Abstract | Introduction | Print Media and Segregation | Birmingham and Danville, 1963 | Local Television News and the Breakdown of Segregation | The March on Washington and Television News | WLBT and Pro-Segregation TV | Conclusion | Notes | Bibliography

Television news began broadcasting political conventions, inaugurations, and other large political events in the early 1950s. The Kefauver organized crime hearings, the 1952 Republican Convention, Richard M. Nixon's "Checkers" speech, and the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954 featured dramatic coverage of political events, and millions of Americans tuned in. By the mid-1950s television news organizations at the local and national levels were experienced with the medium and on the lookout for news that made good television. When the networks covered the Democratic National Convention in 1956 however, the proceedings were so tedious that critics panned the coverage. One reporter pointed out that the picture of Sam Rayburn "pushing through not only the civil rights plank but the whole platform by the simple device of exhausting the delegates" made for good politics but bad television. "There have been great attempts by television to reconcile its medium to political reporting," he noted, "and by politicians to reconcile themselves to television." The convention was not one of them. 28

Jack Gould, the television critic for the New York Times, considered the 1956 Democratic Convention coverage a "routine show." He conceded that television offered the viewers an "excellent seat at the proceedings" but argued that the coverage "highlighted the inherent weaknesses that TV does have as a reportorial medium." The convention, he wrote, "just wasn't the type of story that lent itself to vivid visual treatment." Television, Gould thought, had done a great deal to stimulate the nation's "political consciousness," but he voiced concern about what he called television's "journalistic narcissism." As the medium grew in popularity and power, Gould noted, the television producers were trying too much to come between the viewer and the event. TV, Gould wrote, should worry less about "making history" and more about reporting it. 29

The connections between the civil rights struggle and television as a medium were too numerous and significant to ignore for either opponents or supporters of desegregation. The first televised debate for statewide office in New York took place on October 20, 1956 between New York City Mayor Robert Wagner and New York Attorney General Jacob Javits. The televised debate focused entirely on civil rights issues. Powerful images, from political debates and other events, might come across the screen, reveal different perspectives, and open discussion. In 1957 southern congressmen began taking measures to insure the "southern point of view" might make its way onto the nation's airwaves. The passage of the 1957 Civil Rights Bill led some southern congressmen to put pressure on the big radio and television networks. One powerful congressman sent a letter to the broadcast companies urging that the "southern view" be given consideration. He wanted white conservative opinion defending state's rights and segregation fully broadcast. The letter, printed on the letterhead of the Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee, the committee that oversees the FCC, included the veiled threat that the networks might eventually be transformed into a public utility if they did not present the "southern" point of view. 30

White conservatives took aim at television programming and news coverage that they claimed instigated African American protests and poisoned race relations in the South. Often, local white conservatives in small towns and cities in the South saw the national programming as especially offensive. In 1960, for example, Petersburg, Virginia, businessman Remmie Arnold, president of the Remmie Arnold Pen Co., Inc., objected to an NBC program aired on April 10th and hosted by Chet Huntley. Arnold called the program "terrifying" because "it was put over in such a way that" it gave "instructions to the dissenters of the colored race." Arnold wrote directly to Robert Sarnoff, president of NBC, and invited Huntley and NBC newsmen to "come into the South and see what is happening." He warned Sarnoff that "a campaign" was underway "through proper channels . . . to prohibit such broadcasts as these in the future." Arnold forwarded a copy of his letter to NBC to Virginia Governor J. Lindsay Almond and asked the governor to "protest and prohibit the National Broadcasting Company, or any other television company, from sending in to the State of Virginia such distorted programs." 31

If some southern politicians were taking aim at television indirectly and some citizens were expressing privately their disdain for certain broadcasts, some southern sheriffs were more direct. When the FBI came to Dawson, Georgia, in 1958 to investigate allegations of police brutality and civil rights violations, the local county sheriff, Z. T. "Zeke" Matthews, blamed the situation on television news broadcasts originating in the North that stirred up local African Americans to protest. Television and the "communists," he suggested, were the point of origin for all disorder and difficulty in the county. "There isn't a nigger in Georgia who wouldn't take over if he could," Matthews stated plainly. "I've noticed things have gotten worse since television," Matthews pointed out,

They all got television sets up there and hear the news over NBC and CBS, telling what the Supreme Court has done and what the Federal Courts say and all about civil rights, and they begin thinking. 32

This small town Georgia sheriff was not far wrong about the increasing role of television in the lives of young southerners black and white. One of the most detailed descriptions of the widespread penetration of television into African American households was recorded in the criminal court records in Danville, Virginia, in 1963 when hundreds of young African American people were arrested for violating a local court injunction against street protests. The police took down information about their favorite shows and asked whether they owned a television. The large majority of the young African American students lived in a household with a television. Nearly 70 percent owned televisions in their homes, and only 5 percent lived in homes without access to either a television or a radio. These young people watched major league baseball, "Bandstand," "The Beverly Hillbillies," "western shows," and "The Eleventh Hour." 33

In Virginia the first television stations went on the air in 1949 and by 1960 there were still only a handful of local stations broadcasting local news. Early in the fifties, some television news editors and station managers began to take avowedly neutral stands on the issues of segregation and discrimination. After 1961, the FCC's 1949 Fairness Doctrine became a standard for licensing when Commission head Newton Minnow reinforced it. The doctrine required that television stations give equal time and access to diverse opinions on the air and barred them from editorializing in their news broadcasts. WAVY-TV (Portsmouth, Virginia), for example, declared that its news staff "will not editorialize, give an opinion, or predict any future development relative to the integration issue." The station urged its reporters that all interviews with local school officials and state elected officials "will be handled so that no side or definite stand will appear to result from the questions by our newsmen." 34

In both its original application for a broadcast license in 1952 and its renewal application in 1960, WDBJ in Roanoke, Virginia, offered justifications for its programming in the public interest. The station noted the track record of its radio operation as an "important medium of cultural expression and as a source of unbiased and factual news dissemination." WDBJ pointed out its work with religious organizations for the broadcast of local services and fundraising for the completion of "a new Negro hospital" in the city. In 1960 the station planned to continue "to provide an outlet for the Roanoke area for local self-expression, thus contributing to the vitalizing of our Democracy." As examples of public-interest, unbiased news reporting, the station pointed to several controversial issues it covered, most prominently the "segregation-integration issue." 35

The doctrine originally was intended to secure balanced coverage in the public interest concerning controversial topics because the spectrum of channels was limited and the stations were in effect "trustees" of the public space. The doctrine did not require equal time for opposing sides of a controversy. Instead, it required broadcasters to meet two criteria for license renewal. First, the broadcasting company had a responsibility to air controversial subjects in the public interest. No television station in the American South, therefore, in theory would be allowed to blackout the desegregation or civil rights news. Second, the station had to provide reasonable balance in the coverage of these issues. The FCC required stations "to provide coverage of vitally important controversial issues of interest in the community served by the licensees" and "to provide a reasonable opportunity for the presentation of contrasting viewpoints on such issues." The FCC gave stations wide latitude to interpret how best to achieve balance.

Local television stations, such as WDBJ, did report on controversial issues, and because they gave time and voice to multiple perspectives, these shows offered audiences something new—a desegregated news account. At the local level, some news organizations began putting together hour-long news specials on the civil rights struggle and on racial issues. One of the first to produce them in Virginia, WDBJ developed a special on school desegregation in 1955 titled "Virginia's Dilemma" and another on the school closing crisis in 1958 titled "September Showdown." These programs featured interviews with black and white participants in litigation and school desegregation, representatives of organizations, city government, and everyday passers-by on the street. Not all were willing to talk on television. The white school board officials in Norfolk, Virginia, were "unwilling to face television cameras" when WDBJ did its "September Showdown" piece at the height of the school closing crisis. Yet, they were willing to talk with "pencil and paper" reporters. African American civil rights leader Vivian Carter Mason in Norfolk did grant WDBJ reporters an interview after she escorted the first African American student on her first day at formerly all-white Granby High School in 1959. Carter, however, made clear that the students who desegregated Norfolk's schools would not be interviewed extensively on television. She considered the "barrage of questioning and picture-taking detrimental" to the students and feared that television interviews might be misinterpreted as attention-getting.

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These long-format news shows revealed powerful arguments for desegregation from articulate and compelling African American voices. NAACP lead attorney, Oliver Hill, appeared in numerous news films describing the plaintiff's position in school desegregation litigation. Oliver Hill's clear statement of the moral reasons segregation should end were delivered with drama and force in a WDBJ interview. To provide fairness Hill's comments were paired with an interview of Robert Crawford, the founder of the segregationist Defenders of State Sovereignty and Individual Liberties, an all-white organization intended to preserve segregation in all aspects of southern life.

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While WDBJ and other stations created their own news specials and aired them, these stations also carried the national news and the national networks' specials. Some southern stations refused to broadcast national news reports on the civil rights movement, either because they did not want to cancel popular entertainment programming or because they did not want to air controversial shows. Others refused to air any national programming that dealt with racial matters. National and local news programs often strove, nevertheless, for fairness but southern politicians worried about the visual power of the medium to shape interpretations. CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow, for example, wrote to Governor J. Lindsay Almond in November 1958 to explain the special one-hour report he was preparing on the Norfolk school closings. Murrow claimed that all sides would be presented in a "full and fair hearing." He viewed the situation in Virginia as "a dilemma which had decent people in all walks of life seeking a solution." Calling himself "an old admirer of the Jefferson country," Murrow indicated he would deal fairly with the "traditions of Virginia." 36

Murrow's fairness, however, would not go unchallenged. The program was screened to a limited audience in January 1959 and one participant wrote Murrow to offer her objections. Para Lee Brock, an independent television producer and writer in Atlanta, considered the program on the whole a "reasonable attempt to present both sides of the controversy." But one sequence in the program drew her criticism. It depicted a African American teacher calling roll in class asking those African American students who had applied to attend white schools to stand, and it featured Murrow's voiceover, which, according to Brock, "with a hint of laughter in it, would say, 'One pupil out of six thousand.'" Brock claimed it ridiculed Virginia, as if to say why should Virginia be so concerned about token integration. Brock went on in her letter to explain that the cause of massive resistance was not about a few black students in a few white schools but instead about total desegregation of southern life, something she considered serious, far-reaching, and not a matter to be taken lightly. Brock called on Murrow to correct the sequence: "No Virginian was given the opportunity to say that token integration would be merely the opening wedge."

Brock's letter to Murrow did not end there; she went on to ask Murrow to consider the visual power of the medium of television. She argued that "intelligent viewers" in the South and elsewhere would "refute the unbalanced sequence on their own and the network, rather than the South, would be the object of ridicule." The combination of Murrow's voice and the visual example of the roll call might influence "the masses." Brock called this "propaganda" and was clearly worried that the American public would be led inexorably toward the conclusion, "how ridiculous can the South be?" Brock sent a copy of her letter to Governor Almond, who replied that he "read [it] with considerable interest." 37

There can be little doubt that the CBS national program aired in Virginia. Many of the stations in Virginia including those in Roanoke and in Bristol, carried all such national news programs. WCYB in Bristol stated clearly in its FCC license renewal application that "every documentary and public affairs program made available by NBC, whether sponsored or sustaining, has been carried by WCYB-TV." The station carried all of the Kennedy-Nixon debates and all of Kennedy's news conferences. In addition, it gave time for local editorial opinion and invited multiple perspectives on current issues.

Editorials were run outside of the local news broadcasts but not all stations broadcast them. When they did, editorials on television appeared little different from those in the print media. One WCYB editorial ran on June 12, 1963, just two days after the Danville violence. The editorial commented on Governor Albertis Harrison's reactions to the events in Danville, repeating Harrison's views. Harrison held that Danville's violence was encouraged and perpetrated by "outsiders," that Prince Edward County's closed schools were deplorable, and that the only way to move forward for both races was through communication and education to attain equal treatment and opportunity for African Americans. The editorial applauded Harrison's sensibility on the subject, stating that segregation laws should and would be stricken down, that the Prince Edward "tragic" situation needed quick resolution, and that "this country is not alone with the race problem." At the same time, the editorial warned that zealous civil rights proponents were beginning to trample "upon constitutional guarantees" in calling for the proposed Civil Rights Bill. 38

While editorial comments, then, often carried clear messages for viewers and did not often include corresponding opposing views, news programs and documentaries featured African American voices speaking eloquently and directly to the audience. It is impossible to tell whether any of the young people of Danville or anywhere in the South in the late 1950s ever saw the local news or some of the national special broadcasts aired by NBC or CBS news. They might have seen, for example, James Baldwin interviewed by Dr. Kenneth Clark in May 1963. If they had, they would have witnessed his opening statement. Baldwin looked directly into the camera and said, "I am not a nigger." Baldwin stated plainly his humanity and his equality. The effect took hold of New York Times television critic Jack Gould, who called it "a television experience that seared the conscience of the white set owner." All of the usual legalistic and moral equivocations on television about civil rights were, according to Gould, "shattered" in Baldwin's remarkable performance. "Ever since the introduction of television," Gould wrote, "it has been self-evident that the searching camera eye and the intimacy of the screen at home can reach into the mind's inner recesses in a manner different from any other medium." The television combined access to mass audiences with the kind of personal challenge that Baldwin issued, a statement whose clarity and power stretched across region and time. Gould thought that Baldwin's connection to the audience would last well beyond the end of the show. 39

As the major networks developed and ran specials on the civil rights struggle, some southern politicians saw these as invasive and misguided. They singled out television and sometimes the media generally as a prime cause of racial conflict in the region. In NBC's special "American Revolution of '63" Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett lashed out at television as one of the chief catalysts of African American protest in the South. Barnett had tried to use television speeches in the crisis over James Meredith's admission to the University of Mississippi at Oxford. He spoke of abusive federal power and the need to maintain southern segregation, but the events of September 1962 showed unrestrained violence at the campus and federal marshals struggling to bring order. A year later Barnett attacked television because it presented what he thought were inflammatory pictures, stirred African American protesters, and made local stories into national media events, all but inviting federal power into localities to resolve them. 40

Barnett was wrong about many things, but he correctly understood that television as a medium operated in new and different ways. Television was not only an extraordinarily lucrative new venture, it was also radically different as an information medium. Unlike newspaper, television operated exclusively in a time-dependent fashion. Time governed the pacing of all programming on television and created a different set of structures and imperatives for the reporters and news directors. At first, as the new medium was taking shape, early television directors saw the advantages of presenting long live events to fill the hours and hours of open programming slots. Presidential campaigns and political conventions, as well as boxing matches and other sporting events, both filled time and offered viewers a built-in dramatic narrative. After the Army-McCarthy hearings were televised, news directors could see that the best use of the medium was to craft sequenced narratives. One television news historian, Paul Weaver, has argued against the conventional wisdom that television news was superficial while newspapers more analytical. Instead, he argues that television achieved integration and coherence where newspapers offered fragmentation and multiple layers. The newspaper story, he points out, was not meant to be read in its entirety yet still had to achieve intelligibility. The television news story, on the other hand, "is a whole that is designed to be fully intelligible only when viewed in its entirety." To accomplish this, television news directors began to focus not so much on an event per se as on what Weaver calls "a process, mood, trend, condition, irony, relationship, or whatever else seems suitable to them." While newspapers piled unrelated stories into an edition with little regard for how the whole newspaper for that day looked and read, television news directors developed the reverse strategy—the broadcast in its entirety was an arranged selection meant to appeal to the most viewers and over time not to lose viewers.41

In Roanoke, Virginia, WSLS (NBC) and WDBJ (CBS) covered key events in the late 1950s and early 1960s in ways that set them apart from the state's leading white-owned newspapers. WDBJ was owned by the same corporation that published the Roanoke World News, and so the station was influenced by the moderate stance of the ownership. WSLS was owned by principals at Shenandoah Life Insurance, a company with strong ties to federal employee organizations in the District of Columbia and few links to conservative Virginia Democratic Party operatives. Of the surviving film footage from these two stations that covered civil rights issues, approximately forty-four percent of the films prominently featured or presented African American spokespeople.

WSLS' coverage of the school closing crisis in 1958-1959 included both opposition voices to Virginia's massive resistance program and those in favor of it. After federal and state courts ordered integration to proceed in Virginia and put an end to massive resistance laws, Virginia's Governor Lindsay Almond considered taking a more drastic step to prevent integration in schools—repealing the provision in Virginia's constitution that required the state to maintain free and public schools. After a few days, however, Almond relented and decided to scrap massive resistance and search for "other methods as effective as or better than those which have served until the hammer of federal intervention fell with devastating force." 42

Almond's retreat from continuing massive resistance was big news, and the WSLS news script called it what it was: "a turning point in the fight against school integration." The white-owned newspapers covered Almond's speech not as a turning point but as a capitulation or at least as an admission of failure. The moderate papers, such as the Roanoke World News, considered Almond's speech a positive sign telling the "people what they already knew but were loath to admit." Defiance, these papers suggested, was "futile" and the state should "have learned a lesson" from the dismal failure of massive resistance both as a policy and a strategy. The more conservative white papers, such as the Richmond News Leader, emphasized that white leaders were "powerless" in the face of federal authority and yet still called for massive resistance to shift gears toward minimizing desegregation. The Richmond News Leader ran an angry editorial a few days after the speech. James J. Kilpatrick chastised the broadcasting stations for giving "equal time" to the NAACP spokesmen to respond to the Governor and rebuked NAACP attorney Oliver Hill for suggesting that the lack of communication between white and black Virginians could be corrected "once white people decided to work constructively." Fulminating over the comment, the News Leader editor lashed out in an oddly accurate assessment: the white South, he wrote, has "been working constructively upon segregation problems for the past several generations and they have had mighty little help from the Negro people." Only the African American-owned newspaper, the Richmond Afro American, used the same language as WSLS and called the speech a "turning point." Its editorial reviewed it as "a masterpiece of agonized rhetoric." 43

WSLS gave considerable voice, time, and attention to the white leadership, but it also presented news stories covering the affairs of African American Virginians. The September 28, 1959, news broadcast featured a story on a meeting of the African American Roanoke Development Association. The anchor on the broadcast described a speech calling for desegregation by a retired African American judge from New York, H. T. Delaney, who "says if his race moved any slower towards this goal, they'd be going backwards." The news director not only quoted from Delaney in the coverage but also showed film footage of the event and described the group's plans to "quit doing business" with several downtown merchants who would not hire African Americans. WSLS went further, however, and also covered the speech of a little-known independent candidate challenging U.S. Senator Harry F. Byrd, Virginia's most powerful politician. The script read that the candidate was "claiming he [Byrd] was trying to keep Virginia small in every way." Concluding the story, the script summarized, "Delaney told his audience that white people in the South had never learned the precept of love thy neighbor." Neither Delaney's speech nor the independent candidate's were covered in the newspapers. WSLS's news broadcast linked these stories and created a sequential narrative of black and white opposition to the Byrd-led conservative politics.

On the day of court-ordered integration in several localities in Virginia, WSLS' news coverage explicitly linked the school desegregation issue with a wider one—the economic development and the future of Virginia. The script and film created a seamless narrative of consequences in the desegregation story, one that connected white and black students to the state's future economic well-being. The station's news script for February 20, 1959, led off with how integration proceeded at one of the closed schools, Warren County High School. As it turned out, the African American students arrived for classes only to find that no white students returned to the school. "In theory, classes began at Warren County high school today on an integrated basis," the script read, "actually, however, the once all-white school is now an all-Negro school." The story explained that the white students were staying put in the segregated private schools set up during the closing crisis and then went directly into a second story about a business leader's speech to a gathering in Roanoke. The speaker, a vice president of the Norfolk and Western Railroad, argued that "a prompt and sound solution of the school segregation problem" was necessary to accelerate Virginia business growth. He called not only for lower taxes on businesses but also "a change in attitude by some Virginians, who apparently don't want progress." While the Roanoke newspaper covered the business meeting and mentioned the speaker's points, the newspaper did not connect the event to the larger desegregation story.

In 1960 WSLS presented a radically different picture of the Democratic Party when it featured what it called a "Negro Democratic Rally" on its October 7th evening news. At the time both Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy and his Republican rival Richard Nixon were stumping in Virginia. National Democratic Party leaders considered Virginia in play despite Harry F. Byrd's opposition to Kennedy. Several key Democrats in Virginia, including state party chair Sidney Kellam and Governor Lindsay Almond, backed Kennedy in the race. Desegregation had begun in some Virginia schools, but resistance to desegregation was by no means dead. When WSLS broadcast a African American Democratic Party rally, the political stakes were high for a changing party.

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Meanwhile, television news reporters at WDBJ, the CBS affiliate, covered the events of desegregation in careful detail. The station's reporters interviewed state legislators, political leaders, school board officials, and citizens. These interviews included extensive comments from African American lawyers and NAACP officials, as well as local ministers, organizers, and parents. The balance and engaging presence of these multiple voices represented a distinct difference between the television and the print medium. WDBJ's interview with NAACP attorney Oliver Hill presented as direct and clear of a statement that Virginians were ever to hear about why segregation was wrong.

Later, in 1963, the WDBJ reporters interviewed a young African American student getting on the school bus in Prince Edward County after four long years out of school because white authorities closed schools rather than integrate them. The story's captivating appeal came from both the long wait for the bus as it trundled down the lane and the enthusiasm of the youngster who seemed one moment closer to his lifelong goal—to be a physician. "You need a lot of education for that," remarked the newsman. "I know that," replied the youngster as he boarded the bus.

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Television news not only gave African American leaders a channel of communication to white and black viewers, it also invited viewers into the movement behind the scenes. Television cameras went where many whites had never been: into African American churches, into African American homes, into non-violent training workshops, into African American meetings, and into the legal offices of African American lawyers and organizers. When WDBJ, for example, filmed a SNCC workshop on non-violent demonstration, it offered white viewers an opportunity to learn and see what was happening in their wider community. These images and the commentary that African American leaders provided often were the only sources for whites to hear from and see the African American community unfiltered through the white newspaper media. Only those who had read African American newspapers, such as the Richmond Afro-American, might have absorbed this perspective.

Local television news, it turned out, could reach far beyond a station's broadcast territory. Stations across the networks picked up important stories and the effects of this coverage were sometimes surprising. CBS's story on the June 1963 violence in Danville, for example, was broadcast nationally. A letter to the editor of the Richmond Afro American came from New Mexico, where the writer was "looking at the 8 p.m. news on television" when the Danville mayor appeared on screen to defend his refusal to free the jailed protestors. The writer argued that "our very nation was born and established in a revolt against injustice and tyranny" and that the mayor should start by negotiating with the African American leaders of Danville. 44

Another television viewer saw the Danville coverage and reacted with direct, personal action—she went to Danville. Anne Karro, a 53 year-old wife of a Labor Department lawyer and mother of three, drove to Danville "after seeing a television show on the police brutality there." Karro said she "wanted to see what it was all about" and she ended up marching, protesting, and spending eleven days in jail for violating court injunctions. Later, after the March on Washington, Karro organized a community road trip from her suburban Maryland neighborhood to Danville where they joined meetings and attended church. 45

Television news made up a small proportion of the broadcast day and of the station's operations, but the news it aired was markedly different from what made it into the newspapers. The Roanoke stations estimated in 1952 that 10 percent of the broadcast time would be devoted to news. By 1960 the station reported that the number was optimistic, as just six percent of programming time went to news. Yet both local and national news broadcasts remained powerfully resonant. Local segregationists wanted a news blackout on the issues of civil rights, and in many places controlled or influenced the newspapers enough to achieve that goal for a time. In Roanoke, Portsmouth, and other Virginia areas, television, on the other hand, opened up new spaces, bringing whites into black places, broadcasting black voices, and showing dramatic scenes of confrontation, debate, prayer, and action.

Abstract | Introduction | Print Media and Segregation | Birmingham and Danville, 1963 | Local Television News and the Breakdown of Segregation | The March on Washington and Television News | WLBT and Pro-Segregation TV | Conclusion | Notes | Bibliography

Published: 03 November 2004

© 2004 William G. Thomas III and Southern Spaces