Harry Belafonte was angry at Martin Luther King’s funeral. He lost his cool with a New York Times reporter, telling him “this grievous moment was in part the result of a climate of hate and distortion that the New York Times and other papers had helped create.” It wasn’t just Southerners who had laid the ground for King’s death—Northern newspapers and political leaders had distorted and demonized the civil rights leader for years as well, argued Belafonte.
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Today, in popular narratives of the civil rights movement, journalists are remembered as heroes who braved the South’s violent parochialism to shine a light on those confronting Jim Crow segregation. Some reporters did journey south to cover the “real struggle” between 1955 and 1965, showing great personal courage and publishing ground-breaking reporting on racial oppression and the valiant movement to confront it from Nashville to Selma. However, my study, which looked at hundreds of articles in the mainstream news media across the 1960s, shows that many of the same newspapers that rigorously covered the civil rights struggle in the South often failed to do so around similar struggles in the North and West.
Media outlets questioned the statements of Southern officials but generally accepted, or even amplified, the positions of officials who denied similar problems in cities like New York, Boston, and Chicago. And outlets that cast Southern activists’ direct action as valiant often portrayed civil rights activism outside of the South as unreasonable, disruptive, and potentially dangerous. They covered Dr. King differently in his support of Southern movements—Birmingham in 1963 and St. Augustine in 1964—than his support of movements against housing segregation, school segregation and police brutality in NYC, L.A., and Chicago in these same years. “As the nation, Negro and white, trembled with outrage at police brutality in the South,” King observed, “police misconduct in the North was rationalized, tolerated, and usually denied.” He noted that journalists and other white officials investigated and praised the movement “as long as I was safe from [them] down in the South.”
Too often, national newspapers would criticize civil rights activism that impacted their own cities. For instance, after the Sept. 15, 1963 bombing of Sixteenth Street Church in Birmingham killed four Black girls, Dr. King joined the call for Black people and their white allies to engage in a nationwide shopping boycott during the Christmas season that year to highlight that it was not just individuals in Alabama, but a national racial climate that set the stage for the church bombing. The New York Times editorial board, in a piece titled “Strike Against Santa Claus,” called King a "respected leader" but determined that the boycott was a "dangerous," "self-defeating" and “singularly inappropriate device for promoting civil rights.”
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While the New York Times did occasionally cover New York’s myriad civil rights protests, the paper typically did so without acknowledging a systemic problem. Ten years after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board decision, the segregated schools that Black and Puerto Rican students attended in New York City were underfunded, drastically overcrowded, and crumbling. After a decade of community activism had produced little change, Black parents and community activists called for a city-wide school boycott on February 3, 1964. The New York Times editorial board lambasted the protest as a “violent, illegal approach of adult-encouraged truancy.” They dismissed the demand for a comprehensive desegregation plan as “unreasonable and unjustified.” The New York Times claimed that “few things could be more destructive to the welfare of all of the city’s children” than the boycott, not the segregation of the city’s schools.
In treating Northern so-called “de facto” segregation as distinct from Southern de jure segregation under Jim Crow, newspapers obscured the range of state policies including school zoning, busing, teacher placement, disparities in school resources, decrepit school buildings, and double session days that all worked to maintain school segregation in schools across the Northeast, Midwest, and West (or what King and most Black activists at the time called “the North”). As Black lawyer Paul Zuber observed, “The word de facto segregation was never heard until the historic Supreme Court decision of 1954.” While the Black press repeatedly quoted King calling de facto segregation “a new form of slavery covered up with certain niceties,” mainstream news outlets ignored him.
In 1963, King went to Chicago repeatedly to support the growing movement challenging the city’s school and housing segregation, calling the city “as segregated” as Birmingham. In one article, the Tribune editorial board labeled King “arrogant” and an “outsider." The paper claimed that “in Chicago, there was little to no segregation" and suggested that King was not welcome in the city anymore. “We don’t need any agitators from the South" they wrote.
Just five years earlier, when King’s work seemed contained in the South, an editorial published by The Tribune titled “Portrait of a Christian” praised King as “an influential champion of both egalitarian ends and nonviolent means.” But when Dr. King’s call for change was trained on Chicago itself, the Tribune’s editorial board took a much different stance.
By 1965, King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) made the decision to help escalate their plans for the Chicago Freedom Movement by joining forces with the city’s local movement. During this time, the paper's coverage of King shifted. In one article, the editorial board called King's allegations of police brutality in Chicago “absurd."
In one article by the Tribune editorial board about King's predictions that riots in Los Angeles might spread to cities such as New York, Detroit, and Chicago unless the civil rights of Black citizens were better protected, the paper framed King's forecast as a threat. "What good is done by encouraging a mood of lawlessness among Negroes?" they asked.
When the open housing marches in the summer of 1966 drew massive violence from white supremacist organizations such as the KKK and the American Nazi Party in Chicago, the Tribune cast the Black marchers as the problem for inciting trouble. On Aug. 22, 1966 they editorialized against seven “outside” leaders causing “disorder” in the city.
On the West Coast, the Los Angeles Times also did not cover King and his fight for racial justice consistently. For instance, the paper would rarely frame housing and school segregation or police brutality as systematic problems in the city, although King and Black Angelenos had been naming and protesting these problems for years. In 1963, years of work across the state to challenge widespread discrimination in housing succeeded in getting a modest state Fair Housing Act passed that would mostly apply to apartments. Yet white Californians, real estate interests, and homeowner associations mobilized to secure a ballot proposition in 1964, Proposition 14, to protect the right of Californians to discriminate in the sale and rental of property, and the Los Angeles Times editorial board endorsed Proposition 14. While praising the “principle of anti-discrimination” they called the state’s Fair Housing Act an “artificial law” that infringed on a person’s right to private property.
King flew back and forth between Atlanta and Los Angeles repeatedly in 1964 to join the multiracial campaign to defeat Proposition 14. While he called the effort to pass it “one of the most shameful tragedies of the 20th century,”at a California rally, the Los Angeles Times doubled down on its support. Ultimately, Proposition 14 passed overwhelmingly, with three of four white Californians supporting it.
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King in the Saturday Review termed Proposition 14 a “vote for ghettos”—and blamed Proposition 14’s passage as kindling for the uprising that erupted in Watts nine months later. Sparked by the arrest and assault of 21-year-old Black resident Marquette Frye, after years of Black protest around police brutality, the 1965 Watts uprising seemed to shock the Los Angeles Times—which didn’t have a single Black writer on staff. White Los Angeles Times writer Theodore White extolled the “open and easy tolerance,” of the city where Black people had made “spectacular progress.” This corresponded to Gov. Edmund “Pat” Brown’s assertion that “California was a state without racial discrimination” and praised the police for “doing their job and doing it well.” Calling for “an increase in the size of the police force” the Los Angeles Times editorial board dismissed Black concerns which they suggested “hinge more around their resentment of alleged police attitudes and procedure, than outright brutality.”
Much of the work of the civil rights movement was unpopular in its own time. Even newspapers that recognized and reported on Southern segregation as an obvious wrong had trouble naming segregation when it happened in their own cities. Many northern journalists and editorial boards cast civil rights protests in their own cities as dangerous and extreme, even when it was called out in the eloquent tones of Martin Luther King Jr. himself. After the successes of the civil rights movement, many people and institutions have sanitized this reality. The truth is more complex and less comforting.
Jeanne Theoharis is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College and the author of the award-winning The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks and the new King of the North: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Life of Struggle Outside the South.
Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.