Stereotypes in 1965 Newspaper Articles

  When reading the front page of a southern newspaper from July 23, 1965, one would certainly expect to find certain stereotypes more abundant than nowadays.  In the case of the Southern Courier, a newspaper based out of Montgomery, Alabama and written by journalism students from Massachusetts, there were definitely stereotypes present, most notably when describing race.  Civil rights issues were central to pretty much every story in the newspaper, so obviously the way race was addressed is important to look at.  While this newspaper was based in the South, the authors were from the North, so there was less racism present in the writing than in other papers that were published in the area around the same time.  The being said, there were still quite a few stereotypes used when describing people, most often when depicting African-Americans.  All of the articles referred to African-American men and women as “Negros,” and one headline included this term.  While the writing contained language that we would probably not see published today, the stories themselves were presented in a somewhat equal way.  The most prominent story is a somewhat unbiased piece about a man who was shot simply because he was African-American.  The authors interviewed people of both races to comment on the story; however the Caucasian interviewees were all introduced by name and in some case, title while the African-Americans interviewed for the article were in most case not identified by name, and only described, such as the “elderly Negro woman” who commented on the case.  In addition, the white sources that were quoted tended to be men of status, such as a policeman or a reverend.    The African-Americans quoted in the story were often regular men, women, and even children.  This inequality in presenting black and white community members illustrates how pervasive racism was at this time, even among writers who were attempting to give an unbiased report of what happened.  This pattern, present in most articles in the newspaper, assisted in perpetuating the idea that whites held higher positions in society than minorities.

http://www.southerncourier.org/archives.html