Description
Book SynopsisFormer New York Times correspondent John N. Herbers (1923-2017), who covered the civil rights movement for more than a decade, has produced Deep South Dispatch: Memoir of a Civil Rights Journalist, a compelling story of national and historical significance. Born in the South during a time of entrenched racial segregation, Herbers witnessed a succession of landmark civil rights uprisings that rocked the country, the world, and his own conscience. Herbers's retrospective is a timely and critical illumination on America's current racial dilemmas and ongoing quest for justice.
Herbers's reporting began in 1951, when he covered the brutal execution of Willie McGee, a black man convicted for the rape of a white housewife, and the 1955 trial for the murder of Emmett Till, a black teenager killed for allegedly whistling at a white woman. With immediacy and first-hand detail, Herbers describes the assassination of John F. Kennedy; the death of four black girls in the Birmin
Trade Review
Now it's a country mile from patisserie and threads of saffron, but my colleague Jonathan Martin on the politics desk got me reading Deep South Dispatch, a memoir by the civil rights reporter John N. Herbers, who died in 2017. Maybe you should, too. They don’t make journalists like John Herbers anymore. In fact, I doubt they make people like John Herbers anymore. . . . Wonderful and important memoir, his groundbreaking coverage of the civil rights movement. . . . John Norton Herbers may not have become another William Faulkner, but he did become a very good writer, as this historically valuable book attests over and over again.
