Picture by Colin Washington
This essay is a part of a collection—we requested 17 Atlantans to inform us how the Civil Rights Act of 1964 has affected their lives in honor of its sixtieth anniversary. Learn all of the articles right here.
For many of my upbringing, I by no means thought of myself an activist, or thought I had the management qualities. However as soon as I started my profession as a journalist, I started to see how the work of social justice activists is way more than main protests and speaking to crowds, the duties we usually consider as activism.
I grew up in Atlanta, surrounded by the mystique and status of civil rights leaders—particularly those that emerged from the Atlanta College Middle. After I arrived at Morehouse School, the balanced campus tradition taught me about activism and social justice work. As journalists, I discovered, we now have the ability to supply a stage of advocacy for under-represented voices, which may function a catalyst for additional change in communities in want. In my position as Morehouse’s student-run editor-in-chief Maroon Tiger newspaper, I led protection on police brutality, housing discrimination for marginalized communities, the Israel-Hamas conflict, challenges to gender norms, and extra. By these experiences, I’ve come to see how storytelling creates much-needed conversations around the globe.
Writing these essential tales places us journalists in a singular place: We’ve got the chance to work behind the scenes and construct actual relationships with residents and neighborhood leaders that gasoline the engine of the tales we really inform readers. Once we do our due diligence as reporters and communicators, those self same leaders belief us to broadcast their reality, making our work within the world social justice enviornment much more essential. I at all times preach to my editorial employees that our affect as scholar journalists and college students within the media ought to by no means be underestimated. In at this time’s tales we now have some distinctive views and views, which odd individuals would by no means have entry to in any other case. The interaction between journalism, reality and social liberation will at all times preserve the worth and want for trustworthy and expert journalists on the forefront of our society.
My imaginative and prescient is to guide protection at each stage to proceed telling new tales in new locations. I might work as an editor-in-chief or a high-ranking newsroom government so I may influence the lives of storytellers the way in which my editors have executed for me. Nice journalists are born earlier than them nice leaders.
Austin “Auzzy” Gerard Byrdsell Senior at Morehouse School. Serving as its chief editor Maroon TigerFounding president of the Morehouse School Affiliation of Black Journalists and a information intern Atlanta Journal-Structure.
This text appeared in our June 2024 challenge.
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