Conclusions

The Freedom Rides of 1961, James Meredith’s enrollment as the first African American student at Ole Miss in 1962, Freedom Summer and the murders of Micheal Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney in 1964 were separate events but remain conjoined in the violent history of what ostensibly began as the non-violent American civil rights movement. It was a movement in which Mississippi was targeted.  Roy Wilkins, president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, put it this way: “Mississippi is the most savage, most uncivil state in the United States.  There is no state with a record that approaches Mississippi in inhumanity, murder, brutality, and racial hatred. It is absolutely at the bottom of the list.”[1]

Against this backdrop, Freedom Summer unfolded in Mississippi with deaths, violence, and a degree of civil unrest and tension not seen since the Civil War.  In the end, Freedom Summer added two percent to the number of black voting registrants, showing that the court system alone could not solve such a deep and complex problem.[2]  Freedom Schools are heralded as the precursor to the Head Start program.  Freedom Summer may also have, perhaps inadvertently, put Mississippi on the road to becoming a Republican state as African Americans began to wrestle control of the state Democratic Party from the white, pro-segregation forces.  But, as Pulitzer Prize winning newspaper publisher and editor Ira B. Harkey, Jr., whose Pascagoula Chronicle-Star was, for a time, a bastion of pro-integration commentaries, put it in an updated “afterword” to his 1967 autobiography, The Smell of Burning Crosses, Mississippi has made remarkable progress since the 1960s.[3]  Blacks, once confined to second class citizenship, now enjoy the legal right and privileges that whites have always received.  Harkey quotes Benjamin Hooks, former president of the NAACP, as saying Mississippi had more blacks in elective office than any other state, and there are blacks in the professions and sciences, newspaper editors and publishers, school principals, judges and sheriffs.  “Personal animosities and hates have not disappeared and they are not likely to do so until the millennium when nature has turned all humans sweet,” Harkey wrote.  “Nevil Shute, Austrailian novelist, has said that the world’s problems will not be solved until everyone is a beige color. We are not all beige yet. But the Mississippi Negro now competes in the world in legal equality.”[4]

Freedom Summer was a critical link in the chain of events that led to the “world of equality” that was the primary goal of the entire civil rights movement, and the record – with all of its warts and blemishes – left by the Jackson Daily News and other media outlets provides a sense of how the story was covered.

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[1] Poster displayed at National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, visited by the author, April 18, 2011.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ira B. Harkey, Ira B., The Smell of Burning Crosses: A White Integrationist Editor in Mississippi (Bloomington, Indiana: Xlibris, 2005), 227-8.

[4] Ibid.

Results

Twenty-two articles about Freedom Summer published on page one of the Jackson Daily News from June 1, 1964, through June 30, 1964, were reviewed and separately coded by two people using a common codebook. (See Appendix)

In research question number one, which asked whether the stories were positive, negative, or neutral according to definitions in the codebook, it was found that the negative category and neutral category each scored 38.6 percent of the total number of stories reviewed.  Stories in the positive category amounted to 22.7 percent.

In research question number two, which asked whether headlines on the stories were positive, negative, or neutral according to definitions in the codebook, it was found that 43.1 percent fell into the neutral category; 40.9 percent fell into the negative category; and 15.9 percent fell into the positive category.

In research question number three, which asked whether the stories were written by Jackson Daily News staff writers, wire service reporters, or were published with no byline, it was found that 52.2 percent of the stories were written by wire service reporters, 25 percent by the newspaper’s staff writers, and 22.7 percent of the stories carried no byline at all.

In research question number four, which asked whether stories were placed above or below the fold, it was found that 86.3 percent of the stories ran above the fold, and 13.6 percent of the stories ran below the fold.

In research question number five, which asked whether the tone of editorials was positive, negative, or neutral according to definitions in the codebook, it was found that the issues published during the dates examined did not contain any page one editorials.

Research Questions/Results

Copies of twenty-two articles that were published on page one of the newspaper during this time period were obtained from microfilm records in the University of Mississippi’s J.D. Williams Library.  All materials were available from this resource.  A codebook was developed that established objective standards for judging the articles on the basis of the following: (1) whether the first three paragraphs were positive, negative, or neutral; (2) whether the headlines were positive, negative, or neutral; (3) whether the stories were written by staff writers, wire reporters, or carried no byline; (4) whether the articles were placed above or below the fold; and, (5) whether the tone of the editorials was positive, negative, or neutral.


For the purposes of this study, “positive” means language that supports cultural change in the status quo; “negative” means language that supports the status quo; and “neutral” means objective language that states the facts without taking a position.  Staff writers are defined as employees of the newspaper, wire service reporters are defined as not employees of the newspaper, and without a byline refers to an absence of attribution.  Similarly, story placement was defined as above the fold, or above the middle of the front page; or below the fold, meaning below the middle of page one. 

Introduction

This essay examines coverage of Freedom Summer 1964 through a micro-study of articles published on page one of issues of the Jackson Daily News, Jackson, Mississippi, from June 1, 1964, through June 30, 1964.  By examining this historically important event through the filter of newspaper stories, who wrote them, where they were placed on the page, and the headlines that accompanied them, I clarify the nature of the newspaper’s coverage of one of the defining moments in the American civil rights movement.


The time period coincides with the preparation and arrival of college students from across the country in Mississippi in a major project to register African American voters, to build freedom schools to educate young black children who had been denied equal educational opportunities, and to expose bias and injustice in Mississippi’s all-white, pro-segregation state Democratic Party.  Included in this period is coverage of the murders of three civil rights workers in Neshoba County, Mississippi, by elements of the Ku Klux Klan.


The major research method is content analysis of data collected from microfilm archives at The University of Mississippi’s J.D. Williams Library, supplemented by published works of event participants and observers, and previous research into coverage of the civil rights movement by media in Mississippi.  This essay supports the general theory that mass media communication is an essential element in the public’s awareness and understanding of civil rights issues in Mississippi.

'I Have a Dream' speech by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Before Freedom Summer unfolded in Mississippi in June 1964, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., mesmerized the million-strong attendees at the March on Washington in August 1963 with a dramatic speech that is known as his "I Have A Dream Speech." Surely, some of the students who came to Mississippi were moved by Dr. King's words as they perhaps began to think about how they could make a difference. The clarity of Dr. King's powerful words, delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, remains inspirational today.

To listen to the speech, click here.' I Have A Dream'

Ira B. Harkey, Jr.

If Ira B. Harkey, Jr., publisher and editor of the Pascagoula Chronicle-Star on the Mississippi Gulf Coast had owned the Jackson Daily News in the state capital during the 1960s, things might have been different. But, of course, he did not. Harkey won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 1963 for his hard-hitting, aggressive pro-integration stance in a state whose social and political systems were rooted in white supremacy. As a result, his newspaper lost advertisers and he received many threats. Six months after he won the Pulitzer, he sold the paper and moved away from Mississippi, after becoming a self-described pariah in his community. NPR's All Things Considered noted his passing in October 2006 and interviewed his son, Ira B. Harkey, III, about those tumultuous days in Mississippi. Click on the following link to listen to that interview.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6256069&ft=1&f=1021

NPR Interview with Ira B. Harkey, III.