The Southern Courier was a weekly newspaper published in Montgomery, Alabama, from 1965 to 1968, during the Civil Rights Movement. As one of a few newspapers to cover the movement with an emphasis on African-American communities in the South, it provided its readership with a comprehensive view of race relations and community and is considered an important source for historians.
History
Preparation
In 1964, two students who had traveled to Mississippi to cover and assist in the Civil Rights Movement, Peter Cummings, a staff member of The Harvard Crimson, Harvard University's student newspaper, and Ellen Lake, formerly of the Crimson, were dismayed by the lack of coverage in the Southern papers and the sensationalist reporting of civil rights activities. They conceived of a newspaper that would cover issues not reported in the Southern newspapers, and often not in the national press.
As announced in The Harvard Crimson, the idea was to form a newspaper that would provide news about civil rights activities and protests in the Southern United States, which, the paper argued, was frequently underreported or ignored by Southern editors. Conversely, Northern newspapers had little distribution in the South. A newspaper that gave "a full and accurate account of the [Civil Rights] movement, its goals and tactics," with "fair reporting", would both provide better information about the South and simultaneously "advance the movement in the Negro community", and "would go far toward knitting the various Negro communities of the South together". The students raised money from private sources ($68,500 being the initial goal), since the editors did not expect to receive tax-exempt status given the heated nature of such a paper; thus large foundations would be unlikely to contribute. Once established in Montgomery, the organization achieved tax-exempt status.
Founding in Atlanta, Move to Montgomery
The paper was a multiracial effort, and its reporters were asked to integrate into the localities they covered as much as possible, without being either unattached "drive-by" journalists or involved community activists. Michael S. Lottman, managing editor of The Harvard Crimson until 1962, became its editor in 1965 and again from 1966–68.
It was to be based out of Atlanta, Georgia, run by Harvard students, including a number of students from The Harvard Crimson. The paper was started with $30,000 of seed money, and reporters were paid $20 a week. The plan was to have separate papers for individual states. In the first summer it was based and printed in Atlanta. Then it moved to Montgomery, Alabama, a city that was the focus of much attention since the Selma to Montgomery marches earlier that year.
In September 1965, when Lottman returned to his newspaper job in Chicago, Robert Ellis Smith became editor; he had worked as a reporter at the Detroit Free Press and Trenton Times and had become anxious about the state of the country after the Sunday School bombing in Birmingham.
The weekly paper borrowed from The Harvard Crimson its six-column, six-page appearance, its allegiance to well-sourced and balanced stories, its professional headlines, its immediacy, its inclusion of items about the arts, TV, some sports, individual profiles, first-person accounts, and attention to all sides of the civil rights battle. On the tenth anniversary of the Montgomery bus Boycott in 1955, the paper published memoirs by Martin Luther King Jr., and Rosa Parks. Graphic dispatches from Tuskegee, Alabama, by executive editor Mary Ellen Gale, were highlights of many issues.
Lottman caught the essence of the paper in speaking of how it covered the core details of the federal "War on Poverty", "The coverage by the Courier was just about the only way, at that time, that readers found out what people in other places were doing, what kinds of issues others were confronting and letting them know that they were not alone."
Other editors and writers for the Courier included Stephen Cotton, originally from Chicago and later a student at Harvard's law school, an editor for the Crimson, and co-organizer (with Denis Hayes) of the first Earth Day events; and Marshall Bloom, who had gotten arrested in Selma in 1964 and later enrolled at Amherst College before founding the Liberation News Service with Ray Mungo.