On the surface, the American newspaper industry appears to have changed little from 1945 to 1965, remaining both healthy and prosperous. The number of newspapers in 1965 was about the same as in 1945, while during the twenty-year period advertising revenues increased substantially despite new competition from television. Just as in 1945, the vast majority of newspapers went to press with improved but old-fashioned letterpress methods in 1965. And newspaper reporters still professed a strong, if now somewhat shaken, faith in the federal government at the end of the twenty years.

But the...

For southern newspapers and southern readers, the social upheaval in the years following Brown v. Board of Education (1954) was, as Time put it in 1956, -the region's biggest running story since slavery.- The southern press struggled with the region's accommodation of the school desegregation ruling and with black America's demand for civil rights.

The nine essays in The Press and Race illuminate the broad array of print journalists' responses to the civil rights movement in Mississippi, a state that was one of the nation's major civil rights battlegrounds. Three of the...

For southern newspapers and southern readers, the social upheaval in the years following Brown v. Board of Education (1954) was, as Time put it in 1956, -the region's biggest running story since slavery.- The southern press struggled with the region's accommodation of the school desegregation ruling and with black America's demand for civil rights.

The nine essays in The Press and Race illuminate the broad array of print journalists' responses to the civil rights movement in Mississippi, a state that was one of the nation's major civil rights battlegrounds. Three of the...