Course Description

The 2006 book The Race Beat, which won the Pulitzer Prize for history, tells the story of how the Black press and a cadre of journalists with TV, magazines and newspapers conveyed the moral message that eventually awoke the nation. I have taught this book and know most of the main characters in it (one is my father, the Atlanta buro chief for Newsweek, another my first editor, Claude Sitton, from the Emory Wheel to the NYT, and others are in my Ph.D. dissertation). We will move chronologically through this other angle of a familiar MLK-led history, opening discussion of lesson on the news media and this election year.

Bio: I taught journalism for 19 years as a professor at Washington & Lee University. This academic stretch came after 26 years of reporting, writing and editing for metro papers (including the AJC in the 90s) and magazines.