“Diversity fatigue has been alive and well in America's news industry for many years,” writes Milton Coleman, a senior editor at The Washington Post and an organizer of Leadership in Diversity: New Models for Growing Audience, Talent and Revenues, a two-part conference taking place this year. Racial practices in newsrooms disquiet blacks, but discussions about them surface mostly among minority journalists. As black journalists leave mainstream news organizations for websites, issues of financial viability, resources for reporting, and their site’s impact follow them. Read more
Why is what happened then considered news today? Why stir up memories of events that were long ago put to rest? Hank Klibanoff, author of “The Race Beat” and managing editor of the Civil Rights Cold Case Project, leads off our collection of stories by writing about how people want to know what compels journalists to dig into racial crimes from a distant era. Others involved with this project—and two reporters who covered the civil rights movement—write about the importance of not forgetting. Read more
Before Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus, she had already been fighting for racial equality for more than a decade. She strategized with other activists, organized protests, and in 1948 gave an impassioned speech … Read more
‘Our dual approaches keep steady attention fixed on the [Frank] Morris case and they pressure local and federal law enforcement to thoroughly investigate it, with a spillover effect of bringing renewed attention to other cold cases …’ Read more
When Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and The Washington Post Company CEO Donald Graham launched The Root in 2008, their ambitions were anything but modest. “We wanted to create a daily black national—indeed, international—magazine, a medium on … Read more
‘I continue to pore through 40,000 pages of FBI records, the entire FBI case file in the Klan’s 1964 killings of [James] Chaney, [Andrew] Goodman and [Michael] Schwerner. Two suspects are still alive …’ Read more
Old World War II movies usually included the standard cliché of a United States Army unit serving as a microcosm of American diversity. As the soldiers trudged along muddy roads or charged Nazi foxholes, viewers … Read more
Simeon Booker, center, covers the Emmett Till murder trial for Jet magazine. He is seated in the Negro press section with, from left, Clotye Murdock of Ebony magazine, L. Alex Wilson of The … Read more
