Civil Rights movement causes mid-century split in coverage

For the first 50 years of the Southeast Missourian's existence, the coverage of blacks was limited to crime, accident reports and obituaries. The only reason we know the people in the story were black is because they were denoted as such.

"About a week ago Joe Bollinger, a respectable and colored man, died of pneumonia at his home on the Benton road ..." -- Daily Republican, Thursday, Dec. 8, 1910.

Or

"Crawford McCurdy, Negro, is killed in automobile collision near Three-Mile Creek, Highway 61." -- Southeast Missourian, Oct. 9, 1954.

But this slowly began to change in the 1950s, as the Civil Rights movement thrust the issue of racism onto the front pages of papers nationwide. The Southeast Missourian was among them.

The seminal event of the Civil Rights movement came on May 17, 1954, when the U.S. Supreme Court made its landmark ruling in Brown v. Topeka Board of Education, declaring that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. When Missouri was listed among the 17 states with legalized segregation laws, the entire state sat up and took notice.

"In Cape Girardeau, the problem is simple, if the solution is not," read an editorial published the day after the court's decision. The editorial goes on to say that the solution lies in the "assimilation" of blacks in schools where they would attend with whites. And as for the black teachers, "the Board of Education had advised them that they would not be needed ... because the bulk of the pupils would still be white and there would be no classes exclusively for negroes."

While the announcement made front-page headlines in the spring and summer, when the ruling actually took effect later that fall the Southeast Missourian ran a typical front-page package of two photos of children lined up outside of the Junior High and Franklin Schools and a story at the bottom of the page about enrollment figures. Four black children were pictured but not mentioned in the captions, and the enrollment of "negroes" got only a slight mention about four paragraphs into the story.

Into the 1960s

Although Cape Girardeau wasn't reported to have kicked up a fuss about integration, it was different in other parts of Southeast Missouri. In May 1963, while wire photos and stories of the violence that ensued at the civil rights protests in Birmingham, Ala., the Missourian was also reporting about lawsuits coming through Cape Girardeau's Federal Courthouse and aimed at forcing desegregation of seven Southeast Missouri schools.

Specific districts were not named in the story except to say that they were located in Pemiscot and Dunklin counties, along with one in the Sikeston area. These schools refused to integrate their students almost 10 years after the U.S. Supreme Court's decision.

Later that same year, the issue of race again appeared on the front page of the Southeast Missourian when a city meeting was held to discuss solutions for some 76 people, virtually all "negroes," who were going to be displaced when the new post office was to be built at Bellevue and Frederick streets. As was happening all over the nation, these citizens and black community leaders were standing up to the establishment, crying foul over a combination of racial and economic issues.

"The problem facing the families is two fold, as it was brought out," read the Missourian account of the meeting. "One is racial in that the Negroes are restricted as to the areas in which they can live and the other is economic."

Change was slow in coming in Southeast Missouri, and this was reflected in the coverage of the Southeast Missourian. While the civil rights movement picked up steam nationwide, the newspaper ran wire stories about the 1964 ban on poll taxes, President Lyndon Johnson's signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Bill and the 1965 slaying of Malcolm X painted pages alongside local stories like that of a "Negro boy, 17," being arrested for murder in Sikeston.

Occasionally the paper editorialized on national events of the movement, such as the attempted march of protesters in Selma, Ala., that was squelched by Alabama State authorities and troopers and erupted in violence in March 1965.

"We think it was unreasonable for the leaders of the Negro militants at Selma, Ala., even to suggest a 50-mile march on a public highway from Selma to the state capital Montgomery," read the editorial. "Gov. Wallace used sound judgement and was within all rights to plead with the leaders of the Negroes not to go through with the march and to use the police powers of the state to keep the march form materializing."

But its editorial on the slaying of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968 read in part: "The tragedy lies not alone in his death ... It lies more in the effects on the millions of people he led and who saw him as a means to a better life and to equality. Their leader has been removed."

On the local civil rights front, things were relatively quiet.

"Things were more subtle here, as they are now," said Dr. Frank Nickell, history professor at Southeast Missouri State University and director of the Center for Regional History. "Not much did happen here publicly. Blacks chose to challenge quietly, without confrontation because it's the nature of this community both black and white."

Nickell said the activity around Cape Girardeau was largely limited to discussion, registering to vote, church and organization membership, and a movement to keep black students in school.

These are things the newspaper simply didn't cover in the 1950s and 1960s, said Louise Duncan. Duncan, 73, has lived in Cape Girardeau all her life and was very active in the movement through her church, St. James AME.

"Once in a while they'd cover some of our special church events," she remembers. "But I don't remember any particular incidents. There was no marching or rock-throwing."

That wasn't at all the case in Cairo, Ill., in the late '60s and early '70s, and the Southeast Missourian brought much of that news to its readers. In 1969, an organization known as the United Front came to the forefront.

Over those years, the Southeast Missourian referred to the United Front as everything from "an advocate of social programs for the poor" and "a black civil rights organization," to a "militant Negro organization." But in a 1971 article about Cairo United Front leader Charles Koen, Koen calls his group a "survival organization."

During that time, the United Front led an organized long-term protest against what he called poor living conditions in black neighborhoods and the refusal of white-owned Cairo businesses to hire black employees. The latter was the impetus for the United Front's multi-year boycott of those businesses. A Jan. 20, 1971, Southeast Missourian article painted the situation this way:

"The town blames Koen solely for what now is almost three years of race warfare. Rifle sniping is commonplace. Bullet holes mark most buildings in some neighborhood sections. At least six white businesses have gone out of business as a direct or indirect result of a 21-month-old Negro boycott. And black-white baiting is so near crisis that one state investigator has warned of an 'imminent blood bath.'"

Cape Girardeau had its own United Front. Although not as controversial as its Cairo cousin, it garnered its share of headlines in the early 1970s. For weeks in June 1970, the Missourian followed the trial of three Cape Girardeau United Front members being tried for disturbances at Cape Central and Junior High schools. A month before that two United Front members were indicted for disturbing a Cape Girardeau City Council meeting.

In August 1970, the United Front wrote a letter to the Southeast Missourian denying responsibility for three fires in which arson was reported as evident. Those fires destroyed a sawmill, a refuse collection and disposal equipment.

"'The responsibility lies with the total community which has for four generations failed to meet the human needs of its Poor and Black," the letter said.

In 1971, a Southeast Missourian article reported two United Front leaders specifically criticizing the paper as giving the public "escapist" reading matter. The article said the two claimed that the local media "failed to give equal opportunity to the poor to express their desires and needs."

While one Cape Girardeau civil rights group became associated with violent unrest, there was another that managed to create a positive and progressive buzz in the Southeast Missourian.

Although chartered in Cape Girardeau in 1942, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People came to the forefront of local activity in the early 1970s. The marquee event came in April 1974 when for the first time in history the NAACP held its annual 10-state regional conference in Southeast Missouri.

While speaking to the Southeast Missourian at that conference in Cape Girardeau, national NAACP director William Morris criticized the Nixon administration, which was on the brink of impeachment at the time for the Watergate break-ins.

"He said the administration is still anti-black and that the effects of some of its decisions are felt strongly and disproportionately by blacks and the poor."

The Southeast Missourian continued to cover the NAACP as it spurred creation of a committee to write an affirmative action program for the City of Cape Girardeau in 1977.

Today the NAACP is still active in the Cape Girardeau community, sponsoring the annual Martin Luther King Jr. birthday celebration and handing out the Dr. Edward M. Spicer Excellence in Diversity Award -- a yearly nod to the person who makes the greatest contribution to racial equality.