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

It is often suggested that national television news coverage of the civil rights movement helped transform the United States by showing Americans the violence of segregation and the dignity of the African American quest for equal rights. In the American South, local television news coverage had immediate and significant effects. This essay argues that local television news broadcasts in Virginia in the fifties began to address the segregation issue in ways substantially more balanced and desegregated than the print media, while a major television station in Jackson, Mississippi, worked hard to defend segregation and deny access to opposing voices, both local and national.

A General Note to Readers: I have intended this essay to be read and the films viewed together. Rather than narrate the films, I have presented analysis of them and have introduced them to the reader at the appropriate moments. The essay is intended as a multimedia and hypertextual analysis and is argued in such a way that readers will need to view these films in order that they might interpret and analyze them. These films are from two television stations in Roanoke, Virginia, WSLS and WDBJ. Taken together, the stations have retained approximately 400 films—probably the only remaining films from the period in Virginia. The WSLS collection is archived on 8 millimeter film and accompanied by the nightly news anchor scripts. The WDBJ footage was preserved in the station's recent history and is no longer available in its original form. The Virginia Center for Digital History at the University of Virginia, along with the Robertson Media Center, is working to digitize and provide internet access to the full set of civil rights films with commentary and other materials. No film, image, or text in this essay may be reproduced, copied, or distributed without permission of the author and the rights holders.