More than 133 years elapsed between New York–based Freedom's Journal (1827) and the freedom struggles of the 1960s. Indeed, from slavery to desegregation, Afro-American journalists were drum majors for justice. The civil rights movement gained publicity in the national press, but this gain had costs. Large black newspapers (such as Chicago Defender, New York Amsterdam News, Baltimore Afro-American, and Pittsburgh Courier) saw a serious decline in circulation. Their news agency, the Associated Negro Press, declined too. Black journalism survived, if mostly through religious, fraternal, academic, and local venues. The owners not only revitalized the National Newspaper Publishers Association (1940) but also launched the National Association of Black Journalists in 1975.

White magazines, newspapers, radio and television networks, in the meantime, gradually hired black journalists. One of the older reporters to accompany Life photojournalist Gordon Parks in breaking barriers was Malvin R. Goode (1908–95). Since 1948 he had been with the Pittsburgh Courier and co-anchor at a black radio station. Joining ABC in 1962, he became the first African American television network reporter and an inductee to the National Association of Radio and TV News Directors. Parks and Goode reported on the southern freedom movement.

As it fueled demands for racial integration in newsrooms, some younger blacks achieved distinction. Among them was Charlayne Hunter-Gault (b. 1942), a South Carolinian. When she and Hamilton E. Holmes (1942–95) breached the University of Georgia's color line in 1961, the National Guard had to quell a race riot. After graduate study at Washington University, Hunter-Gault joined the staff of Trans-Action and was an evening anchor at WRC-TV in Washington, DC. She covered the metro news for the New York Times from 1968 and the MacNeil/Lehrer Report from 1978. She went to South Africa as chief of National Public Radio's African Bureau in 1997.

Black reporters struggled with a sense of racial isolation. Pamela Newkirk held positions at four news organizations in a single decade and co-won a Pulitzer Prize for spot reports at New York Newsday. Still, she quit in 1993 because “I felt constricted by the narrow scope ... of reporting on African Americans. I found that our sensibilities, attitudes and experiences were often viewed with skepticism or alarm, and were left out.” It is estimated that 550 “journalists of color” were recruited by major news organizations between 1994 and 2000; however, 400 of them resigned.