Mississippi’s leading segregationist newspapers ran openly racist headlines during civil rights era

Evidence

In the 1950s and 1960s, the Hederman brothers, Thomas and Robert, were among the most powerful segregationist forces in the South. Two examples from the civil rights era give a taste of the reporting that Hederman-owned entities regularly generated for the Mississippi public. When the Supreme Court ruled that the all-white University of Mississippi had to admit James Meredith in 1962, the Jackson Daily News included a front-page story featuring a picture of a cross that had been burned outside of Meredith’s assigned student housing with the headline “Greeting for Negro.” Similarly, the Clarion-Ledger’s coverage of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 March on Washington ran under the headline “Washington Is Clean Again with Negro Trash Removed,” featuring a photo of the National Mall littered with garbage. A 1967 national review of newspaper coverage of the civil rights movement by the Columbia Journalism Review dubbed the Clarion-Ledger and the Jackson Daily News “quite possibly the worst metropolitan papers in the United States.” — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long, 116

Categorization

• CANDY: The two invented headlines, ‘Greeting for Negro’ and ‘Washington Is Clean Again with Negro Trash Removed,’ are stunning, tweetable specifics.
• XREF: Connects to the theme of white Christian institutions manufacturing racial meaning and controlling media, echoing patterns from the book’s treatment of the Southern Baptist Convention. — connects to: Racist newspaper narratives deliberately escalated southern anti-Black violence. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The…, 643; Mississippi Baptist clergy publicly defended racial segregation in explicitly white supremacist terms — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 122

Broader Connections

• Racist newspaper narratives deliberately escalated southern anti-Black violence. #expands (0.85) — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 643
• Mississippi Baptist clergy publicly defended racial segregation in explicitly white supremacist terms #exemplifies (0.72) — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long, 122