March To A Promised Land: The Civil Rights Files of a White Reporter 1952-1968 (Capital Currents)

In March to a Promised Land, veteran reporter Al Kuettner begins: "You had to walk in the footsteps of these people--black and white--to get some understanding of their deep feelings, their prejudices, the sad deprivation suffered by so many blacks, the fear in whites. You had to walk and talk with them, and that’s what I did for 15 years, knowing that this story could not unfold from reading propaganda statements from both sides of the controversy. This was a people story." Al Kuettner was a young, white Southern reporter when the civil rights struggle began in 1952, the year he was assigned to cover it by the wire service United Press. During those years he traveled extensively throughout the U.S., talking with hundreds of people, black and white, witnessing the events that transformed American race relations. In this book, Al, now 93 years old, retraces his steps, reexamining the history he witnessed in the making, and questioning blacks and whites about the legacy of change. While he traces the events he witnessed from the 1952 announcement that the Supreme Court would review Brown vs. Board of Education to the tragic assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968---his vision is informed by the future and by his own determination to present the events honestly.

Al Kuettner is a veteran reporter, now 93 years old and living in retirement in Arkansas. He began his career on weekly newspapers and was hired as reporter by the United Press wire service (now UPI) in 1942. Later he was a bureau news manager in Memphis and Birmingham, and then in 1952 became UPI's director and national correspondent for the Civil Rights Movement, which he covered until 1978. During this period, he personally interviewed such historic civil rights figures as Martin Luther King Jr., the NAACP's Roy Wilkins, Governor George Wallace, and others. He is a recipient of the Professional Journalism Fraternity Distinguished Service Award.