In the 1950s in Virginia, a range of newspaper and periodicals dotted
the media landscape. Nearly 250 news publications were printed in Virginia in 1950.
Some were religious newspapers, such as the
Presbyterian Outlook or the
Virginia Churchman, while others were major city dailies, such as the
Norfolk Virginian-Pilot or the
Richmond Times-Dispatch. Two major
African American weekly newspapers were published in Virginia—the
Richmond
Afro-American and the
Norfolk Journal and Guide. In Roanoke and
Charlottesville a small African American newspaper, the
Tribune, rolled off
the printing press each week as well. In 1950 the
Times-Dispatch's daily
circulation was approximately 120,000 and the
Richmond News Leader reached
96,000 households. Smaller papers, such as the
Farmville Herald, had
circulation of less than 5,000 homes. The leading African American papers, the
Journal and Guide and the
Afro-American, published 63,000 and
11,000 weekly newspapers respectively.
In the county seats and small towns, such as Farmville, Abingdon, Appomattox,
Urbana, Danville, and Winchester, two and sometimes three newspapers competed.
These papers identified themselves as either "Independent,"
"Independent Democratic, " or "Democratic" in their
annual reports to the trade association. Most of the small town papers
and the large city papers adopted a conservative editorial position, many
offering outright support for the state's Democratic political organization.
U.S. Senator Harry F. Byrd, for example, was the leader of Virginia's
Democratic organization, came up in business as a newspaper publisher,
and owned and operated the
Winchester Star and several other
papers. Byrd's son, Harry Byrd, Jr., continued in the family newspaper
business and won election to the state senate after World War II.
A significant number of white papers stood independent
from the Byrd Democrats. These papers, such as the
Norfolk Virginian-Pilot,
the
Roanoke World News and the
Danville Commercial Appeal,
provided alternative voices within the white news reporting and editorial
circles in the state. Editor Louis Jaffe, and his successor, Lenoir Chambers,
at the
Norfolk Virginian Pilot maintained a consistently moderate
voice for progressive change. The
Virginian-Pilot opposed massive
resistance from the start. The paper's owners, Norfolk Newspapers, Inc.,
headed by Henry S. Lewis, also controlled WTAR television. In nearly every
major city in Virginia, the print media did not self-identify as "Democratic"
and in several places it was entirely independent. Byrd and his allies
railed at the
Washington Post as an engine of liberal ideas that
polluted Virginia with its reach into Northern Virginia. In the middle
of the hard-fought 1957 gubernatorial campaign, Senator Byrd attacked
the
Post as "the most rabid, and unreasoning integrationist
paper that I know of." He pounded on the table and shook his fist
at the
Post, but Byrd could do little about it. In some respects,
his control over the major media channels in the heart of Virginia was
just as distant and ineffective.
7
Over time the circulation rates and affiliations of major papers in the state shifted
and became more independent. By 1960 the number of non-partisan, independent,
and independent-democratic papers significantly outnumbered those affiliated with
the Democrats.
Big cities, especially Richmond, Roanoke, and Norfolk, witnessed
the largest jumps in circulation during the fifties while the smaller Virginia
southside and rural areas experienced nearly flat circulation rates over time.
In each of these places, such as Danville, Winchester, and Petersburg, television
stations that were unaffiliated with the newspapers began broadcasting in these
years.
The Byrd Organization held the reins
of political power in Virginia and dominated the state's Democratic Party
from the 1920s until its splintering in the 1960s. Republican opposition
to the Byrd Democrats was so anemic in these years that it was barely
able to field candidates until the 1950s. Whatever opposition to the machine's
conservative leadership there was came from maverick Democrats, most of
them running as "anti-organization" candidates on platforms
that tended to support the national Democratic Party. Senator Byrd and
his political allies articulated a stringent set of policies, designed
to keep state expenditures to a minimum, big businesses steadily growing,
"racial disorder" in check, and "outside influences,"
such as labor unions, at a distance. The organization's success was more
than a matter of electoral campaigning—it depended on structural
advantages that kept it in power year after year. First, Byrd's Democrats
kept careful control over the state's appointive offices, especially circuit
court judges and clerks of the court. They controlled nearly every local
courthouse and the electoral officers at the county level. Second, the
poll tax and disenfranchisement provisions of the state's Constitution
were instrumental in keeping voter participation at an abysmally low level.
Byrd Democrats could count on the fact that they only needed to persuade
the eight to ten percent of the total eligible voters who actually voted.
8
The Byrd organization's source of power in the local courts was only partially
mirrored in the local press and even further removed from television.
As a result resistance to integration took the shape it did in Virginia
because the legislature and local courts were the instruments of power
that Byrd and conservative Democrats had the tightest control over. They
concentrated on legal tactics, state court injunctions, and executive
powers to slow down desegregation.
In fact, television remained a medium over which Byrd
and his allies had little direct control. The conservative Richmond newspapers'
ownership, led by D. Tennant Bryan, was unable to gain a television station
in 1955. Bryan's company owned the
Richmond Times-Dispatch and
the
Richmond News Leader, as well as two radio stations in Richmond.
When the Richmond Television Corporation, headed by Morton G. Thalhimer,
a local realtor and theater operator, and Larus & Brothers, an old
tobacco concern, teamed up to secure the Richmond area television license,
the FCC approved the bid and rejected a competing one from Bryan's newspaper
company. Larus Brothers' founder, William T. Reed, was an old political
ally of Harry Byrd who funded Byrd's campaigns and chaired his presidential
campaign committee at one time. Reed, however, died in 1935, and his son,
William T. Reed, Jr., managed Larus & Brothers with an eye strictly
toward financial profit and rarely participated in political circles.
Thalhimer eschewed political connections as well and concentrated on business
operations. The FCC found that both groups "stand in approximate
parity" in their control of the media in Richmond, but that Richmond
Television Corporation was simply superior in every aspect of its operational
affairs.
9
The FCC examiner, furthermore, criticized the Richmond
Newspaper's bid for its lack of creativity and its weak commitment to
independent news gathering. "It is a curious thing," he pointed
out, "that a company which throughout its history has published newspapers
should have attached such seemingly little importance to the gathering
and presentation of news by its own radio station." The radio stations
had no news staff and merely cribbed stories from the wires and the newspapers.
The FCC found "qualitative differences" favoring Thalhimer's
Richmond Television in the areas of news and educational programming.
It cited that group's independent news team and applauded its operation
as "a vigorous news gathering and editing unit."
10
Other parts of Virginia also experienced television ownership dedicated
to independent news gathering and far removed from the Byrd organization's
direct influence. The newspaper groups in other areas of the state closest
to Byrd, including Byrd's own newspaper company, were unable to gain control
of a television license. In Roanoke, the Fishburn family controlled the
Roanoke World News and the CBS affiliate, WDBJ, and the Shenandoah
Life Insurance Company principals owned WSLS, the NBC affiliate. Neither
group was closely allied with the Byrd organization. In Newport, the Chisman
family owned and managed WVEC. While Thomas Chisman was allied with various
Democratic Party leaders, including Sidney Kellam, a state party chairman,
and Thomas Downing, a Congressman, his views were independent-minded and
placed a premium on regional economic growth as the primary concern. Chisman,
Fishburn, and other television presidents in Virginia had in common their
emphasis on progressive growth. They were conservatives and moderate Democrats
who wanted to craft an appealing, stable, future-oriented set of policies
for their regions. Few of these businessmen publicly supported massive
resistance and its school closings because they feared the damage such
policies would do to their region's future growth.
If Byrd's influence was blunted in the television media and limited in the white
newspapers, it was directly challenged weekly by two major African American newspapers.
A mix of editorials and hard-hitting news writing, the African American papers
offered the only African American perspective on current events in the print media.
Not all African American newspaper editors agreed on the best means to end
discrimination and injustice. They disagreed, for example, on whether to support the
NAACP's campaign to move beyond equalization suits to attack segregation per se in the
early 1950s, on the sit-in protests at department store lunch counters in 1960, and on
the use of young students in street demonstrations and marches in the summer of 1963.
All of the African American newspapers featured stories on civil rights and promoted
African American newsmakers and events, some promoting protest, others a more managed
approach to ending discrimination.
The
Richmond Afro-American campaigned against segregation, discrimination,
restrictions on African American voting, and injustice. Its first editor,
John L. Mitchell, led a massive boycott of the Richmond streetcar company
in 1904 to protest against segregated seating laws, and in 1921 he ran
for governor as a "Lily-black Republican" to protest the lily-white
movement in the Republican Party. In the 1950s the
Afro was part
of the
Baltimore Afro-American papers, and the editor, Rufus
Wells, carried on in Mitchell's tradition. The
Norfolk Journal and
Guide, on the other hand, offered a more accommodation-oriented approach
to race relations under segregation. Editor P. B. Young used the paper
to encourage self-help, education, and improvement in the African American
community, as well as to voice African American demands within the limits
of segregation. He pressured for new schools, more funding, better parks,
and equal facilities. By the 1920s the
Journal and Guide was
the largest African American weekly in Virginia, with national, local,
and special Portsmouth editions. By the 1940s the paper ranked fourth
in circulation among the African American papers in the country, behind
the
Pittsburgh Courier,
Chicago Defender, and
Baltimore
Afro-American. Both Young and his counterpart at the
Afro American
had grown tired of the slow pace of change as early as the late 1930s
and after World War II African American editors in Virginia voiced more
strident protests against segregation and discrimination.
African American newspapers explicitly and consistently
connected events of significance to black Americans in the civil rights
struggle into the wider context of world affairs, particularly the Cold
War. During the Korean War, in particular, African American newspapers
covered the desegregating U.S. forces and featured the heroic performances
of African American troops in the field. They also explicitly linked the
United States’ battle against totalitarianism to U.S. world leadership
in promoting freedom and democracy. At the same time they pointed to the
glaring hypocrisy of segregation and discrimination at home. "Americans
are aware that the Russian propaganda machine has tried to stir greater
tension between the dark peoples of Asia and the white race," one
African American newspaper explained, "It was probably no accident
that Negro troops were present in the first victory of the Korean struggle.
This pulls a tooth from Russian propaganda."
Charlottesville Tribune
editor, Thomas J. Sellers warned his readers, however, that the "war
is in part a struggle of oppressed people to be free." He considered
the Korean War a fight against aggression and disdained any notion that
Russian propaganda might convince African Americans that the "war
in Korea is a white man's war against a colored people." Instead,
he used the patriotism and success of the desegregated military to criticize
the forces of segregation in the South. When Georgia Governor Herman Talmadge
promised the "worst bloodshed since the Civil War" if schools
were integrated, Sellers quipped, "The white and yellow and black
and brown Americans who recently gave their lives for the cause of freedom
might have appreciated the presence of these blood thirsty citizens of
Georgia in the front line trenches of Korea."
11
The connections that segregationists drew between
civil rights demonstrators and communist agitators appear ridiculously
off the mark in retrospect; however, white politicians used highly charged
rhetoric in the print media that resonated with their supporters. In the
midst of the massive resistance campaign, the Virginia legislature drew
up and passed its Interposition Resolution in 1956, and its language resurrected
the states' rights ideas of Jefferson's and Madison's
Virginia and
Kentucky Resolutions. However, the Interposition Resolution relied
for its strongest rhetorical punch on its analysis of the state of the
country within the Cold War context. It pointed to the growing power of
the federal authority "which contributes to the decline of the family
as a unit of society, and the substitution of the state for the role once
served by the family, the local community, and the governments of the
States." The crisis could be located squarely in the home, and every
family's liberty was at stake. "To the extent that the Federal government
assumes obligations of the States and of the people," the Virginia
legislative report on interposition stated, "to that extent have
we exchanged a responsible republican form of government, based upon old
ideals of individual responsibility, for the phantom benefits of a collectivist
society."
12
When Virginia's Governor, J. Lindsay
Almond, took office in January 1958, he made clear to the public the dangers
he saw. In the second paragraph of his inaugural address, Almond described
"global dangers that confront us" and asked Virginians to bring
"to the defense of the Nation, without reservation, every ounce of
loyalty, devotion, and courage that is within us." He spoke about
the "security of a Nation" and "the challenge that awaits
our entire system of education in the light of the Russians' ominous moon."
Almond quipped that he was concerned about "two revolving bodies:
Sputnik and the Supreme Court of the United States." The health and
security of the American republic hung in the balance, according to Almond,
and massive resistance to change was necessary because "the potential
of this Republic to resist external aggression, and the capacity of our
central government to preserve domestic tranquility, evolves from and
depends upon the continuing capacity of its structural components."
13
As governor, Almond led the fight in Virginia to resist
integration in public schools, and at each stage he tied the campaign to
the larger context of the Cold War struggle. Almond implemented the
massive resistance laws in the fall of 1958 and ordered several white
schools to close in three communities rather than allow them to move forward
under federal court order to integrate. The school closings persisted into
the winter of 1959 and reached a crisis point when federal and state courts
struck down the massive resistance laws as unconstitutional. Almond reacted
with even more determined speeches in which the Russian threat, the Supreme
Court's reckless expansion of federal authority, and agitation of civil rights
protestors combined to endanger the republic and required the vigilance and
resistance of citizens.
If the rhetoric of the Cold War dominated both black and white print media
in the 1950s as each tried to orient their positions on desegregation,
then the battle over desegregation in public schools only seemed to raise
the stakes. For white editors and politicians, such as Lindsay Almond
of Virginia, the schools were not only a place of social mixing that needed
segregation to promote purity, but also a central battleground in the
fight against communism. Schools were the means by which the nation would
catch up to the Soviets' Sputnik, and with math and science preparation
at the forefront schools were the institutions that could equip Americans
for the fight in the future. Schools were also the places that African
American editors and leaders viewed as the clearest examples of discrimination
of segregation and the anti-democratic nature of the South's social system.
Segregation in schools, African American editors charged, stood out as
unequal and undemocratic in the wider context of the Cold War.
Within this context, white and black newspapers helped shape their readers'
understanding of schools and desegregation and, specifically, the information
each city, town, and community received about its schools. Nowhere was
the segregation of print information about schools and desegregation more
complete than in Prince Edward County, Virginia, where the local board
of supervisors closed the county schools for five years from 1959-1964
rather than allow them to be integrated. Prince Edward was exceptional
in the South for its long school closings, but it was unexceptional in
the way its white media excluded African American voices and segregated
key information. "The school board was completely isolated from the
sentiment of the Negro community," one leading scholar of the crisis
in Prince Edward wrote, "And the Negro community was more or less
isolated from the thinking of the school board." The local white
paper did not cover any of the school board meetings; as a consequence,
the only people in Prince Edward County with information about the board
or the PTA were those whites who served on them. White leaders claimed
that the media publicity of meeting times and dates would only inflame
the situation or "unleash controversy," so information about
meeting times and places as well as news coverage about the decisions
made at them remained unreported in the print media.
Throughout the South many white newspapers followed
a similar pattern—they restricted information and encouraged white
resistance to desegregation. In the late 1950s when school desegregation
in Birmingham, Alabama, sparked bombings and vigilante violence, the local
white newspapers, the
Birmingham News and the
Post-Herald,
dismissed the violence as harmless and likely the handiwork of African
Americans trying to discredit whites. When the
New York Times
came to Birmingham in 1960 to write a story on the sit-in movement, it
suggested that "every channel of communication" was closed between
the races and relations were ruled largely by white violence. The local
Birmingham papers reprinted the story in the hopes of promoting a libel
case against the
New York Times. In Danville, Virginia, the city's
major newspapers blacked out news on civil rights. Only the city's
Commercial
Appeal, edited by a white moderate, bothered to interview local African
American civil rights leaders and publish news about their movement. "The
news media in Danville," one radio station editorial argued on June
6, 1963, "has made every effort to keep the stories about demonstrations
from the people of Danville."
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