Deep South Dispatch

<p>Former New York Times correspondent John N. Herbers (1923-2017) who covered the civil rights movement for more than a decade has produced Deep South Dispatch: Memoir of a Civil Rights Journalist a compelling story of national and historical significance. Born in the South during a time of entrenched racial segregation Herbers witnessed a succession of landmark civil rights uprisings that rocked the country the world and his own conscience. Herbers's retrospective is a timely and critical illumination on America's current racial dilemmas and ongoing quest for justice.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p>