, many fewer than you would expect on a busy Saturday afternoon, were sitting elsewhere in the restaurant eating their food. These white patrons appeared to be going out of their way not to notice the racial protest taking place near them in the restaurant.

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A white Baltimore City police officer, in uniform and armed with his police revolver, was standing just outside the restaurant door. Similar to me, the police officer had been sent to simply keep an eye on things. He was bored. He was only too happy to answer my questions about what was going on. “This is the third Saturday in a row that we’ve had this,” the police officer said. “The protesters come promptly at 10 A.M. and quit about 4 P.M. Because this is a shopping center, the restaurant mainly does a lunch and afternoon-snack business, so the demonstration is designed to drive away patrons at the busiest time of the day.” “They’re quiet, though,” the policeman said of the protesters. “The picketers are not trying to talk to or interfere with any of the people trying to get into the White Coffee Pot. The protesters are handing out a leaflet, but only to people who come up and ask for one.” “But it’s working,” the policeman concluded. “A lot of people are walking up as if they are headed to the White Coffee Pot to get something to eat. Then they see the pickets and their signs, and the people just stop dead in their tracks. They look things over for a while, wondering what to do, and then most of them walk away. I guess they figure they’ll get a meal someplace else today. Who needs the hassle?” One of the picketers outside the White Coffee Pot was a young white woman. In terms of age, she looked as though she was in her mid- to latetwenties, just a few years older than I was. She was nicely dressed in a wool sweater and a Scotch-plaid skirt. She had a very cultured and refined upper-class look to her. When I had finished talking to the police officer, I decided to talk to the young woman, mainly because she appeared to be in charge of the demonstration. Her manner was very rational and business-like. I sensed that she was very serious about what she was doing that day. I asked her: “Are you the person in charge of this demonstration?” “Yes, I am,” the young woman replied. “I am from the Baltimore Chapter of CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality. This is an official CORE demonstration.” Apparently the young woman wanted to be interviewed by the press,

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because she was answering my questions with some measure of enthusiasm. Her lecture to me began my education about CORE, which became one of the most prominent civil rights organizations working to end racial segregation in the United States. I then asked: “What are you trying to accomplish here?” “We are trying to racially integrate the White Coffee Pot at the Mondawmin Shopping Center,” the young woman replied. “CORE’s goal is to integrate restaurants, snack bars, lunch counters, and public rest rooms throughout the North, the Border States, and South.” I knew there was an invisible and indeterminate line across the United States. Above that line, black people could be served along side whites in public places. Below that line, almost everything was raciallysegregated. It was called the Jim Crow line. CORE was dedicated to pushing the Jim Crow line southward as quickly as reasonably possible. In the late 1950s, the Jim Crow line sat just a little bit north of the city of Baltimore. There was a pause in the conversation. I looked away from the young woman and at the pickets slowly walking up and down in front of the White Coffee Pot. Instead of tension and tumult, there was a strange peacefulness to the scene, not at all what one would expect during a civil rights demonstration. I looked back at the young woman. “Right now,” I said, “things are kind of quiet here. What would happen if the manager of the White Coffee Pot asked the police to forcefully remove your CORE demonstrators, the ones who are occupying the booth and the table inside the restaurant. What would happen then?” “Our people are highly-trained and know just what to do,” the young woman replied. “If there’s violence, they know how to curl up their bodies and put their arms around their heads so as to reduce the effects of a physical attack. No matter how hard someone might hit them, our demonstrators are taught to never strike back. CORE is non-violent, but at the same time we are very determined.” I decided to develop the theme that she and her fellow demonstrators were breaking the law. I said: “Why do you think you have the right to break the trespass laws of the state of Maryland. The owner of the White

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Coffee Pot has the right in this state to refuse service to anyone, for any reason. He could get the police in here to enforce that law if he wanted to.” I had no difficulty making the private-property argument for defending racial segregation in restaurants and other privately-owned properties that the general public patronized. I had heard the argument made many times by my Baltimore friends. I had read the argument when it was written up in numerous newspaper articles about the Civil Rights Movement. With this question, the young woman changed her tone and manner of speaking. She softened her stance and lowered her voice. She looked me straight in the eye as she answered me. “It’s wrong,” she said, “to put ‘Keep Out’ signs on restaurants and snack bars and have those signs apply to only one group of people. It’s so demeaning to blacks to have large parts of their world marked off as places where, because of their skin color, they cannot go. Have you ever thought about how long the list of segregated places is in this city? Blacks can’t go to restaurants, swimming pools, skating rinks, country clubs, movie theaters. They are reminded of their second-class status everywhere they look and everywhere they go. It’s unfair. It’s unkind. It’s immoral.” Listening to this impassioned plea, I was struck by the depth of the young woman’s commitment to the cause of black civil rights. This saddened me, because I was, after all, giving the young woman a raw deal. I had been talking to her for almost half-an-hour, acting the whole time as if I would be writing a story for the newspaper about CORE and the civil rights protest at Mondawmin. Since there had been no violence, not even harsh words, there was no way that even one word of the event would get in that day’s NewsPost. Even if I had written such a story, my racially bigoted city editors would have made certain it never saw the light of day. That evening, when the young woman searched the pages of the News-Post for the story, she would find nothing. She and her white and black CORE compatriots were going to receive one more rejection, i.e.

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no coverage of their protest against racial segregation from the Baltimore newspapers. I said goodbye to the young woman and walked away from the CORE demonstration at Mondawmin shopping center. Nothing ever came of that particular CORE sit-in demonstration. The manager of the White Coffee Pot shrewdly let the demonstrators continue to sit in his restaurant without having them arrested. There was no violence, and therefore no newspaper or television coverage. I never heard for certain, but I assumed the Baltimore branch of CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality, eventually gave up on that particular protest and quietly accepted, at least temporarily, defeat. This much was for certain. The White Coffee Pot stayed all-white.