A Commemorative Bind: How the Birmingham News Redressed Past Journalistic Failure through Contemporary Civil Rights Memory

Abstract

ABSTRACT Ideological clashes over race in American memory reveal an existential divide in journalism, between an ethos of activism and the normative rituals of objectivity. This study examines a crisis of memory that occurred upon a newspaper’s centennial in the 1980s alongside mainstream commemorations of the US civil rights movement amid an age of apology and backlash. The Birmingham News, a White newspaper that in the 1960s used proximity to a national story to conceal rather than bear witness, a generation later sought to reposition itself in a radically changed environment. This study, building on the scholarship of journalism as a site of collective memory, analyzes how a news organization arbitrated a reckoning with the past and its own professional failure. We analyze the strategies by which the News sought forgiveness and redress, and thereby sought to reclaim authority. The case illustrates how notions of journalistic legitimacy collide with the project of truth and reconciliation, and how journalists find a way forward by refashioning collective memory to navigate the present.