Editor Emory O. Jackson, the Birmingham World, and the Fight for Civil Rights in Alabama, 1940-1975 ed. by Kimberley Mangun

Abstract

Reviewed by: Editor Emory O. Jackson, the Birmingham World, and the Fight for Civil Rights in Alabama, 1940-1975 ed. by Kimberley Mangun James L. Baggett Editor Emory O. Jackson, the Birmingham World, and the Fight for Civil Rights in Alabama, 1940-1975. By Kimberley Mangun. New York: Peter Lang, 2019. xviii, 268 pp. $47.95. ISBN 978-1-4331-4802-6. Not long after attending the 1968 funeral of Martin Luther King, Jr., in Atlanta, Birmingham World newspaper editor Emory O. Jackson drove to Selma. Jackson confided to a friend that he walked back and forth across the Edmund Pettus Bridge four times, pondering the march that had happened there only three years prior. And for the next six weeks Jackson was unusually silent, not writing his twice-weekly newspaper column. It was a rare time of quiet in his otherwise long and exhausting career. Jackson was a critical, if not well remembered, figure in Alabama's Civil Rights struggle. In a welcome addition to Civil Rights historiography, Kimberley Mangun, an associate professor of communication at the University of Utah, has written the first full-length study of Jackson's work as a journalist and Civil Rights activist. Born in Buena Vista, Georgia, in 1908, Jackson grew up a child of middle class parents in Birmingham. He attended Industrial High School, then the only high school for African Americans in the city, and Morehouse College in Atlanta, where he edited the student newspaper. After teaching high school for two years, Jackson joined the staff of the Birmingham World in 1934. He was a feature writer who covered sports and wrote book reviews before being named managing editor. In the 1940s Jackson joined the Birmingham branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and [End Page 194] served for decades as an active member and officer in the NAACP. Jackson believed that the road to equal rights for African Americans ran through the ballot box. Blacks, Jackson argued, needed to secure equal voting rights and use the franchise to build political power. In letters to government officials and through the pages of the World, Jackson exposed discriminatory practices that local registrars used to keep African Americans from registering to vote and helped educate potential Black voters about their legal rights and strategies to use when confronted with recalcitrant white voting officials. Jackson also wrote extensively about police brutality and the frequent killings of African Americans by white police officers. His efforts attracted the notice of Birmingham's white city commission, who labeled him a "Communist," and brought harassment from the police. But the rise to prominence of Civil Rights leaders who practiced a different style of activism pushed Jackson further into the background. He did not support direct action protests such as those led by Martin Luther King, Jr., and Fred L. Shuttlesworth in Birmingham in 1963. Calling such street protests "mass action stunts," (143) Jackson believed they secured only short-term gains and were counterproductive because they disturbed the peace and sometimes incited violence. And Jackson, a Birmingham booster despite all the city's racial problems, "constantly worried about the impressions of his city," (147) Mangun writes. Jackson believed the 1963 protests, where authorities used police dogs and fire hoses to disperse demonstrators, harmed Birmingham's image. By the early 1960s, Jackson, a generation older than the Civil Rights leaders who came after him, felt "the movement was beginning to pass him by." Where he had once drawn "inspiration" from his Civil Rights activism, he now confessed to a friend that he "didn't feel part of anything" (143). Jackson was not wrong in his belief that racial equality required working within the legal system, the courts, and the ballot box. And while he supported King and Shuttlesworth, Jackson found it difficult to embrace the need to demand white America's attention with large-scale protests. [End Page 195] As a crusading journalist, Jackson was sometimes at the center of historic events, other times a sideline observer. Despite a meager salary, insufficient staff, and deep frustration with the mismanagement of his newspaper by the parent company in Atlanta, Jackson never left the World and served as...