In 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt allocated $150,000 to create the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) as a war measure under the Federal Communications Commission. Following the Second World War, the FBIS was transferred to the Central Intelligence Agency under the National Security Act of 1947. Integrating into the missions of its post-war overseers, the Service expanded to monitor all “enemy broadcasts”, looking for coded messaging, as well as general negative reports about the USA emanating from communist and contested countries. American domestic affairs provided plenty of fodder for foreign journalists, particularly in the area of race relations, and the FBIS monitoring produced a rich collection of reports from the outside on America’s mid-to-late twentieth-century confrontations with its troubled racial past and present.
NewsBank has collected these reports in a database entitled American Race Relations: Global Perspectives 1941-1996. With a homepage image of a haggard-looking President Johnson with Martin Luther King, Jr., the database takes a minimalist approach. Users are provided with a simple search box with the option to conduct an advanced search. Having been on the receiving end of student database confusion, the homepage could use more information as to exactly what materials are contained within the collection. As many libraries offer little more than a link to the databases from their homepages, this rich resource might be shortchanged by the lack of description.
On the technical side, results are broken down by date in a left sidebar, users can either browse by decade or click on a specific year. Unfortunately, users cannot sort search results by the original source, although the sources are listed prominently in the results list. I entered a few geography-based news searches; a basic Boolean search “Camden AND New Jersey” and “Los Angeles”. Although the Camden, New Jersey, search resulted in a single article, it covered a little explored uprising in 1965 of the city’s Puerto Rican community in response to a police beating. Searching the larger city of Los Angeles brought back several more results, ranging from a China Daily report on the 1992 riots brought on by the acquittal of four police officers in the beating of Rodney King, to a critical analysis of American reporting on the 1965 Watts riots from Moscow’s TASS International Service. While the two latter articles were produced as propaganda pieces, they provide an outsider’s perspective which attaches both events to the long thread of American racism. It is difficult to cross into hyperbole when discussing the deep-seated history of racism in the USA.
This resource may also aid students and researchers in making global connections to the American race story. An example, the Accra Ghana Domestic Service, expresses unbridled solidarity with the victim of a police shooting in Philadelphia in the 1960s, concluding with their support of their “Afro-American brothers and sisters across the Atlantic as they continue to mount massive protest demonstrations”. The editorial is demonstrative of the link between African liberation and the civil rights struggle in the USA.
A distressing observation about many of the results is the headlines could be inserted into a current news website and few would flinch. The issues of police violence toward black and brown communities, riots brought on by a lack of options and agency and the continued global struggle for equality are as relevant now as when these reports were originally collected. Although many of the articles were produced as anti-American propaganda pieces by communist governments, their perspectives might be seen as a corrective to the one-sided reporting by many of the mainstream news outlets in the USA at the time. Further, in an era where one can customize their news intake to reflect one’s personal view of the world, these articles prove the importance of reading global perspectives to be truly informed. If the current election cycle is any indicator, the USA is approaching a nadir with regard to information literacy. Seeking global perspectives on the past and the present is one way to step out of the echo chamber. Librarians, teaching faculty and general researchers will find this database a useful discussion tool and research resource.
