Story Of Their Lives

Newson started dreaming of a career in journalism, chasing stories, writing on deadline, eyeing his name in print. "You knew the job market for you," he says, "would be in the black press."

He served a 27-month stint in the Navy, then studied journalism at Lincoln University in Missouri. Sometimes reporters would visit the classes -- black reporters from the black press, white reporters from everyplace else. He'd sit in awe.

He applied for a job at the Tri-State Defender, a black newspaper in Memphis run by a man named L. Alex Wilson.

Newson got hired. The only full-time people at the Tri-State Defender were L. Alex Wilson -- and Moses Newson. They both wore a suit and tie daily. Wilson favored an elegant hat with brim and crease.

In early 1955 in nearby Belzoni, Miss., some brave souls, among them Medgar Evers and George Lee, started agitating for the right of blacks to register to vote. Both men routinely received death threats. In April, Lee, a preacher and businessman and, like Evers, an NAACP official, appeared at a rally in Mound Bayou, Miss. He stood on a stage looking out onto 7,000 people. "Pray not for your mom and pop," Lee bellowed to the crowd. "Pray you can make it through this hell."

He was talking about Mississippi.

On May 7, 1955, having left his wife, Rosebud, at home in her sickbed, Lee was attacked near midnight on a Mississippi road. A shotgun blast ripped into his face, killing him.

Newson was dispatched to cover the funeral. Lee was buried in an open casket to expose the brutality of his murder, a decision that would soon be repeated elsewhere.

The Lee murder was tailor-made for the black press, which had deep contacts in the black church and community. Black reporters, write Klibanoff and Roberts, "had the front-row seat during the early dramas, while the white press sat in the balcony, if it came to the performance at all."

Newson returned to Memphis after covering the Lee story.

"Then," says Newson, "in August we heard that Emmett Till was missing in Money, Mississippi."

Till, a black youth from Chicago, had disappeared after reportedly wolf-whistling at a white woman inside a small grocery store.