Here's a column by former Bill Cotterell of the Tallahassee Democrat that appeared on April 25, 2002, concerning the April 20, reunion in Montgomery, Ala., of former UPI civil rights reporters and photographers:
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I went to Montgomery last weekend for a reunion of United Press International reporters, photographers and editors who covered the civil rights movement.
I was in the Marine Corps or in college during the 1965 Selma-Montgomery march, Gov. George Wallace's "stand in the schoolhouse door" at Tuscaloosa and the Ole Miss rioting. Many of my UPI colleagues were at the 16th Street Baptist Church moments after Ku Klux Klansmen bombed it in 1963, or covered the murders of voter registration workers in Philadelphia, Miss., or trials after the shootings of Medgar Evers in Jackson, Miss., and Viola Liuzzo outside Selma.
I knew some of them and heard most of their tales during my 18 years with the wire service. But I never tire of learning more.
Journalism was different then. Obviously, there were no cell phones, no cable-TV networks bouncing live remote shots off of satellites. But more important, the issues, people and dangers of that era were nothing like the South today.
"I'm not sure that we thought at the time that these were particularly watershed events. All of us covered important steps along the way," said Pat Harden, who took refuge in a Montgomery church with Freedom Riders who defied segregation in waiting rooms of bus stations in 1961. "It's very easy to say, 40 years later, 'I was there when the history of the world changed,' but I think we just saw some of the seeds of change being sown."
Our gathering was sponsored by Troy State University's Montgomery campus, the Montgomery Advertiser and the Gannett Foundation. It was held at the Rosa Parks Museum, which is located on the street corner where the weary black seamstress was arrested on Dec. 1, 1955, for refusing to move to the back of a city bus.
With its interactive recreation of events, newsreel films and newspaper accounts from the bus boycott, the museum is well worth the 220-mile trip. But visitors have to put aside the 20/20 hindsight of history and keep reminding themselves that, at the time, we really didn't know how the civil rights struggle was going to turn out.
Could intelligent, sophisticated politicians like Wallace really believe they would have "segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever"? Did such men as Ross Barnett and Lester Maddox really think they could withstand the pressure of Congress, the courts and public opinion? Did they think Martin Luther King and so many others would just give up?
They must have known better.
And the issues were easier then, more obvious. Should people be beaten and attacked by police dogs for trying to eat at a lunch counter? Should the law protect their right to vote, go to school, get an apartment or have a job? How do you cover "both sides" of a fire-bombing?
"I always had a sense that we were watching history," said Bob Gordon, a native Mississippian who was beaten by a mob while covering a school integration conflict in Greneda, Miss. "It was interesting, fascinating sometimes, and sometimes very scary."
Gordon, who was my boss in Columbia, S.C., from 1967 to '69, recently retired as managing editor of the Jackson Clarion Ledger. He was one of the first reporters on the scene when four young girls were killed in the 1963 Birmingham church bombing.
He recalled that a lot of Alabama newspaper owners and editors, self-appointed safeguards of the South's image, tried to downplay the movement. Some even tried to pressure the Associated Press not to get all excited about an occasional beating or murder.
Leon Daniel, who was on the bridge at Selma, said the "bloody Sunday" beating of marchers on March 2, 1965, was the turning point. It led to the mass march a few weeks later and gave President Johnson the public spectacle he needed for the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
"We looked for headline value and significance," Daniel recalled. "I think Bloody Sunday wins on both counts. It was a personal epiphany for me. I knew then that this movement was going to succeed."
These graying, balding men were denounced as "outsiders" 40 years ago by governors, sheriffs and mayors. The wire stories they and their AP competitors put on front pages across the nation were shunned by southern papers that wouldn't dignify such "outside agitation."
But their homecoming was a warm one.
"I want to welcome you back to Alabama and ask you to see us through new eyes, and see Alabama as we are today," said Gov. Don Siegelman. "I wanted to be here to welcome you to an Alabama where no one takes a seat in the back of the bus, whether in law or in spirit."