Deep South Dispatch
Product details
- ISBN 9781496828194
- Weight: 423g
- Dimensions: 152 x 228mm
- Publication Date: 31 Mar 2020
- Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Herbers's reporting began in 1951, when he covered the brutal execution of Willie McGee, a black man convicted for the rape of a white housewife, and the 1955 trial for the murder of Emmett Till, a black teenager killed for allegedly whistling at a white woman. With immediacy and first-hand detail, Herbers describes the assassination of John F. Kennedy; the death of four black girls in the Birmingham, Alabama, church bombing; extensive travels and interviews with Martin Luther King Jr.; Ku Klux Klan cross-burning rallies and private meetings; the Freedom Summer murders in Philadelphia, Mississippi; and marches and riots in St. Augustine, Florida, and Selma, Alabama, that led to passage of national civil rights legislation.
This account is also a personal journey as Herbers witnessed the movement with the conflicted eyes of a man dedicated to his southern heritage but who also rejected the prescribed laws and mores of a prejudiced society. His story provides a complex understanding of how the southern status quo, in which the white establishment benefited at the expense of African Americans, was transformed by a national outcry for justice.
Anne Farris Rosen is the daughter of John Herbers. An award-winning freelance journalist and adjunct professor at the University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism, she has worked for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Pew Research Center.
