Gwyneth Mellinger, Chasing Newsroom Diversity: From Jim Crow to Affirmative Action (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2013), Paperback, 240 pages, $25.Review by Joseph HaydenInstitutional histories tend not to be very compelling, usually because their authors are burdened by the desire to catalogue everything that ever happened to an organization. That is not the case with this monograph, which tackles only one aspect of the American Society of Newspaper Editors' 90-year life span: the group's stance toward newsroom integration and diversity. The result is a brisk account of an often contentious professional quest. It is also a story of failure.Part of the University of Illinois' History of Communication series, edited by Robert McChesney and John Nerone, this study examines ASNE's attitudes and initiatives concerning social justice in the workplace. Author Gwyneth Mellinger starts her analysis with the recalcitrance of white editors in the 1950s. This was the era of Brown v. Board of Education, and just as schools were asked to open their doors, other sectors of society, including the newspaper industry, were likewise scrutinized. Now editors were being challenged, albeit quietly and usually privately, to do more, too. They usually responded with defensiveness and rationalizations.Thus the association would weather the 1950s with its all-white identity challenged but intact (20), Mellinger writes. Indeed, the group tolerated racist editors like Harry Ayers of the Anniston (Ala.) Star, whose offensive comments about black people embarrassed the organization at its 1956 convention. It gave voice to people such as Frederick Sullen of the Jackson (Miss.) Daily News, who fretted over mongrelism. And it amplified the voice of segregationists who trumpeted southernism and their Confederate identity, motifs often played up in the words and cartoons in the ASNE Bulletin.That is not to say that all southern editors in ASNE were racial reactionaries. Several individuals, such as Virginius Dabney of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, sympathized with the goal of greater inclusiveness. But the foes of integration checked and effectively silenced the more progressive tendencies of their colleagues. Thus, a handful of vocal louts held sway: While few editors openly opposed social integration by the end of the decade, few openly supported the integration of their (45).The one event that may have altered the mindset of ASNE members and eventually influenced them to change was the Kerner Commission's 1968 report blaming recent urban riots, in part, on the nation's monochromatic newsrooms. That impact did not manifest itself immediately, though. Just as the editors' group had utterly ignored the Hutchins Commission report of 1947, calling for the media to exercise greater social responsibility, they at first tried to look the other way in the face of these accusations. At the 1968 convention, speakers...acknowledged it only in passing (48). But coming in the wake of such traumatic national events, which had triggered the report, ASNE members slowly started addressing the issues raised by the study.The years immediately following the Kerner commission were, therefore, a time of transition, when the idea of integrating newsrooms and the ASNE had appeared on the horizon and many editors had begun contemplating its distant inevitability (51).Editors like Norman Isaacs of the Louisville Courier-Journal and C.A. Pete McKnight of the Charlotte Observer were among the first association officers to push hard for the recruitment of minorities. When McKnight became president of the group in 1971, he launched the Minority Employment Committee.By the mid-1970s, more members were behind the goal of diversity, and they were working more aggressively to encourage it. They also sought alliances with people outside their association. Eugene Patterson of the Atlanta Constitution and later the St. …