William G. Thomas III, Television News and the Civil Rights Struggle: The Views in Virginia and Mississippi

Acknowledgements. I would like to thank Mary Catherine Wellons for her research assistance on this essay and for leading the way with her own research on Danville in 1963. The team of students and staff at the Virginia Center for Digital History and the Robertson Media Center also contributed to this effort, including Felicia Johnson, Maria Kosut, Mia Morgan, Gerard Robinson, Amanda Beckner, Kim Tryka, and Jennifer Muter. The participants in my summer seminar on civil rights in 2003 helped me a great deal with understanding the media coverage of the civil rights period. I would also like to thank several colleagues who read this essay and offered comments, including Edward L. Ayers, Grace Hale, Aniko Bodroghkozy, Crandall Shifflett, Gerard Robinson, Mike Schaefer, Andrew Witmer, J. Douglas Smith, and Andrew B. Lewis. I thank Jim Kent, News Director at WDBJ-7, for his support and help with the project. The editorial board of Southern Spaces, especially Charles Reagan Wilson, Allen Tullos, Carole Merritt, and Lucinda MacKethan, reviewed the manuscript at key stages, and the staff of Southern Spaces, especially Katherine Skinner, has helped immeasurably to improve the work and its presentation. Research for parts of this article have been made possible through a generous grant from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

1. Richmond News Leader, July 27, 1948.

2. Mary Ann Watson, The Expanding Vista: American Television in the Kennedy Years (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990),: 97. The subject of television and the civil rights struggle has received recent attention in Sasha Torres, Black, White, and in Color: Television and Black Civil Rights (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), and Sasha Torres, ed., Living Color: Race and Television in the United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998). In addition, two new books have focused on the WLBT case in Mississippi: Steven D. Classen, Watching Jim Crow: The Struggles Over Mississippi TV, 1955-1969 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004) and Kay Mills, Changing Channels: The Civil Rights Case that Transformed Television (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004).

3. Brian Ward, ed., Media, Culture, and the Modern African American Freedom Struggle, (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001). See also Beverly Keever et. al., eds. U.S. News Coverage of Racial Minorities: A Sourcebook, 1934-1996 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1997); Carolyn Martindale, The White Press and Black America (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1986); Sharon Bramlett-Solomon, "Southern vs. Northern Newspaper Coverage of the Dime Store Demonstration Movement: A Study of News Play and News Source Diversity," Mass Communications Review 15, no. 1 (1998); Paul L. Fisher and Ralph L. Lowenstein, eds. Race and the News Media (New York: Praeger, 1967); Allison Graham,"Remapping Dogpatch: Northern Media on the Southern Circuit," Arkansas Historical Quarterly 56, no. 3 (Autumn 1997): 334-340; Allison Graham, Framing the South: Hollywood, Television, and Race during the Civil Rights Struggle (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).

4. Some media historians question whether television was so powerful, whether it helped shape public opinion at all. In a recent essay on television's role on decision-making in 1968 during the Vietnam War, one historian reexamined the widely accepted idea that opposition to Vietnam grew because the American public watched the first "living room war." The impact of television has been overrated, he argued, and the "living room war" a cliché. Some military historians of the war also downplay the impact of television and media because revisionist critics have tried to pin American withdrawal on intense (and they argue slanted) media coverage. Media historians, too, have reviewed hundreds of hours of television news film and found it visually uninteresting. Television, some argue, mainly followed elite opinion; it did not lead. See David Culbert, "Television's Visual Impact on Decision-Making in the U.S.A., 1968: The Tet Offensive and Chicago's Democratic National Convention," Journal of Contemporary History, 33, no. 3 (July 1998): 419-449. The search for a direct link between television news and the civil rights movement has often been too literal. When former television journalists discuss the subject, they make claims about the power of the medium to change minds and humanize subjects. One prominent television journalist summarized the effect of the medium on the civil rights movement as "showing the red neck of the white south" to the rest of the country. Brian Ward, ed., Media Culture, and the Modern African American Freedom Struggle, (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001). For a view of television as a desegregating force, see S. I. Hayakawa, "Television and the American Negro," in David Manning White and Richard Averson, eds., Sight, Sound and Society: Motion Pictures and Television in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968). The FCC and the Fairness Doctrine critics, including some television station managers, argued that the effect was "chilling" and that stations tended to avoid controversial subjects, exactly the opposite outcome from the Doctrine's intent. The Supreme Court of the United States upheld the doctrine in 1967 in Red Lion Broadcasting v. FCC 395 U.S. 367 (1967), but in 1984 the Court ruled that the basis for the doctrine no longer applied to the broadcasting business FCC v. League of Women Voters, 468 U.S. 364 (1984). The Court held that the number of cable and network stations had so proliferated that concerns about the scarcity of media outlets could not justify the Fairness Doctrine and its potential restriction of free speech. The FCC set aside the doctrine in 1987 after the Court's decision. Since 1987 proponents of the Fairness Doctrine have attempted to enact statutory provisions to define and reinstate it. For analysis of the Fairness Doctrine, see Adrian Cronaeur, "The Fairness Doctrine: A Solution in Search of a Problem," (Symposium: The Transformation of Television News).Federal Communications Law Journal, 47 (October 1994): 51-77. Henry Geller, The Fairness Doctrine in Broadcasting: Problems and Suggested Courses of Action (Santa Monica: Rand, December 1973). Timothy A. Brennan, "The Fairness Doctrine as Public Policy." Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 33, no. 4 (Fall, 1989): 419-440. Broadcasters and the Fairness Doctrine: Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Telecommunications and Finance of the Committee. (House Committee on Energy and Commerce. Subcommittee on Telecommunications and Finance.) 101st Cong., 1st sess., 1989, February 9, 1989. Ford Rowan, Broadcast Fairness: Doctrine, Practice, Prospects: A Reappraisal of the Fairness Doctrine and Equal Time Rule (New York: Longmans, 1984). On television managers views, see Peter M. Sandman, David Rubin, David Sachsman, Media: An Introductory Analysis of American Mass Communications (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1972). The most recent work to look at civil rights and television is Sasha Torres, Black White and in Color, although Torres presents only two chapters on events in the 1950s and 1960s. Torres considers the "visuality" the key ingredient for linking the events of the African American freedom struggle to the emergent business and technical demands of television. (see pp. 16 and 23 for the best analysis of this linkage).

5. Caption to "Virginia's Dilemma." From the 1955 Peabody Digest. (WDBJ-TV, Roanoke, Va., Peabody Collection.)

6. Washington Post, April 15, 1952.

7. Washington Post, October 8, 1957. See also Wall Street Journal, March 9, 1956 for an analysis of examples of white segregationist attempts to use the media under their control to put pressure on big national corporations that had exhibited liberal leanings, especially Philip Morris, Ford, Falstaff Beer, and others. For an important article on print culture, see Robert Darnton, "An Early Information Society: News and Media in Eighteenth-Century Paris," American Historical Review, Vol. 105 no 1, www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/105.1/ah000001.html. For an excellent overview of the approaches to print culture in American history, see Jennifer Tebbe, "Print and American Culture," American Quarterly, 32, 3 (1980): 259-279. Tebbe's analysis explores the two dominant models of social scientific research on mass media and print: content analysis and "production of culture" models. The content analysis research proceeds from the view that communication is delivered "with purpose of control" and that its main aims are to socialize, persuade, and change attitudes through the transmission of information. The second model emphasizes communication as a cultural process "through which shared culture is created."

8. On the Byrd Organization and its role in Virginia, see J. Harvie Wilkinson III, Harry Byrd and the Changing Face of Virginia Politics, 1945-1966 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1968); Ronald L. Heinemann, Harry Byrd of Virginia (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996); Matthew Lassiter and Andrew Lewis, The Moderates' Dilemma: Massive Resistance to School Desegregation in Virginia (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998). On the media and editorial practices in Virginia, see John T. Kneebone, Southern Liberal Journalists and the Issue of Race, 1920-1944 (The Fred W. Morrison Series in Southern Studies, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985); J. Douglas Smith, Managing White Supremacy: Race Politics and Citizenship in Jim Crow Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Henry Lewis Suggs, ed., The Black Press in the South, 1865-1979 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983); Henry Lewis Suggs, P. B. Young, Newspaperman: Race, Politics, and Journalism in the New South, 1910-1962 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1988).

9. Washington Post, February 22, 1955.

10. Richmond Times Dispatch, February 22, 1955.

11. Charlottesville Tribune, August 18, 1950 and October 13, 1950. The literature on the civil rights struggle's connection to the Cold War has been received a high level of attention from scholars recently. See especially, Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); Nancy E. Bernhard, U. S. Television News and Cold War Propaganda, 1947-1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Timothy B. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Barbara Dianne Savage, Broadcasting Freedom: Radio, War, and the Politics of Race, 1938-1948 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); and Jeff Woods, Black Struggle Red Scare: Segregation and Anti-Communism in the South, 1948-1968 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004).

12. The Doctrine of Interposition: Its History and Applications, A Report on Senate Joint Resolution 3, General Assembly of Virginia, 1958, Senate Document No. 21.

13. Inaugural Address of J. Lindsay Almond, Jr., Senate Document No. 3, January 11, 1958.

14. See Mary Catherine Wellons, in "'Mediated' Communication: Mass Media and the Civil Rights Movement in Danville, Virginia in 1963," (unpublished undergraduate thesis, University of Virginia, 2004), 67. Also, Len Holt, An Act of Conscience (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965). Holt described what happened during the trials when he asked the local newspaper reporters for information and photographs from the June 10 confrontation. Holt claimed he was "not given cooperation" and subpoenaed all of the reporters at all newspapers in Danville. Washington Post, August 6, 1963. Recently, the Lexington Herald Leader in Kentucky has issued an apology for its blackout of civil rights news in the 1950s and 1960s, see New York Times, July 13, 2004, "40 Years Later Civil Rights Makes Page One." See also especially, Bob Smith, They Closed Their Schools (Farmville: Martha Forrester, 1996), 23-5. For other accounts of the Prince Edward County school closing, see Amy Murrell, "The Impossible Prince Edward Case," in Matt Lassiter and Andrew Lewis, ed., The Moderates' Dilemma: Massive Resistance to School Desegregation in Virginia (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999). On Prince Edward County, see The Saturday Evening Post, April 29, 1961, the Christian Science Monitor, April 5, 1962, and The Nation, November 14, 1966. On Birmingham see New York Times, April 12 and May 4, 1960. See especially Glenn T. Eskew's analysis of the Birmingham press and its relationship to the national press in But for Birmingham: The Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 142 and 150, and 363 n. 69.

15. For an account of King's concern over the national media and John Thomas Porter's objections to King's pragmatism, see especially, David Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: Vintage Books, 1988), 247. Glenn T. Eskew, But for Birmingham: The Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle, 252. Peggy Bobie Thomson, "A Visit to Danville," The Progressive (November 1963). Sasha Torres, Black White and in Color, argues that "local television played a crucial and unusual role by breaking the local newspapers' monopoly on information." (p. 27)

16. See J. Mills Thornton III, Dividing Lines: Municipal Politics and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002) and Glenn T. Eskew, But for Birmingham: The Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). There are no book-length treatments of the Danville protests. For an account of the legal issues at stake in Danville, see James W. Ely, Jr., "Negro Demonstrations and the Law: Danville as a Test Case," 27 Vanderbilt Law Review 927 (October 1974). Ely's assessment of the Danville legal action was dismissive of the protestors. "One of the most unhappy legacies of the 1960s," Ely concluded, "was the widespread notion that questions of public policy should be determined by mobs in the street." Ely considered the Danville protests a "failure" and "that white citizens of Danville paid no attention to such activities." He found that "Virginians correctly insisted upon obedience to the law and established procedure. Illegal practices in Danville or errors by Judge Aiken could be corrected on appeal and did not furnish an excuse for street mobs." Ely's characterization of the protestors as a "mob" and the protests as unnecessary and counterproductive takes up a conservative, paternalistic line that evolved out of the events themselves. See also Dorothy Miller, Danville, Virginia (Atlanta: Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, 1963). For a complete examination of Danville and media role in the events of 1963, see Mary Catherine Wellons, "'Mediated' Communication: Mass Media and the Civil Rights Movement in Danville, Virginia in 1963," (unpublished undergraduate thesis, University of Virginia, 2004).

17. Richmond News Leader, May 8, 1963, May 6, 1963, and May 4, 1963.

18. Richmond Times-Dispatch, June 5, 1963.

19. Richmond Afro-American, April 20, 1963, see also April 27, 1963, May 4, 1963, and May 11, 1963.

20. Richmond Afro-American, May 18, 1963.

21. Dorothy Miller, Pamphlet on Danville, Virginia, published by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee of Atlanta, Georgia, Undated, Sarah Patton Boyle Papers, Box 12, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia. See also Len Holt, An Act of Conscience (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965). On the "John Brown law" see also Richmond Afro-American, July 6, 1963. The exact events of the June 10, 1963 remain in some dispute in Danville. Because garbage collectors and others were deputized during the tense standoff and had little formal training in handling protests, some police maintain that the beatings and violence were the natural and unfortunate result. T. Neal Morris, who recently retired as Danville's police chief, was a on duty as a young officer on June 10, 1963, and recalled that the members of the police force committed none of the violent beatings. He also believes that the media "made us out to be barbaric, a brutal police force." Danville Register and Bee, June 8, 2003.

22. Richmond Times-Dispatch, June 11, 1963. Richmond News Leader, June 14, 1963.

23. Danville Bee, June 11, 1963. Danville Bee, June 12, 1963.

24. Roanoke World News, September 30, 1958. Richmond News Leader, June 27, 1963

25. Danville Bee, November 16, 1963.

26. "Dr. King to Lead New Danville Drive," Washington Post, July 13, 1963. For McCain's announcement that he would use cameras to photograph protestors to go after those not arrested on the scene, see "Jailed Rights Protestors Stage Balk in Danville," Washington Post, July 27, 1963. For McCain's later testimony, see Danville, Virginia, Corporation Court, 1963 Civil Rights Case Files, 1963-1973, Local Government Records Collection, Library of Virginia. McCain's testimony is on Dictabelt 2K204-003. The data on television was compiled from the case files by Mary Catherine Wellons, in "'Mediated' Communication: Mass Media and the Civil Rights Movement in Danville, Virginia in 1963," (unpublished undergraduate thesis, University of Virginia, 2004).

27. New York Times, June 23, 1963.

28. Washington Post, August 20, 1956.

29. New York Times, August 19, 1956.

30. New York Times, July 31, 1957.

31. Remmie Arnold to J. Lindsay Almond, Jr., April 13, 1960. Governor J. Lindsay Almond, Jr., Executive Department Papers, Record Group 3, Library of Virginia.

32. Washington Post, June 8, 1958.

33. The data on television was compiled from the case files by Mary Catherine Wellons, in "'Mediated' Communication: Mass Media and the Civil Rights Movement in Danville, Virginia in 1963," (unpublished undergraduate thesis, University of Virginia, 2004).

34. Federal Communications Commission, Report on Editorializing by Broadcast Licensees, 13 FCC 1946 (1949). Portsmouth station quoted in J. Fred MacDonald, Blacks and White TV: Afro-Americans in Television Since 1948 (Chicago: Nelson-Hall Publishers, 1983), 70-1. Whether all stations in the South adopted this editorial position on civil rights issues remains unclear. The most recent reference to the WAVY statement is in Classen, Watching Jim Crow, 49. Classen considers the WAVY statement a thinly veiled "studied neutrality." Because we do not know whether WAVY broadcast anything related racial issues, we cannot determine the effective outcome of this policy. The policy, it should be noted, simply stated that the station would not "editorialize" and, in fact, contemplated ongoing coverage and broadcasts. It required those broadcasts to present both sides. This set of guidelines seems quite different from those followed in Mississippi where "hands-off" meant a news black-out.

35. Federal Communication Commission, License Files, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, Record Group 173 69A, WDBJ Proposed Typical Week, June 30, 1952 Exhibit # 4. See also MacDonald, Blacks on White TV, 96.

36. Edward R. Murrow to J. Lindsay Almond, December 22, 1958, Governor J. Lindsay Almond, Jr., Executive Department Papers, Record Group 3, Library of Virginia.

37. Para Lee Brock to Edward R. Murrow, January 16, 1959, Governor J. Lindsay Almond, Jr., Executive Department Papers, Record Group 3, Library of Virginia.

38. Federal Communication Commission, License Files, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, Record Group 173 69A, WCYB Certificate of Renewal of License, and Application for Renewal of License, July 9, 1963.

39. New York Times, May 30, 1963

40. See "Long Race Special Worth Time, Cost," Washington Post, September 4, 1963. Barnett in NBC's "The American Revolution of 1963," charged that "information media, including the TV networks, have publicized and dramatized the race issue far beyond its relative importance in today's world." Barnett particularly objected to the coverage of the March on Washington which he found excessive and "propagandized."

41. Paul Weaver, "Newspaper News and Television News," in Television as a Social Force: New Approaches to TV Criticism, ed. Douglass Cater and Richard Adler (New York: Praeger, 1975), 85. African American newspapers might be an exception to Weaver's general characterization. These weekly newspapers might be considered more integrated and coherent than the white dailies. See Samuel R. Winch, Mapping the Cultural Space of Journalism: How Journalists Distinguish News from Entertainment (Westport: Praeger, 1997), 30.

42. WSLS Collection, February 20, 1959, News Scripts, Roberston Media Center, University of Virginia Library, and Virginia Center for Digital History, University of Virginia. Roanoke World News, February 20, 1959.

43. WSLS Collection, September 28, 1958, News Scripts, Roberston Media Center, University of Virginia Library, and Virginia Center for Digital History, University of Virginia. The Roanoke paper did not print on Sunday and the meeting was held on a Saturday.

44. Richmond Afro-American, June 29, 1963

45. The Washington Post, September 5, 1963

46. The New York Times, August 29, 1963

47. The New York Times, August 29, 1963

48. Washington Post, August 20, 1963, Roanoke World News, August 20, 1963.

49. see Roanoke World News, August 27, 1963.

50. New York Times, September 8, 1963

51. Roanoke World News, August 29, 1963

52. Jackson Clarion-Ledger, February 1, 1980, in United Church of Christ Office of Communication Collection, Folder 14, Mississippi State Archives.

53. "Dissenting Statement of Chairman E. William Henry in which Commissioner Kenneth A. Cox Joins," United Church of Christ Office of Communications Collection, Folder 11, Mississippi State Archives. MacDonald, Blacks and White TV, 84. Federal Communication Commission, License Files, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, Record Group 173 69A, Box 315, Vol. 1 and 1A, Mary Jane Morris to Washington Bureau of the NAACP, July 1, 1959.

54. New York Times, November 11, 1965 and December 13, 1962

55. Wendell P. Taylor to Federal Communications Commission, June 5, 1964, and Jacquelyne J. Jackson to Federal Communications Commission, June 15, 1964, United Church of Christ Office of Communications Collection, Box 1, Folder 11, Mississippi State Archives.

56. "Dissenting Statement of Chairman E. William Henry in which Commissioner Kenneth A. Cox Joins," United Church of Christ Office of Communications Collection, Box 1, Folder 11, Mississippi State Archives.

57. Washington Post June 11, 1965.

58. Marian E. Musgrave to Federal Communications Commission, June 15, 1964, United Church of Christ Office of Communications Collection, Box 1, Folder 11, Mississippi State Archives. News Scripts, Box 1, June 19, 1963, WLBT Newsfilm Collection, 1954-1971, Mississippi State Archives.

59. MacDonald, Blacks and White TV, 90-2. Programs included for example, "Clinton Law: A Study in Desegregation," See It Now, January 6, 1957, "The Lost Class of '59," See It Now, January 21, 1959, "The Second Agony of Atlanta," NBC, February 1, 1959, "Sit In," NBC White Paper, December 20, 1960, "Cast the First Stone," Closeup, September 27, 1960, "The Freedom Explosion," CBS Reports, February 15, 1960, "Who Speaks for the South?" CBS Reports, May 27, 1960, "Harvest of Shame," CBS Reports, November 25, 1960, "Crucial Summer," ABC, August 11, 1963 to September 8, 1963, "The American Revolution of '63," NBC Special, September 2, 1963.

60. New York Times, February 21, 1965.

61. New York Times, November 14, 1965.

62. W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903): 3. Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia.