On the 55th anniversary of the 1962 crisis at Ole Miss, author Kathleen Wickham traces the footsteps of twelve American journalists and examines the unsolved murder of Paul Guihard, a French reporter, the only journalist killed during the civil rights movement. In We Believed We Were Immortal: Twelve Reporters Who Covered the 1962 Integration Crisis at Ole Miss, Wickham details the challenges faced by these journalists and how they managed to overcome beatings, snipers, and a rogue governor to file the news reports reprinted here.
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As James Meredith observes, the strength of the book is “the reporters Wickham chose to write about.” Those reporters are Claude Sitton of The New York Times; Karl Fleming, of Newsweek; Sidna Brower, Daily Mississippian student editor, Moses Newson, of the Baltimore Afro-American, CBS reporter Dan Rather, Richard Valeriani of NBC, Michael Dorman of Newsday, freelance photographer Flip Schulke, Fred Powledge of the Atlanta Journal/Constitution, Texas videographer Gordon Yoder, Dorothy Gilliam of The Washington Post, and Neal Gregory of the Memphis Commercial Appeal.
“Here are flesh-and-blood reporters,” writes Jerry Mitchell of the Clarion-Ledger, “whose dispatches from the war-torn University of Mississippi campus remind us what real journalism looks like and why we need it now more than ever.”
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