Even with its many interactive tools, Washington's Newseum relies on American and many international newspapers to illustrate the events in history it describes. The papers are only part of the story but a reoccurring one throughout the journalism museum in the nation's capital.
As an example, in the section of the Newseum dealing with news coverage of criminal investigations, through reproduced newspapers, photographs, and other documents, it highlights one of the grimmest episodes in the U.S. civil rights movement--the murders of three young voter-registration workers in Mississippi in the summer of 1964.
The description of the events then termed them a turning point as congressional passage neared of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Volunteers from elsewhere in the United States who flooded into Southern states to help register black voters had sparked enormous racial animosity.
Disappearance of civil rights workers in Mississippi
In June of that year, three men who were members of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), which advocated non-violent opposition to racial discrimination, disappeared. They were James Chaney, 21, a black Mississippian, and Andrew Goodman, 20, and Michael Schwerner, 24, both white and from New York and Jewish.
On the night of June 21, all three had gone to investigate the firebombing of black Methodist church. As they returned afterwards to the CORE office in Meridian, Mississippi, they were arrested by a local deputy sheriff who was also a Ku Klux Klan member and briefly jailed, allegedly for suspicion of church arson. Following their release on bail later that evening, the three were again stopped on a rural road by the same deputy and a white mob that included local Klansmen.
Within days after their disappearance a burned-out station wagon, which the three men had used, was found near the town of Philadelphia in Nashoba County, Mississippi. The story generated national coverage. President Lyndon Johnson ordered FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to send agents to the state to find out what happened. In July, Hoover traveled to the state capital, Jackson, to open the only FBI field office in Mississippi.
In August, six weeks later, the bodies of the Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were found shot to death buried in a partially constructed dam in a wooded area near Philadelphia. It was later shown in court that a conspiracy existed between members of Neshoba County's law enforcement and the Ku Klux Klan to kill the men.
Seven men were convicted in the case in 1967. Years later, under pressure from civil rights groups, the FBI's pursuit of leads and continuing news stories on the murders ultimately resulted in the Klan ringleader's conviction in 2005.
Display of Pulitzer Prize news photographs
Among the Newseum's collection of news materials are Pulitzer Prize-winning photographs, featuring interviews with a number of the photographers as part of a documentary film shown continuously.
Some of the photographs included are: U.S. Marines raising the American flag on Iwo Jima, the joyful reunion of a returning prisoner of war and his family, and a firefighter cradling the body of an infant killed in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
One of the numerous Pulitzer winning photographs for photojournalism displayed is a news photo from July 1956 of the rapidly sinking Italian ocean liner Andrea Doria, taken by Harry A. Trask, a staff photographer for the Boston Traveler newspaper (which later became the Boston Herald-Traveler). The ship was struck by the Swedish vessel, the Stockholm, late at night in fog in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Nantucket, Massachusetts.
Trask used a Graflex Speed Graphic camera to capture a photographic sequence of the Andrea Doria in its final minutes before going under the water's surface. He was on board an airplane at the time flying some 75 feet overhead. The ship remained afloat for 11 hours after colliding with the Stockholm.
Kim Komenich was a photojournalist with the San Francisco Examiner in 1986 when he took one of the photos for which he received a Pulitzer in spot news photography during the last days of the regime of President Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines. A picture he took shows Marcos wiping his brow during an election campaign stop in Mindoro in January 1986. In the photo his hand is noticeably bandaged--the result, Marcos said, of handshakes from overzealous supporters.
Komenich had traveled to the Philippines several times between 1984 and 1986, photographing events before, during, and after the revolution that toppled Marcos from power after 20 years and brought to office Corazon Aquino, the widow of assassinated Marcos opponent Benigno Aquino, as the new president.
Visitors also can access and view a database of 300 video clips, 400 audio clips, and 1,000 prize photos.
Part of original Berlin Wall on exhibit at Newseum
Elsewhere the Newseum's Berlin Wall Gallery is the largest display of sections of the original Berlin Wall outside of Germany. The exhibit has eight 12-foot-high graffiti-covered concrete sections of the wall, along with a three-story East German guard tower that was near Checkpoint Charlie--Berlin's best-known East-West crossing--where guards shot many East Berliners attempting to escape to West Berlin.
This focal point of news coverage indicates the role of the press in contributing to the fall of the wall. It includes looped TV footage from November 1989 showing jubilant East and West Germans hacking away at the concrete barrier between them with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The Interactive Newsroom lets visitors, who often tend to be children, play the role of a photojournalist, editor, reporter, or news anchor at 48 interactive kiosks. Participants must race against deadlines to prepare reports. At one of eight "Be A TV Reporter" stations, youngsters can pick up a microphone, step before a camera, and experience what it's like to be a TV reporter.
Still another Newseum feature is a map assessing press freedom around the world by individual countries. That determination is made by Freedom House, an independent private organization that probes information about freedom around the globe. Its yearly survey examines how freely news and information flow in each country.
From a score of 0 (best) to 100 (worst), countries scoring 0 to 30 are classified as having "free" press, countries scoring 31 to 60 are considered "partly free," and those scoring 61 to 100 are deemed "not free." The full report on press freedom by country is available at www.freedomhouse.org.
Source:
- Visit to Newseum
John Seidenberg - John Seidenberg has worked on newspapers, newsletters, radio news, and produced specialized news publications as well as freelance ...
