Other Media Interpretations

These items analyze more newspapers opinions on the integration crisis. Leading up to the Hunter-Holmes incident Brown v. Board of education set the stage for the South’s battle for autonomy yet again echoing issues reminiscent of the civil war. The effort to resist forced integration was not only a grass roots effort nor one of unintelligence. The movement was spearheaded by senators, lawyers, doctors, educators in the south, with as many as 250,000 joining the Citizens Council, which would be known as the “country club” KKK. The resistance legislatively aimed at impeding forced integration or circumventing it by empowering states to shut down school systems if forced to integrate. This was the law used to shut down the University of Georgia after the riots on campus. Newspapers aided in the effort to galvanize public opinion as polls reported upwards of 90% of the southern population did not support integration. The papers with more nuanced defense of segregation were shown to be evident in how they reported on the news of Hunter-Holmes. Progressive papers such as the one shown from the Afro- American refereed to the students by name and interviewed them about their well-being as well as the state of their education. However, other papers consistently referred to the students as Negroes in their headlines and throughout pieces, with interviews from white students on their opinion of the issue. The second item is a critique of Georgia and calling into question Jim Crow Justice. This concept of equality not existing in the judicial system was prevalent. Reporter Jack Nelson received reports from Walter B Brooks, a chairman of the Georgia Pardon and Parole Board proving the inequalities. A case where a black teenager was sent to jail for hitting a white woman jaywalking, who was warned multiple times of police was not too uncommon in the state. The plaintiffs were tried, judged, and punished by all white juries, judges and executed with none of their peers in the process. In that specific case the prosecutor refused to even bring it to a grand jury for trial.

Nelson, J. (2001). The Civil Rights Movement - A Press Perspective. Human Rights, (Issue 4), 3. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edshol&AN=edshol.hein.journals.huri28.43&site=eds-live

Sam Crockett, “Conclusion to Common Sense Lead Story,” Mapping Nature ~ English 1102 Fall 2019, accessed November 22, 2019, http://mapping-nature.org/omeka2019/admin/items/show/112.

Wallace, D. J. (2013). Massive Resistance and Media Suppression : The Segregationist Response to Dissent During the Civil Rights Movement. El Paso: LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com.proxy-remote.galib.uga.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=e000xna&AN=608917&site=eds-live