Book review: "The Race Beat," by Roberts and Klibanoff
Hannah-Jones is the main creative force behind the 1619 Project, a journalistic endeavor published in the Aug. 14, 2019 issue of The New York Times Magazine. She is a recipient of a 2017 MacArthur Fellowship (the so-called genius grant), and was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2020.
The 1619 Project was wildly popular, if also controversial in more conservative circles, and since then has morphed into several other projects, including a highly informative and entertaining five-part podcast. A book, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, came out last November.
One of the goals of the 1619 Project is to promote the view that a truly comprehensive survey of American history should rightfully begin with the year when enslaved Africans were first brought to this continent, and not simply with events surrounding the Declaration of Independence. The Race Beat is one of three books that Hannah-Jones recommended for those interested in learning more about the history of race in the US.*
The Race Beat tells
the story ...
of how America awakened to its race problem, of how a nation that longed for unity after World War II came instead to see, hear, and learn about the shocking indignities and injustices of racial segregation in the South—and the brutality used to enforce it. It is the story of how the nation’s press, after decades of ignoring the problem, came to recognize the importance of [what came to be called] the civil rights struggle, and turn it into the most significant domestic news event of the twentieth century [from inside front cover].
Possibly the biggest take-away, for me, was learning how much of that struggle may have been influenced by the 1944 publication of a book written by a Swedish academic researcher named Gunnar Myrdal!
In the final months of 1940, Myrdal thought he was almost done with the most comprehensive study of US race relations, and the condition of Negroes in America, that had ever been attempted. But he was finding it difficult to draw conclusions, and wrote the Carnegie Foundation, which was supporting his work, that he felt the plan for his book was “in danger of breaking down.”
After the Nazis invaded Denmark and Norway, Myrdal and his wife and collaborator Alva feared Sweden would be next, and made plans to return home. Upon surviving the transatlantic crossing (on a Finnish freighter laden with explosives), the Myrdals were “appalled” to discover that their government was seeking to appease the Nazis. He was outraged, and the book that he wrote and had published later that year to rally Swedish resistance against Hitler, Contact with America, also enabled him to overcome the writer’s block he’d been facing with his American race research.
Writing in Contact that Swedes had “much to learn from America about democracy, dialog, and self-criticism” he added that even the Carnegie project underwriting his work was evidence of “America’s willingness to sanction [i.e., to approve of] a sweeping examination and discussion of a national problem.” After seeing how some Swedes were willing to trade freedom for security, he “came to appreciate the vital role the American press could play in challenging the status quo of race relations.”
In thousands of small and large ways, Myrdal’s 1944 book, An American Dilemma, would blow up the comfortable consensus on race relations that for so long had held sway in the US.
One example was the integration of baseball, including everything that went before the hiring of Jackie Robinson, which had been catalyzed in part by the reading of Dilemma by Brooklyn Dodgers president, Branch Rickey Sr.
Another pair of hands which Myrdal’s two-volume tome fell into belonged to Harry Ashmore. Back from the war and looking forward to catching up on his reading during a second honeymoon on Nantucket, he had found room in his luggage for Myrdal’s work. Ashmore would return to a career in journalism that had begun in his native South Carolina in 1937, and later found himself at the forefront of the “small group of white southern editors” fighting “to open the southern mainstream to Negroes.”
A final example of someone who had the “moss and magnolias lifted from his eyes” (as he would later describe it) after having read Dilemma was federal judge and 8th-generation member of one of Charleston’s most influential families J. Waties Waring, who in 1947 stunned the southern white aristocracy with a pair of decisions that allowed Negroes to participate in previously whites-only South Carolina primaries, and to attend the state-funded law school, USC. Myrdal’s book also hugely influenced the landmark Supreme Court Case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954).
The violence, the drama, the murders, bombing and the heroism that are also a part of that struggle make up the other 99.9% of this book, and the detailed story-telling of those incidents combine to make this one unforgettable book.
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* - The other two works Ms. Hannah-Jones recommends are The Warmth of Other Suns: the epic story of America’s great migration, by Isabel Wilkerson (2010; also a Pulitzer Prize-winner), and Black Reconstruction in America: Toward a history of the part which Black folk played in the attempt to reconstruct democracy in America, 1860 – 1880, by W. E. B. Du Bois (1935).
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