Elon University students will present a screening of a civil rights documentary showcasing journalists who had a profound impact on the civil rights movement in the south at 3 p.m., Saturday, Dec. 9 in Koury Business Center room 101. The screening is free and open to the public
The documentary, titled “In the Midst of a Movement,” is based on the stories and experiences of journalists who attended a civil rights conference at Elon in October. Scholars who study the media’s impact during the civil rights movement and civil rights activists also shared insights for the documentary.
The documentary includes these journalists:
- Dorothy Butler 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.
- Moses Newson spent 20 years covering every major civil rights event in the south working for Afro-American newspapers in Baltimore.
- Karl 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.
- Horace Carter began his career in Tabor City, N.C. at the Tabor City Tribune. Carter risked his life in his news crusade in the 1950s reporting about the Ku Klux Klan’s activities. In 1953, the Tribune was the first weekly paper in the country to win the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for its editorials about the Klan.
- 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.
- Tom Gaither, an activist and former field secretary of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), was involved in challenging segregation on interstate buses and terminals by organizing the freedom rides that occurred in 1961.