As I Take Time To Reminisce: Kerner Plus 40

So what can I say?  Journalism is a heavy topic and the Civil Rights Movement was a prime time to be a reporter.  Even more so than that, however, was how important the African American was during this time.  It didn't take long after the death of the Civil Rights messiah Martin Luther King Jr. for black people to completely lose composure and act a damn fool.  Riots and racial conflicts started to take over and journalists, nearly all of them white at this point, had the duty to report on these riots and risking getting killed.

In the immortal words of David Chappelle, "Fuck that!"  It's not hard to understand or even appreciate that people value their lives (save for the suicidal) so being a white person in the middle of a black-owned riot has the distinction of being a deadly situation.  The solution was to have a black bodyguard, something of an African American guide through the wilderness of a riot-run city; a ghetto safari if you will.  That failed.  Solution 2: have the African Americans do the reporting themselves; the risk for death is much, much lower, nearly 0%... for the white people.

But the people need their news and as such the Black journalist was, more or less, established in a professional realm.  Black people had the honor of going into the riot zones and being able to actually talk to their looting and shooting brothers and sisters, right at the scene of the crime.  This, much like news coverage of the stupid War on Terror today, added a personal and to the point, on the spot feel to the news reports.

Alas, despite the African American getting a new position in the media, racial hatred was still alive and kicking... sometimes literally.  Black reporters were finally behind the desk but that didn't mean the desk wasn't ravaged in anger.  You had black reporters that submitted stories, but those stories might mysteriously disappear.  It was a vicious cycle that isn't as bad as it was then now but it's still not completely clean.

Kerner Plus 40 chronicled this mass event and did it with style, from the major players of the game to the Miles Davis playing in the background (started with So What of "Kind of Blue" and maybe going into his soundtrack of "Lift to the Scaffolds).  Overall it was informative and painted the perfect picture of the press in that time.  On a scale of one to ten, perhaps it deserves an 8, 9 maybe.  I'd have preferred Blue in Green myself... So What was a little too upbeat for the story...