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

Dedicated segregationists and committed civil rights proponents both recognized the potential of television news to upset the inertia of segregated society. From the early stages of the technology, television attracted the attention of politicians who saw what airtime might mean for their campaigns. When, for example, President Harry S. Truman issued the executive order to desegregate the armed services in 1948, the Richmond News Leader accused him of doing so solely to get the African American vote. The white-owned newspaper also suggested that Truman's Democratic opponent, Henry Wallace, would probably try to trump him with a television appearance: "Mr. Wallace would have emulated old John Brown and would have kissed a Negro baby—if he could have done it before a television lens." In the 1950s, politicians seemed to recognize the power of television, and they scrambled to understand the medium and how it worked in the context of political and social change after World War II. Southern governors tried to use television news to reach their constituents and to reinforce segregation in southern spaces and information. Governors George Wallace of Alabama, Ross Barnett of Georgia, Orval Faubus of Arkansas, and J. Lindsay Almond of Virginia all used television news interviews and statements to express their segregationist views.1

Historians, commentators, and participants have suggested connections between the media, especially television news, and the course of the civil rights movement. Generally those who consider television news as a powerful force for change refer to the nationally broadcast images of police dogs and fire hoses turned on the demonstrators in Birmingham. They see this moment and other similar ones that followed, such as the violence at the Pettus Bridge in Selma, as key turning points when Americans witnessed violence, repression, and hatred directed at African Americans and began to change their minds about the U. S. South and segregation.

Recent histories have stressed a crucial difference between national and local television news and suggested that local television in the South helped perpetuate segregation. In some cases, especially in Mississippi, local television managers worked hand-in-glove with segregationist organizations such as the White Citizen's Council. When southern stations failed to broadcast national documentaries on racial issues, Bill Monroe of NBC commented that

We know very little about what was aired on the local television news across the South and have little notion of how these broadcasts were received and what differences they made. Yet, we do know that some of the reporters, commentators, and public officials understood the medium as especially powerful and useful in shaping public opinion. Television was so new in the 1950s that it developed just as the civil rights movement was getting underway. In a recent book of essays on the media and the civil rights movement, Julian Bond speculated that "until historians unravel the complex links between the southern freedom struggle and the mass media, their understanding of how the Movement functioned, why it succeeded, and when and where it failed, will be incomplete."3

Television's rise to prominence in American culture was startlingly fast, and all participants in the civil rights struggle understood that it had dramatic power. As politicians, demonstrators, news reporters, litigators, and others tried to shape and capture public opinion, they all worked to use the new medium to their advantage.

Television became a subject of scrutiny within the politics of the movement. By 1963, one media observer argued that it was already too late for the South to reverse the influence of television and television news—segregation could not be extended to the new medium because the medium itself was not conducive to it. But television's capacity to breakdown segregation was by no means a fait accompli; it could easily have worked to perpetuate and defend segregation. White businessmen owned and controlled the television stations across the South. They were often state and local power brokers, who owned life insurance companies, newspaper companies, and banks. The advertising revenue they hoped to bring in came largely from automobile dealers and local white businesses. Leading political figures in the South used television to try to pump life into segregation and maintain the status quo. That it did not was the result of a convergence of technological, governmental, social, and political forces at work as the medium developed. The FCC's licensing process, the visual and dramatic effect of film, the linear narrative demands of television news, and the national programming affiliations of the local stations combined to make television a potentially powerful instrument for change. 4

Across the U.S. South in the mid-1950s, local television news had a wide effect on the shape of the struggle over civil rights, as both segregationists and civil rights advocates tried to use the new medium to their advantage. Local television news had the potential to eclipse the print media in terms of audience and to alter the historically segregated sources of information. Television news reporters and producers in Virginia presented multiple perspectives of the events in the 1950s and 1960s in a way that eluded the long tradition of print media and opened these local stories and personalities, black and white, to communities across the South. In Roanoke, Virginia WDBJ ran a weekly program in 1955 titled "Virginia's Dilemma" as the state's policy of "massive resistance" was taking shape. The station described the program as

This program with its wide ranging interviews and opinions told Virginians about themselves. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s the forces of segregation and desegregation battled to get their messages across in the new medium. Television in Virginia gave space for African American news, arguments, and opinions, as well as for moderate white opinions. In Virginia the media landscape differed significantly from Mississippi's, where there was a virtual blackout on racial issues.

This essay undertakes a close analysis of the news footage of two Virginia television stations and the ways both print and television media presented several of the major events of the Civil Rights Era.

Virginia boasted the first television station in the South, WTVR in Richmond. The Richmond station began broadcasting in 1949 and soon afterward another station, WTAR, was licensed in Norfolk. Within five years a handful of stations were up and running in Virginia after the FCC's self-imposed moratorium on new channels for nearly three years. In April 1952 the FCC opened up channels nationwide and allotted channels for thirty-nine stations in Virginia, nine of which would be in the VFH category reserved for commercial entities. 6

The programming and news footage of these stations as a whole might appear little different from the news as reported in newspapers. The same leading white politicians appeared regularly in both. Many stations excluded African American churches from their religious programming, African American schools from their scholastic programming, and African American farmers, business people, and professionals. It took stations years to open up to African American hiring and African American actors and anchors. But the television coverage of events in Virginia was decidedly different from the print media and offered viewers more perspectives. Whether it changed minds may never be known, but there is evidence television inspired some to act forcefully in the streets and others to try desperately to control the media.