Word: couriers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Fate willed, worked for The Southern Courier, the civil rights newspaper, during its first two summers in '65 and '66. The Southern Courier represented the ultimate effort of white liberal evangelism. Started by some Harvard CRIMSON editors and funded by a lot of liberal people and their organizations in the Northeast, it was an attempt to expose what was wrong with what true with the understood result that the governmental system would then have to correct itself...
...Courier finally folded last November after it had become clear to its editor that it was hopeless to keep on trying for any further political change to stop discrimination. The newspaper wasn't a very effective weapon in pragmatic politics. The Courier, and the Civil Rights Movement, in general, brought about a great new cultural awareness, but didn't change the hands of the power...
...reasons Mike Lottman, who was the editor, gave for closing down the over-indebted Courier was that the Federal Government, the organization which should be most responsive, was behind the worst discrimination. Take, for example, Macon Country, an Alabama country which is 85 per cent back. For years whites held all the elected positions. Then, with the coming of the Civil Rights Movement, Negroes started working their way into the system. It was Macon County that elected the first black sheriff ever (or since reconstruction) in the South. (His name was Lucius Amerson. It got lots of New York Times...
...American Can Company has its own little company-run town in Bellamy, Alabama. Stores, schools, churches, and neighborhoods are segregated in Bellamy. There's no plumbing in the Negro homes, their streets aren't paved, they get paid less. It's a really tough town. Jim Peppler, the Courier's dare-anything photographer who took pictures of some of the meanest crackers in the state, just drove down the main street of Bellamy shooting his camera from on top the dashboard...
...were driving west out highway 80 towards Selma, Alabama, cruising into the sunset. Every town we passed through had been the scene of adventures four years earlier when I had been on the Courier. I remember that every time we went out to dig up information on a story I was sure we were going to be shot. Civil Rights workers were murdered all the time in '66. A lady from Detroit, Mrs. Luizzo, had been killed in 1965 near Selma for riding in a car with some Negro guys. On my first story for the Courier, I and another...