Wedding News
There has been quite an outcry about this New York Times wedding story that ran on Sunday.
Wedding news was a large part of women’s pages – and at many newspapers, that is where social change occurred. In the 1950s, Colleen “Koky” Dishon changed the practice of running large bride photos of prominent families in the Milwaukee Sentinel. Instead, the size of all photos were equal.
From the day Vivian Castleberry started working at the Dallas Times Herald in the 1950s, she said that she intended to publish pictures of African-American brides, although it was against policy. When she asked for permission to publish photos of African-American brides on a regular basis, management told her “no” each time. “I don’t know why they didn’t fire me, because I probably asked at least once a month – at least.” In the midst of her requests, she was approached by an African American woman who asked Castleberry why her daughter’s wedding photo was not published when numerous photos of white debutantes ran regularly. Castleberry responded that she could not justify the exclusion in any way and tried again to persuade editors to change the policy – a fight that she eventually won in the late 1960s.
In the 1960s, women’s page editor Edee Greene advocated for the publication of photos of black brides in her section at the Fort Lauderdale News. Her success in integrating her section is now noted in the Fort Lauderdale school system’s curriculum.
