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.
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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