The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation.

* The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation By Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff Alfred A. Knopf October 2006, $30, ISBN 0-679-40381-7

It took a half century for this story to be told: mainstream media's marriage to the Civil Rights Movement, a union that contributed to the end of legal segregation by race in the United States; and this union is examined for the first time in The Race Beat.

Prior to the mid- 1950s, only the black press regularly covered black America. White media made no pretense of recording black people's activities and aspirations in America where, Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal said, "An entire social order had been built, and rationalized, around race." Thus, the African American ethos that emerged in the decade after World War II went largely unchronicled.

White press avoidance of African Americans, especially in the South, its blindness to the embryonic protest movement and its struggle to catch up are authoritatively recounted in The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation, by journalists Gene Roberts (a journalist with whom I've worked) and Hank Klibanoff.

With perspicacity, the authors set the stage in the first two chapters for their narrative and establish the context for their analysis.

The Race Beat recounts the comings and goings at each civil rights' milestone and crisis, and includes such black reporters as Moses J. Newson of the Baltimore Afro-American; L. Alex Wilson of the Memphis Tri-State Defender, Ernest C. Withers, a freelance photographer; Simeon Booker of Jet and Ebony; and New York's Amsterdam News's editor, James L. (Jimmy) Hicks. Many of the reporters are pictured in the book's collection of 42 photographs.

Beginning with the 1957 school integration attempts in Little Rock, Arkansas, white reporters from national media went South to cover boycotts, desegregation sit-ins, freedom rides and protest marches. They observed the profound hatred and viciousness many white southerners--ordinary citizens, public officials and law enforcement personnel--manifested toward black people. Although many prominent white journalists on the race beat were southerners, most understood black aspirations.

Roberts and Klibanoff relate the anxieties faced by a few white liberal southern editors and publishers. Understanding, in the wake of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, that the old order must change, they labored between the rock of their intellect and the hard place of their environment.

Reporters recording the changing order called themselves race reporters assigned to the race beat. The beat took them to Little Rock, Arkansas; Birmingham and Selma, Alabama; Albany, Georgia; and Oxford, Mississippi, where Paul Guihard of Agence France Presse was fatally shot in the back as students and non-students protested lames Meredith's enrollment into the University of Mississippi. The authors detail the white journalists' work methods and indicate that some were exceptional.

The authors contend that once white reporters showed up, the curtain came down on the black press as movement chronicler. They write: "Negro reporters who had pioneered the civil rights coverage found themselves [at Little Rock's Central High School] pushed to the sidelines at one of the most momentous events of the story, [integrating student] Ernest Green's graduation ... [V]eteran Negro journalists who had covered some of the seminal civil rights milestones ... were turned away from the baccalaureate and commencement, as well as from a school board news conference.... The Negro press was losing not merely its eyewitness position on the story, it was losing the story."

This is an exaggeration. Black press representatives showed up at all subsequent movement hot spots, often having access no white journalist possessed, the authors noted. Only after the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements "ended" does the black press, in my view, become less vigorous and essentially abdicate its traditional role as watchdog-advocate. In order to cope with local, state and national perfidy, it is still necessary to produce news of significance to African Americans from a black perspective.

C. Gerald Fraser is a former New York Times reporter; and during his 40-year career in journalism, he has worked with several of the individuals named in this review.