“. . . the decisions made at the Herald
and the Leader hurt the civil rights movement at the time, irreparably
damaged the historical record and caused the newspapers' readers
to miss out on one of the most important stories of the 20th century.” – Lexington
Herald-Leader, July 4, 2004
“If a tree falls in the forest and
no one is there to hear it does it still make a sound?” This philosophical
conundrum has been debated for generations. The question is an interesting
one, but it can be applied to issues other than trees. If a revolution
took place and the press ignored it, did it still happen?
The city of Lexington, Kentucky, like so
many other communities, experienced the fall of an entire forest
in the 1950s and 1960s. The civil rights movement brought wrenching
changes to the entire nation. Lexington was not exempt. Unfortunately,
anyone depending on Lexington’s newspapers for information would
not have known to shout “timber” and get out of the way when the
redwoods began hitting the forest floor.
The city’s two daily newspapers, the Herald
and the Leader, worked hand in hand with respected pillars of the
community and decided to ignore the revolution. The press took their
orders from the powerful and didn’t report one of the biggest news
stories in American history. Lexington had demonstrations, sit-ins
and other protests, but the papers didn’t acknowledge their complicity
in telling a lie until earlier this month.
The Herald-Leader (the two papers merged
in the 1980s) recently apologized to readers for not reporting that
the fair city of Lexington had a civil rights movement. The white
citizenry of Lexington decided that pretense was preferable to the
truth and chose not to point out the elephant in the living room. “Good” white
people like Fred Wachs, general manager and publisher of both newspapers,
said they wanted change, but didn’t think that anyone demanding it
was worthy of an expenditure of newsprint.
"He didn't like the idea of some of
these rabble rousers coming in and causing trouble," Fred Wachs
Jr. said of his father, who died in 1974. "He tried to keep
that off the pages. But he supported school desegregation, and they
wanted it done without any problems, and I don't think we had any
problems here."
The godfathers of Lexington told people
where they could and could not live, and could and could not work,
and could and could not go to school and yet were not labeled rabble
rousers. That honor fell on those who risked death, injury and loss
of livelihood to demand a just society.
As for problems, it is certainly true that
Lexington had problems. Audrey
Ross Grevious was one of the
movement organizers in Lexington. During a sit-in at a lunch counter
the manager swung a chain barrier into her legs for several hours,
causing her pain that continues until this day. Audrey Ross Grevious
certainly had problems in Lexington.
It is doubtful that anyone was fooled by
the news white-out. Black people certainly knew what was going on.
They were the ones taking the action. Their white neighbors also
knew that something had changed. People don’t refrain from talking
about something because the newspapers are silent. They knew that
protests were taking place, even if their leaders didn’t want to
bother their pretty little heads about it.
Of course there was another very simple
reason to deny the existence of the movement in Lexington and other
cities. The lack of coverage discouraged activism. Many more people
would have been galvanized by the courage of Audrey Ross Grevious
and thousands of others. Calvert
McCann was a young man who
photographed the events in Lexington. He says that if the revolution
had been televised or even reported in the paper, “I think there
may have been more people would have joined, and more interest in
the movement …”
It is easy to pass judgment against the
pillars of the segregationist Lexington community but it is more
difficult to ask about the present day elite corporate media in the
North. Thirty years after a newspaper brought down a corrupt presidency,
the New York Times recently apologized for not living up to journalistic
standards when it went along with the Bush administration propaganda
that Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of chemical weapons.
The flimsy mea
culpa went along these
lines. “We did not listen carefully to the people who disagreed with
us.” It would have been a lot better if powerful opinion makers like
the Times had given legitimacy to opposing points of view before
12,000 Iraqis and 800 American soldiers were killed. July must be
the official “better late than never” month for national newspapers.
The New York Times today cannot claim to
be superior to local papers published in Lexington, Kentucky forty
years ago. The Times claimed that anti-war rallies had 10,000 marchers
when they actually had 200,000 and
the Times ignored the very existence of the lesser known and/or politically
inconvenient candidates
in presidential election debates.
Everyone knows that we shouldn’t believe
everything that we read, and not just because the information may
be faulty. We must also assume that important truths are left out
of news coverage. The press are embedded with the powerful, whether
in Kentucky or New York, and they continue to cause irreparable damage
to the historical record.