You manage to transform the story of The Times dragging its feet of clay on putting a Black reporter in the game almost the minit before MLK got killed, into one of wonderment and that a Black reporter had started covering MLK. Unexplained mystery.
Why so long, NYT? "Earl Caldwell ... made history ... when he became the first black reporter The Times had assigned to follow the civil rights leader."
I think what you meant to say is that The Times finally gave an important job to a black reporter, one that was equal to what it had always been giving its white reporters. 1968. Way behind the curve for a somewhat progressive publication.
"The milestones in King’s career ... had always been the province of white correspondents, principally native Southerners"
1968. It took you that, what, 13 or 14 years to put a reporter on the scene who was treated the same under Jim Crow as the subject you were covering?
This story is a whitewash.
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Back when the Times was still the paper of record.
Why did the "7 days that shook the world and the Times" Internal story run without a byline? Any reason why Earl Caldwell declined to comment or to be interviewed for the April 3, 2018 story?
Joe Louw's historic pictures of the balcony where MLK was killed were not part of his assignment in Memphis. He was one of the soundmen supporting a Public Broadcast Laboratory team of documentarians who were following the march. We who were part of that PBL team in 1968, led by editor Joe Filipowic, had to edit all of that raw material back in NYC to prepare it for broadcast later that week. In August 1969, I invited Joe Louw to be one of our soundmen on the movie, WOODSTOCK.
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Are you sure that is Arthur Gelb in your picture? He looks absolutely nothing like the man I began working with a few years later.
Dear Readers, Here's a link to the Jim Douglas article I mentioned in my previous comment. Thank you. https://kennedysandking.com/martin-luther-king-articles/the-martin-luthe...
Carole Ferraro 4-6-2018
I don't expect this to be published, but I'm disappointed this story was so superficial. The title suggests a description of Cardell's process of covering the event and what he did to rally the newsroom. Did he lead by doing? Did he advise them on key perspectives? We get nothing but his designated assignments in the tragedy—nothing that reveals him as a key player.
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Agree. Also odd that Cardell declined to comment?
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Joe Louw went on to a successful career as a photojournalist, working in Kenya and returning home to South Africa after the end of apartheid. He died in Johannesburg in 2004. He had traveled to Memphis to film Martin Luther King's support to the striking sanitation workers and was staying on the second floor of the Lorraine Motel. I'm not sure he realized that he had created an iconic image when he rushed out to the balcony and photographed the people around Martin Luther King, but he mentioned that he could have taken close up shots of MLK's body, but did not, out of respect for him, because of the destruction caused by the bullet wound.
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David Margolick, so if we want to find Stokely Carmichael's reaction to Dr. King's death we should enter, "inflammatory remarks about guns"?
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You can listen to the clip of him speaking on the History Channel: https://www.history.com/embed/21170832
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What struck me was that all the people involved were men, with the two or three women who took part pitching in from obviously very inferior positions. And yes, even if that was the title of the day, the use of "rewrite men" and so on. Very glad this part of journalism has changed!
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I suppose some of today's readers might even object to this:
"...Diane Henry, news assistant, manned the telephones as the men called in."
But to be realistic, the title of 'rewrite man' had been part of the newsroom vocabulary for decades. The rewrite desk was a known as place for fast, accurate and highly skilled writers, male or female. I doubt the women working the desk in 1968 would have felt diminished by the imperfect job title. In that era, if the term "rewrite men" was altered at all for gender accuracy, these journalists would likely have ended up being called 'rewrite girls'-- not exactly an improvement.
Gender roles--happily--sometimes change very suddenly; language, not so much. Our vocabulary occasionally must play catch up to keep pace with the pioneers who break through gender barriers. But that's OK. Somebody has to take the lead, and these women are more than capable of the task.
I appreciate your including this in the MLK stories on this sad anniversary. It brings another time vividly to life.
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Back in the day, I looked forward to reading the Daily News when they had the best columnists - my favorites Earl Caldwell & Jimmy Breslin, et al. Great reads.
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Gripping and harrowing reporting. I'm stricken by the shock and the disturbing feeling that even today the official explanation(s) of what happened and who shot Dr. King just don't make sense.
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Did it occur to the author to use the word "staff" instead of "men"? Yes, I realize most of the reporters were men and there was plenty of sexism, but if I wrote such a piece today I would use a gender neutral term.
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The industry commonly called them "rewrite men", just as the personnel who ran the printing presses were called "pressmen". You can't rewrite history.
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Yes, and the writer's use of "spearheaded" is racist.
And "congruent" discriminates against people who don't know what the word means.
(eye roll)
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That's what you got from this?
Not much in this article on the journalistic reason Mr. Caldwell was sent down there.
According to him, the editor sent Mr. Caldwell down there to do a “journalistic hit job” on Dr. King.
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The paper of history covering it as it unfolded.
Lead type, cigarette smoke, rotten coffee and adrenaline.
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I recently read Jim Douglas's account of the civil trial for the murder of Rev. King. I was astonished at all the evidence there is that point to a conspiracy to murder Rev. King that reached into Federal agencies. One of the readers commented on how the bushes and grass had been cut down....any other tampering with the crime scene? We have yet to be told the truth!
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No concrete evidence of a conspiracy whatsoever but don't let that stop you.
He wasn't the "lone journalist," thank you very much. Have you not seen Joseph Louw's famous photo of the assassination, showing King down on the balcony surrounded by his entourage? Do you not consider Barney Sellers of the Commercial Appeal, to be a journalist? You ran his photo along with your story. To think that in this day and age the New York Times doesn't consider photojournalists to be journalists is astounding. http://time.com/3749091/mlk-assassination-photograph/
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I was 15 years old and living in Cincinnati, Oho. I remember feeling lost the same feeling I had when President Kennedy was killed. Why did this happen? As a young Blackman my parents would not let us go outside because of the riots. Here we are 50 years later with no strong black leader. It is so sad that the person in the white house who plays president has not made mention on this date. In a way I am glad he has not because I do not think he would say anything respectful. Thank you Dr. King for provide a path for me to follow!
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It would have been nice to see an image of the day-after front page.
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Great piece. The part that stuck is that they had an obit ready eight years before he died. That says more about America than any other thing I have read about King.
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Newsrooms always have obits ready on all prominent people long before they die, just fyi.
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Yes, Mugs, but the idea that they first got it started when MLK was all of 31 years old IS remarkable...
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Did you read the article? That fact is stated.
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Thank you for this first-hand account of events and a glimpse into journalism in an earlier age.
For the past few days I've been steeped in reading and watching documentaries about Dr. King. It all brings me to tears, still.
And 50 years on, we appear to be moving backward, not forward.
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Thank you NYT for telling the story like it is or was.
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Too bad that they are now often hard pressed to do the same.
A truly amazing article. I could feel the tension. It reads like a screenplay for a frenetic movie. It reminds me of "All The Presidents Men"
Also interesting is remembering what it was like before cell phones, Internet, email etc. I could picture the composing room with the pre-set obit waiting to go to the composing stone for final updates. The industrial sounds of the Linotype machines casting hot lead. No computers there.
Make a movie!
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This is the comment I was going to make. Everything was mechanical or over limited phone lines. The reporter had to fish for change to call his story in. Pre-written obits or stories were actually stored in Linotype set lead type. Little or no computer typesettingin 1968 and of course no internet communication...fax machines took 8 minutes or so per page. Very exciting article.
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The behind the scenes is often just as if not more interesting than the breaking news. Thank you for sharing this information. WOW.
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The same NYT journalist Earl Caldwell writes in today's (April 4) NY Daily News, "Questions Linger" with a somewhat different take.
"The official story came the night of the assassination with a stamp of 'case closed.' The killer was James Earl Ray, an escaped convict, officials said.
Ray fired the shot from the bathroom window of a flophouse a block away. A manhunt was already in the works.
Two days later, I stood in my motel room doorway and noticed the crime scene had been altered.
Across from the motel, the thicket of trees, brush and big weeds all had been cut to within an inch of the ground."
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Chilling.
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A great story about when the NYT was a real newspaper, not an organ of the DNC.
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truth, science, the universe, they all have a liberal bias. so I'm pretty comfortable that I'm on the right side of history here.
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@Jerry IMHO The NYT is still a REAL newspaper. Guessing your news /diet/ consists of Fox,Fox & Fox ?
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That's an utterly inappropriate Comment. Nothing in the article justifies such snarkiness.
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A fantastic window into old-fashioned journalism at its best. Articles such as this are why I read The Times.
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Vivid and breathtaking indeed.
And the old-school touchstones that take me back to my Detroit News city room days -- phoned-in copy, rewrite desk, "set in type," "the bull pen," "rushed through photoengraving," pay phones.
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Me too. It takes me back to my news days in television and at the Free Press. I miss those days and the path our country was on.
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This story very much reminded me of the photographer Joe Louw, a brilliant young colored South African I knew in Dar es Salaam, Tanganyika (now Tanzania) when I was teaching in Africa for a year in 1962-1963. His name appears as the byline under your photograph of King lying on the balcony, surrounded by officers with NYT's Caldwell in the background. Joe was trying to get to the United States after fleeing S.A. with his white girlfriend. He and I lost track of each other when we both left Tanganyika after the spring of 1963, so five years later I was startled to see his name and face in Life Magazine the week after the assassination, as the photographer who was photographing King on the balcony when the murder occurred. Life ran his spectacular pictures the week after the event, folks around King, some pointing towards the point from which the shots came. I tried to contact Joe, dropping a note c/o Life shortly afterwards, but was never able to make contact, and do not know what became of him later. (I was a graduate student -- in physics -- at the time, so I did not have time to follow up, alas.
I hope Joe went on with this wonderful scoop to have a rich career as a journalistic photographer, which I thought he well deserved. He had come to the school for refugees where I taught in Dar that year with three other American student volunteers. That was a rich and vividly remembered time for us all, with earth-shaking events striking near and far.
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Interesting to think of how the NY Times itself was so segregated and discriminatory throughout the 1960s that the Paper didn't even have Black reporters available to cover the civil rights movement, much less other news events and stories. It was actually a novel idea for the Times to send a Black reporter to cover King in Memphis.
This, for a large paper located in NYC, which had large African American population, much of which was well-educated.
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Yet the NYT was considered "liberal" in those days.
Now imagine how conservative papers treated him... There's a reason why the National Review doesn't make their archives available online.
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Thank you Free Press. Because of you we all remember.
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