When African-American student James Meredith first arrived at the University of Mississippi in 1962, riots erupted by those who opposed his attending the school. Mississippi governor Ross Barnett called the president in an attempt to figure out what to do. Barnett wanted to remove Meredith from the campus, but Kennedy would not allow him to do so, insisting that the situation on campus was too volatile and that it would be dangerous to remove Meredith from the campus building where he was situated under the protection of security. "Mr. President, please," Barnett said. "Why don't you, can't get you give an order up there to remove Meredith?" "How can I remove him, Governor, when there's a riot in the street and he may step out of that building and have something happen to him?" Kennedy asked him. "I can't remove him under those conditions.... Let's get order up there, then we can do something about Meredith."
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
