No standing room remained when Gene Roberts arrived on an unusually warm February night in 1960 to cover Martin Luther King Jr.’s visit to Durham, N.C., so a church deacon boosted Roberts onto a windowsill of the church.

After speaking, King asked for contributions to help the student sit-ins then spreading throughout the state, Roberts recounted.

“Money was so hard to come by, no one wanted to risk losing a nickel or a dime or a quarter, and black maids in the South put their coins in a handkerchief and knotted it so they wouldn’t easily lose them,” Roberts said.

Co-authors of The Race Beat, a 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winning history book, Roberts and Hank Klibanoff addressed students and faculty Monday in the McCormick Tribune Center. They talked about covering the civil rights struggle and the media’s role in drawing attention to the movement.

“From the windowsill I could see all these pocketbooks come out in unison, all of them open, hands in…handkerchiefs coming out,” Roberts said, “and I came away from the rally that night thinking for the first time we were going to see radical change because the depth of commitment ran far deeper than the white South realized or have accept[ed].”

The Race Beat focuses on how the American press elevated the civil rights struggle into one of the most dramatic news events in the 20th century.

Klibanoff said, “We hope the book frames a time, but also withstands the test of time, [to help] people understand the world worked at a very critical juncture in history.”