Late, but not lost

By: Barbara Bedway A lengthy report in the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader on July 4 examining the paper's failures in covering the local civil rights struggle of the 1960s gained nationwide attention, but John Voskuhl, assistant managing editor for projects at the paper, says he has not gotten calls from other dailies considering doing the same thing. "Obviously, there are lots of papers with a similar history," he observes. "The main thing is, if you do this, you're likely to find very interesting stories that have not been shared. What could be better for a newspaper?"

An E&P spot-check of eight newspapers in four Southern states failed to find any that had conducted the kind of review carried out by the Lexington paper. But Alan English, executive editor at The Times in Shreveport, La., said he planned to bring up the idea at his next staff meeting, inspired by what the Herald-Leader had done.

Local historians have made clear to Voskuhl that history is impoverished by unreported events. They told him, he says, "doing research on the civil rights movement in general is complicated by the fact that a primary resource, newspapers, is almost utterly unhelpful. Papers always think of their obligations to their readers, and not always of their obligation to history."

The Lexington experiment began as the 50th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark Brown vs. Board of Education decision approached. A speech on newsroom ethics in May by Los Angeles Times Editor John Carroll, who led the Lexington paper from 1979 to 1991, provoked Voskuhl to dig deeper. Referring to corrections, Carroll, partly joking, "gave an outlandish example," Voskuhl recalls, "using the Herald-Leader: 'It has come to the editor's attention that the Herald-Leader neglected to cover the civil rights movement. We regret the omission.'"

Voskuhl decided to take this seriously and asked his reporters to look hard at the paper's own coverage. He expected his reporters would find some good stories as they delved into research on the civil rights movement and its impact on Lexington's civic life. "I'm a story freak," Voskuhl acknowledges. Reporters did find good stories; unfortunately, none of them had ever appeared in the pages of the local newspapers, The Herald and The Leader. (The two papers eventually merged under ownership of the Knight Newspapers group.)

John Carroll's whimsical correction would top the article that appeared in the Herald-Leader on July 4, when the newspaper at last published, on the front page, news of Lexington's vibrant civil rights movement ? as told to reporter Linda Blackford, four decades later.

Blackford, with the help of reporter Linda Minch on archival records, had found myriad stories of lunch-counter sit-ins, marches down Main Street to protest segregated stores and restaurants, and prayer vigils on the county courthouse steps, but "we couldn't find that much about it in the paper," she recalls. "That seemed sort of curious. I had just been talking to [sources in the African-American community] about desegregation. Since these same people were involved in the civil rights movement, I just looked them up again in my Rolodex. I got a lot of response from ex-reporters, who had chafed under the restrictions."

Though the Lexington movement's stories basically remained unwritten, images of some of the protests were captured on film by a local high school student named Calvert McCann, who had learned photography while working as a janitor and film processor at a store on Main Street. A few of McCann's photos had been published at the time in black newspapers such as the Louisville Defender, but most of his film remained undeveloped in canisters in his mother's home.

Only last year did the film become known, when local historians learned of it while compiling a photo archive from the black community. Eventually his photos were showcased in a book on Lexington's black history, where Blackford saw McCann's name. "Calvert's not in the phone book," she says, "so I did a reverse search and found he lived two blocks from the paper."

Local civil rights leaders and former employees of the papers told Blackford that the lack of coverage was no mere oversight, but rather the policy of the papers' white management, which did publish national stories about the national movement. "The rare local march or protest that made front-page news usually involved arrests of demonstrators and was described in the terse, clipped tones of a police report," Blackford reported. The papers' publisher generally supported desegregation but believed keeping "rabble rousers" off the pages was best for the city.

There has not been much local response to the July 4 story. The paper has posted three queries asking readers for memories of that earlier time. "I think it will come," says Blackford. "We'd like to keep on telling the story." The experience has led Voskuhl to consider what current issues deserve better coverage. Candidates include gay marriage and Lexington's sizable migrant population, suggestions he received after sending an e-mail urging the staff to "get ahead of the next possible 40-year correction."