Both articles on the bombing—the one from the September 16 edition of the Los Angeles Times and the one from the September 18 edition of the Chicago Defender—report the basic facts: that bombs detonated at the 16th Street Baptist Church, killing four black girls and injuring about 20 other black people. But then the articles diverge.

The one from the LA Times deals predominantly with the implications of the bombing for race relations and the preservation of order in the cities.

The Chicago Defender article, by contrast, focuses almost exclusively on one awful fact: that even in this instance of great tragedy, it was business as usual as far as the Jim Crow laws went. Black victims were driven by black ambulance drivers to black hospitals, while white victims were driven by white drivers to white hospitals.



The Chicago Defender is one of the oldest black newspapers in the country, and, as the article on the church bombing shows, it reported news from a perspective quite different from what was generally available in mainstream white newspapers.

It's not that the Defender articles were intrinsically more accurate or reliable, it's just that they depicted facts most white readers were unlikely to get anywhere else. Textbooks wouldn't have been much help. How many of them even today report the fact—which does so much to help students in 2008 understand segregation in 1963—that the races were kept separate amidst the chaos and carnage of the 16th Street blasts?

Probably not many.

Activity

Go to the African-American Civil Rights Movement topic in ProQuest Historical Newspapers (Graphical Version).

Pick one of the subtopics and select from the article lists something from a mainstream white newspaper and something from the Chicago Defender.

(Alternatively, if your school subscribes to the Defender or another black newspaper, search for articles on any racially charged historical event.)

Write a 500-word essay comparing and contrasting the ways in which the two newspapers treat the same event.