March to a Promised Land: The Civil Rights Files of a White Reporter - Softcover

Kuettner, Al

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1933102497 ISBN 13: 9781933102498

Publisher: Capital Books, 2007

Synopsis

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 fifteen 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 a much older man, 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.

About this title

About the Author:

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.

Review:

". . . an illuminating yet brief history of the Civil Rights Movement: the strength of the book is that it places concisely in historical context the movement’s important events. . . The author claims to have set out to determine if the civil rights battles were “worth it.” However, the reader learns soon that Kuettner already knew the answer and if the reader has any doubts of his or her own they are dispelled by this affecting memoir." (Foreword Reviews)

"Those of us who lived through the 1960s remember them as incredibly turbulent times. Al Kuettner has written March to a Promised Land: The Civil Rights File of a White Reporter.He was a young, Southern reporter when the civil rights struggle began in 1952, the year he was assigned to cover it by the United Press wire service. As a result, he traveled widely through the nation, meeting and talking with hundreds of people while witnessing the events that transformed American race relations. He knew all the key players, including Martin Luther King, Jr. who he met in 1955. Anyone with a particular interest in this period of our history will find this book to be an interesting eyewitness account." (Alan Caruba Bookviews.com)

About this edition

• Publisher: Capital Books
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1933102497
• ISBN 13: 9781933102498
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 216