Imagine a Baptist church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1968, a few weeks after Martin Luther King Jr. was shot in Memphis. His widow is speaking at night to an overflow crowd of striking hospital workers and their sympathizers. At least ten thousand union supporters from throughout the United States are in Charleston, marching for these workers. The streets are cordoned off by armed South Carolina National Guard troops standing next to their troop carriers.
I am one of the few white faces in the church crowd. I am here to witness this historical event. I am a poverty lawyer, representing the poor of Charleston for free. I am part of President Johnson's War on Poverty during the civil rights/Vietnam War era of U.S. history.
This lengthy Charleston struggle was never reported by the local paper. When I returned to my hometown in the Midwest, I looked up this time period in the New York Times. That paper had covered the union struggle, marches and the arrests, in full.
The failure of the local media to fully report the events of our times has occurred over and over in my forty-some years of law practice. I have decided to try to contribute to a better coverage of these events, especially as the environmental stresses grow. That is why I have enrolled in this environmental journalism program.
(I wish I had a photo from South Carolina. As a substitute, I do have the Missoula photo above, with Honey, an Austrian Haflinger.)
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