New in Civil Rights History

Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff, The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation is recently released. It is reviewed in Wil Haygood,"Story of their Lives," Washington Post, 26 November; David Garrow,"How the Press Reported on Racism, and How It Didn't," NYT, 22 November; Jon Wiener,"Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff on ‘The Race Beat'," LA Times, 12 November; and Jonathan Yardley,"The Race Beat," Washington Post, 26 November. The Roberts and Klibanoff volume makes a good companion to Reporting Civil Rights: American Journalism, 1941-1973, 2 volumes (Library of America, 2003).

Derrick Z. Jackson,"A King We Hardly Knew," Boston Globe, 22 November; and Jackson,"The Continuing ‘Danger' of King," Boston Globe, 25 November, is a two-part series in anticipation of the publication of Volume VI of The Papers of Martin Luther King. A preliminary draft of this new volume sits three feet away on my bookshelves. The final version should appear in the Spring. This volume is of special interest because it includes material – many sermons and speeches, some letters -- that Coretta Scott King long delayed making available to the King Project. It is a large part of what was recently purchased for $32 million by an Atlanta trust. Because many of the documents are from years already covered in volumes I-V of the King Papers, Volume VI breaks the chronological sequencing of those first five volumes. Until now, much of the material in this volume has never been closely read by King scholars.