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Veteran journalist Gene Roberts has covered everything from the civil rights movement to the Vietnam War. His book, "The Race Beat: The Press, The Civil Rights Struggle, and The Awakening of a Nation," which he co-wrote with Hank Klibanoff, won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for history.

Roberts teaches journalism at the University of Maryland in College Park. Before that he was executive editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer and managing editor of the New York Times. Throughout his journalism career he worked for newspapers including the Goldsboro News-Argus, The Virginian-Pilot, The News & Observer and the Detroit Free Press.

Roberts will be the featured speaker at the Friends of the UNCG Libraries Annual Dinner Wednesday.

We spoke with Roberts via e-mail about what drew him to journalism and the events that led him to cover the civil rights movement.

What made you want to be a journalist?

The short answer was that I was born into it. When I was a child my father owned a small weekly in Goldsboro, "The Herald," which was aimed at farm families in rural Wayne County. He printed the paper on a flat-bed press, and the sheets of newsprint had to be fed into it one at a time by hand.

My earliest memory is my father holding me in his arms and letting me push sheets of paper into the press. The paper came out on Thursdays, and on Fridays and Saturdays, my father would put his editing role aside and become circulation director -- driving along country roads bartering yearly subscriptions for whatever farmers had in the way of food. From the time I was 3 or 4 until I entered kindergarten, my father took me with him every Friday and Saturday. ... I never really got all of this out of my system.

Did you choose to cover the civil rights movement or was the beat assigned to you?

The Supreme Court's school desegregation decision was handed down the very month I graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill. It was not until almost five years after I graduated that I got even a taste of the civil rights story. I was then a reporter for The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk. And the state of Virginia, as part of its massive resistance program, closed six high schools and junior high schools, putting 9,500 white students out on the street for four months, rather than have them attend classes with 17 black students. I covered only the periphery of the story from my beat at city hall.

Then, in 1960 after the sit-in movement started in Greensboro and spread quickly to Raleigh and Durham, Martin Luther King flew into Durham to show support for the students. Although ... this was not really on my beat, I asked to cover King and went over to the White Rock Baptist Church. ... Dr. King called for an end to all forms of segregation, and the black audience, young and old, was clearly with him. I left the church that night convinced for the first time that we were going to see massive change. ... But no paper in the South was then covering race outside its home base or in a few cases its home state.

Was there any particular event that prompted the press to start covering the civil rights movement in the South?

There was one pivotal event that led the Northern press to start covering white supremacy and racial discrimination in the south. It was the Emmett Till murder in the late summer of 1957. Till, a 14-year-old black boy from Chicago, allegedly whistled at a white woman in a grocery store while visiting relatives in the Mississippi Delta. The woman's husband and his half-brother abducted Till from the home of his great-uncle at night. His badly mutilated body was found three days later.

Till's mother decided on an open casket funeral so the world could see what racial hatred had done to her son.

At first, only the black press -- as it had so often in the past — covered the story. But this time, the massive turnout for the viewing caught the attention of the mainstream Chicago press and from there caught the attention of the wire services and many other northern newspapers. Well over 50 reporters, more than 75 percent of them white, showed up for the trial which lasted three days.

Till's great-uncle identified the two abductors in the courtroom, but an all-white jury acquitted the men in less than an hour of deliberations.

Later, the two men, in exchange for $4,000 paid to them by journalist William Bradford Huey and Look magazine, described in detail how and why they had murdered Till. The nation was shocked and shaken by the quick acquittal and the detailed confession. The men, of course, couldn't be tried again because of double jeopardy. Until 1955, however, it was basically only the black newspapers that covered race in America, and they covered it vigorously for decades.

Contact Carla Kucinski Seward at 373-7319 or carla@gotriad.com

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