To go along with our newly launched issue on Cold Case Reporting, we return to the April 1962 issue of the magazine, which included remarks the late John H. Nelson, then with the Atlanta Constitution, made to a group of students at Harvard.
In speaking about coverage of the civil rights movement, Nelson derided the tendency of reporters from the North to paint the entire South as racist and every conflict in it as being one of race. Nelson said: “The South should no more be indicted for the fact that a handful of Klansmen live there than the North should be indicted for the fact that the John Birch Society’s headquarters is in Belmont, Mass.”
He also pointed out that many newswires reported riots in the North without reference to the race of participants, a detail that would have been front and center had the same stories originated in Atlanta.
“My concern is not for sympathy for the South,” he said. “It is for a better understanding of the South’s racial problems. … Only the press and the national news media can bring about this understanding.”
