Talk:Alistair Cooke

Cooke film: A Summer Opportunity

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAok5M3GBAg

Alistair Cooke presents this film - shown to male college students only - about the opportunities available to those who sell Colliers encyclopedias door-to-door during their summer break.

Thought this might be on interest, but didn't want to add it to the page proper because I wasn't sure of format and/or relevancy. Feel free to delete this comment. Jerimee (talk) 21:46, 25 January 2024 (UTC)

Racism

More should be mentioned regarding Cooke's racism in his writings, and accusations as such by Professor Sir Michael Dummett, based on this article: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/critphilrace.3.1.0001?seq=1

his autobiographical account of his years as editor of The Guardian Hetherington conceded that Cooke “had a slight blind spot about civil rights in the South.” Nevertheless, it is clear that Cooke was quite proud of his report- ing of the Civil Rights Movement. In May 1956 he reprinted seven of his articles under the title The Ordeal of the South: A Study of Race Relations in the United States. All the quotations from Cooke in Dummett’s essay are drawn from two of the essays reprinted there: “The Boycott City” and “The Untravelled Road.” Although the two articles together amount to well under three thousand words, Dummett finds some eight errors: the date of Rosa Parks’s arrest; where she was seated on the bus; the demands of the protestors; the role of the NAACP; the description of Storyville; the name of the church (which Cooke gets wrong in both articles); the word- ing of the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) constitution; and his account of allegations about King’s instructions about where car driv- ers involved in the boycott should buy gas. In order to find these mistakes Dummett did the kind of digging that Cooke had evidently failed to do: he visited the courthouse to examine the records there and drew a diagram to show where Rosa Parks was sitting on the bus, and collected newsletters from MIA, an activist organization headed by King that detailed the origins of the boycott and proposals put forth by the organization. 10 By exposing the inaccuracy of Cooke’s account of the facts, he also succeeded in calling into question his demeaning portrait of King. A further aspect of the article warrants attention. As the first paragraph of his essay indicates, Dummett wrote in order to expose Cooke as a spokes- person of the viewpoint of white Southerners. Hetherington was well aware that this was one of the problems associated with Cooke’s reporting. Sheila Hetherington recalled that her husband believed that Cooke was suffi- ciently concerned “with reporting the injustices suffered by black people to the South and it caused us some anxiety in London.”11 The problem was not confined to his articles in The Guardian. It was reflected too in the radio talks that Cook delivered weekly under the title “Letter from America.” In one of them he expressed this principle: “Before we judge the South too hastily, we must put ourselves in their place.” He continued by asking his British audience a question: “Would you at once accede to a law going through Parliament that next autumn your children must go to school with coloured people? It is a crude question and no doubt some people will be irritated by it. But it is the first question to put. Because what a parent thinks of is that his children will mingle equally, as scholars and playmates, then, later on, as friends and sweethearts, with coloured people.”

We are treated to some really magnificent local colour: rows of people “blacker than the night around them” steeped in “memories of the time when they wore no clothes at all.” Skin-colour of course varies enormously among American Negroes; but just what is all this about nudity? Is it a joke? Can Mr. Cooke believe in some racial subconscious stretching back to days in Africa? Does he really think that people wear no clothes in West Africa? But obviously we are not supposed to scrutinize the details of Mr. Cooke’s writing: the intention is to summon up in English readers’ minds pictures of savages in top-hats and superimpose them on this Alabama church. 2A02:6B6A:D0AC:0:C4BE:BA78:B51E:51D3 (talk) 13:03, 1 February 2024 (UTC)