I’m here under false colors - University of Kentucky



Bernard Stein notes and remarks, Case Studies of Courage in Community Journalism

AEJMC convention, Chicago, Aug. 8, 2008

I’m here under false colors.

(Refer to other panelists.)

Courage is what Ira Harkey displayed when he bought a down-at-heel weekly newspaper in Pascagoula, Mississippi in 1949 with the avowed intention of crusading against racism.

Courage is exemplified by Hazel Brannon Smith, the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing. Her little weeklies in the rural towns of Lexington and Durant Mississippi defied the White Citizens Council, exposed police mistreatment of black residents, and supported civil rights workers who sought the right to vote.

In 1963, months after winning the Pulitzer for his editorials, Harkey sold his paper. “I won the fight. I won, but I lost, too,” he wrote. “I found I . . . could not function in a silence of total isolation as if I were underwater or in galactic space. I was a pariah.”

Smith held on for two decades as the Citizens Council financed a competing paper and enforced an advertising boycott, until the roof literally caved in onto her printing press. To this day, the derelict Lexington Advertiser building in the shadow of Lexington’s town square sits open to the elements, as though to remind those with long enough memories of the price of defiance.

I defied no powerful forces when a few days after Valentines Day I made a phone call to the local bookstore—the only bookstore in the Bronx—to ask about the reaction there to the death sentence proclaimed on the novelist Salman Rushdie. Iranian ruler Ayatollah Khomeini’s threats extended to those who published and promoted the novel The Satanic Verses. The chain bookstores—Barnes& Noble, B. Dalton, Walden—had removed the book from their shelves. I thought that was wrong, and I was looking for a local peg for an editorial saying so.

Now, I have a deal with my brother and co-publisher. (Explain the deal.)

So when I wrote an editorial contrasting the cowardice of the chain stores with the courage of Paperbacks Plus, our little local store, I didn’t show it to Richard.

The tyrant and his chains

Here’s the central argument of that editorial: “To suppress a book or punish an idea is to express contempt for the people who read the book or consider the idea. In preferring the logic of the executioner to the logic of debate, the book burners and the Ayatollah Khomeini display their distrust for the principle on which self-government rests, the wisdom and virtue of ordinary people.”

I thought that was motherhood and apple pie. Until 5:30 on Tuesday, February 28. Story of mom’s call. Fire lieutenant: “Written anything about Salman Rushdie lately?”

(Tell the story and show slides.)

911 call: “Can you please listen to my message very carefully. Very very important. You know that British author who wrote the book The Satanic Verses. For that protest I throw the bomb. I’m sorry but we got to do more bombs pretty soon if they don’t stop from publish that book. That’s it.”

(Rally in the rain and other local expressions of support.)

Some 100 community newspapers in New York State reprinted “The tyrant and his chains.” Those publishers are the courageous ones. Many of them later told me that they were frightened about the possible consequences; some said they disagreed with my editorial’s assertion that “Americans are fighting back in the most appropriate way possible, by reading and talking about” The Satanic Verses. But they acted anyway, as an act of solidarity.

The editorial appeared in its entirety in the daily New York Newsday, as well. And Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan had it published in the Congressional Record. All told, it reached a million readers, surely a defeat for the terrorists.

For the next 10 years on the anniversary of the bombing, The Press published an editorial about Rushdie. It did so for two reasons: to keep the fact that the author was still in danger before the public; and to say to the bombers: “You didn’t win. You haven’t intimidated us.”

I want to turn to another example of courage in community journalism—one most of us don’t think about much: the courage displayed by our students.

(Show Hunts Point Express and explain what it is.)

[Student] Monica’s blog

“Now, you may think, why in God’s name did I register for a class that heavily covers the Bronx, a neighborhood that isn’t exactly known for its peace and safety, on the contrary. Good question. I myself am seriously petrified of the thought of going there often, interviewing people and other things . . . I’m certainly not crazy about the Bronx, [but] it can’t do me too much harm (assuming I don’t get shot at or attacked).

Then, at the end of the year, she accompanied the last of her three stories with a note saying how impressed she was with the students and teachers she had written about, and what an eye-opening experience covering an impoverished South Bronx neighborhood had been.

When English or history or sociology professors assign students to write, they’re asking them to respond to the writing or others. I think we sometimes forget that we journalism teachers are doing something quite different. It’s hard to go to unfamiliar places, and harder still to observe and question strangers. We ask our students to be brave, and we should applaud their courage.

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