Media and the civil rights movement conference held Oct. 5

Scholars who study the media’s impact during the civil rights movement and civil rights activists were also present at the conference. The guests’ experiences set the stage for the conference title: In the Midst of a Movement: The South, the Press, and Civil Rights.

The conference featured four separate sessions throughout the day:

• Session One:
  
  Dorothy Butler Gilliam and Moses Newson were the featured speakers. Gilliam was one of the few African-American women journalists in the 1960’s and the first African American female reporter for the The Washington Post where she covered the violent integration of Central High in Little Rock. Newson spent 20 years covering every major civil rights event in the south working for Afro-American newspapers in Baltimore.

• Session Two:
  
  Karl Fleming and Norman Lumpkin were featured in session two. Fleming began his career in Wilson, N.C. at a newspaper. He went on to become one of Newsweek magazine’s chief civil rights reporters, covering all of the South’s hot spots throughout the 1960s.

  Lumpkin was the first African American reporter at a television station in Alabama where he covered major events in the civil rights movement. Most notably, he covered George Wallace on the campaign trail.

• Session Three:
  
  The third session featured Jerry Mitchell, former reporter for The Clarion Ledger in Jackson, Miss. Mitchell’s stories played a large role in sending four Klansmen to jail for the assassination of NAACP leader Medgar Evers, the fatal firebombing of NAACP leader Vernon Dahmer, the bombing of a Birmingham church that killed four girls and the murders of three men.

• Session Four:
  
  The fourth session was a panel discussion. All of the journalists were joined on stage by Tom Gaither, an activist who worked with CORE during the movement. Bob Korstad, associate professor of public policy studies and history at Duke University, moderated this closing discussion of journalists’ experiences in the civil rights movement.

The conference was funded by a grant from the North Carolina Humanities Council, the Elon Fund for Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, the Department of History and Geography and the Elon University School of Communications. A documentary will be produced by students examining the experiences of journalists, scholars and activists attending the conference.