62 years after Danville’s civil rights movement, both the city and the local newspapers have evolved

Though the newspaper’s name is familiar, local reporting in Danville looks much different today than it did 62 years ago. 

Much has changed in the city and the journalism industry since 1963, when Danville’s daily papers discredited the city’s civil rights movement and characterized it as criminal and futile. 

Coverage of the movement in the two daily papers in Danville — the morning Danville Register and the afternoon Danville Bee — contrasted sharply with reporting from a weekly paper, the Commercial Appeal. 

The Register and the Bee focused on arrests, court trials and the city’s law and order response to the movement, rather than the purpose of the demonstrations themselves. 

The Commercial Appeal was regarded as a more accurate source of news about the movement in the city’s Black communities. 

In the intervening years, the Register and the Bee have merged into one edition called the Danville Register & Bee, which remains the go-to newspaper for many city residents. The 1989 merger was a decision by the Grant family, which owned and published the paper at that time.

After several leadership changes, the paper is owned today by Lee Enterprises, an Iowa-based company that operates 78 publications across the country.

The newspaper has evolved drastically as an organization since the 1963 movement, said Karice Luck-Brimmer, a local Black historian and genealogist. 

“The Register & Bee, just like all newspapers that sprung up in those days, had to eventually integrate as segregation was no longer legal with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” she said. “The newspaper has done a great job moving past that and reporting accurately on all news across cultures.”

Andrea Burney, the Register’s first Black reporter in 1975, says even small things like wording make a difference in today’s reporting. 

“We have gotten beyond using words such as ‘colored’ in discussing people,” said Burney, whose father was a reporter with the Commercial Appeal in the 1950s. 

The Danville Register & Bee was a daily paper for decades. It still publishes online daily, while its print publication dropped to three days a week in 2023. 

The newspaper’s local leadership referred questions for this story to a Lee corporate spokesperson, who did not respond in time for publication.

Coverage of a demonstration today would likely — hopefully — look much different than the Register’s and the Bee’s coverage in 1963, said Patrick Walters, journalism historian and professor at Washington and Lee University.

“Now the question would be, if you looked at that coverage and you contrasted it with coverage of civil rights protests today, what would the difference be like?” Walters said. “I would really hope you’d see more protesters’ voices, and I think you would.” 

There’s an awareness in the journalism industry today about its previous reliance on “official sources,” Walters said. 

In 21st-century coverage of police shootings or the #MeToo movement, there is more pressure on journalists to “give credence to sources that are not these traditional, official sources like powerful business leaders, government leaders, police,” he said. 

That’s not to say that the journalism industry is now in a “post-official-source time,” Walters said, and there are still improvements to be made, but social media and the digital era of reporting have put more trust in non-official sources. 

Expectations around transparency are greater today than in the 1960s as well. 

Almost all of the Register’s and the Bee’s articles about the protests that summer, and many of the Commercial Appeal’s, appeared without bylines. 

It’s unclear whether the reporters writing about the civil rights demonstrations actually attended the protests in person, and it’s impossible to find out, since there are no reporter names attributed to the articles. 

In Register and Bee issues from 1963, there is not even a masthead to list the names of staff members. This made it more difficult for Cardinal News to track down any Register and Bee reporters from the time, or their descendants, for comment on this story.

Stories from this time period also show a lack of transparency around sources.

Often, the Register, the Bee and the Commercial Appeal quoted sources that were not named and reported information with unclear origins. 

“From an unusual source there came another indication today that activity is continuing to approach normal as racial disorders subside,” said a June 17 article in the Bee. 

There is no elaboration on the unnamed “unusual source” or characterization of how or why that source is reliable — or “unusual.”

The intervening years have brought a greater emphasis on transparency around both reporters and sources, Walters said. Bylines and specificity of sources are expected today, he said. 

“That’s not to suggest by any means that it is always perfect, but transparency is being looked at much more … as perhaps more of a new type of norm,” Walters said. 

Transparency — through articles that explain a reporter’s process on a particular story, for example — can often lead to increased trust from modern readers, he said. 

Today, the Danville Register & Bee adheres to modern journalistic norms, like including bylines and naming sources. 

It is now considered a reliable source of news for the city, said Luck-Brimmer. 

“I grew up with the Register & Bee on the table every morning,” she said. “However, as a researcher, once I go back pre-1970, I always consult with Black newspapers first for more accuracy.”

Journalism has a big influence on public conversation at the time of publication, and on the historical narrative as time goes on. 

“I believe we are missing something when we don’t cover local community news like the Commercial Appeal did by regularly spotlighting neighborhoods in the city,” Burney said. 

If mainstream media coverage in 1963 had looked different, perhaps Danville’s civil rights movement would have remained in the public consciousness in the years afterward, Walters said.

“That’s something we have to think about — a journalist’s responsibility and the ways evolving norms can change that.”