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

Few events underlined just how deeply segregated public opinion was in the South during the civil rights struggle more than those that took place in the spring and early summer of 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama, and Danville, Virginia. In both places newspaper and television played important roles in shaping the protests and how the public understood them. In Birmingham Martin Luther King, Jr., pushed local African American leaders to use the television media to their advantage, so much so that some in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) grew disillusioned with the strategy and saw it as a corruption of the ideals and spiritual grounding of the movement. Local white papers, according to Fred Shuttlesworth, never "printed what it is that we are demanding." The newspaper coverage shutout led to deep misunderstandings and misinformation among both races in Birmingham. Similarly, in Danville after six days of protests in June 1963, the white major newspapers had yet to cover the events, a remarkable silence that prompted the Associated Press to threaten to cut off its wire service if these papers would not provide the coverage. One reporter who investigated the Danville violence called the white newspapers "a hindrance to communication and understanding." 15

In both Birmingham and Danville, local civil rights leaders organized protest marches and demonstrations to make progress in ending segregation in all areas, especially employment, voting, and public facilities. School desegregation had made little progress since Brown v. Board of Education, and local civil rights leaders turned to what they hoped would be less controversial places to begin desegregation: city jobs for blacks, employment at downtown retail stores, and desegregation of parks and public facilities. They planned demonstrations that would affect directly the white-owned downtown businesses whose owners were local power brokers and could readily bring about change if they demanded it. Protestors expected confrontations with police and city authorities, and they wanted to use the media to their advantage. Most of all, they wanted to gain a place at the negotiating table and to have ongoing conversations about the process of desegregation. 16

Coverage of these events in Southern newspapers was starkly segregated, following years of practice. White editors used specific language and images to disparage the protests and encourage resistance. In Richmond, Virginia, white newspapers depicted the Birmingham demonstrations as deeply threatening to the nation's law and order and as a near riot without clear goals or coherent reasons. These editors focused almost entirely on the white side of the story, especially the police, and hinted that a racial war was underway. The Richmond News Leader provided little coverage of the April court battles and barely mentioned Martin Luther King's jailing for violation of the Birmingham city judge's injunction against demonstrations, nor did the paper carry any mention of King's "Letter from a Birmingham City Jail." White papers emphasized the self-control of Police Commissioner Eugene "Bull" Conner and portrayed the young African American protesters as unruly truants. Most of all, these papers discussed the protests as near racial riots and characterized the whites in Birmingham as stoically trying to prevent impending racial violence. The police were "powerless" in the face of the protests and, the white paper explained, ten policemen were injured in the struggle. The Richmond News Leader portrayed the police response as necessary, even rational, to "prevent racial troubles from exploding into violence." To support the point, the paper turned for comments to Alabama Governor George Wallace who was considering "murder prosecutions if the Negro demonstrations result in violence and death." To highlight the restraint of the police in this tense situation, the white papers emphasized that the well-armed police were "struck by thrown rocks" while there were "no confirmed reports of any Negroes being injured." The News Leader, for example, published a photograph of an African American woman with her back turned to the camera as the forceful stream from a fire hose hit her in the back. The photograph suggested that the protestors were nothing more than a directionless, faceless mob, and the caption made light of her predicament—"Negro woman gets wet down by a fireman's hose as protest marches were broken up." 17

When the Richmond Times-Dispatch ran an editorial about Martin Luther King's "Letter from Birmingham City Jail" on June 5, 1963, the editors dismissed King as a self-anointed "judge of which laws he will obey." King had "incited mobs of Negroes to turbulent street demonstrations in violation of local ordinances," the Times-Dispatch maintained and now he wanted to require white obedience to the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown decision. In response to King's argument that southern African Americans were disfranchised and therefore had no obligation to obey segregation laws, the paper's editor addressed its white readers directly and reminded them that the Court's decision was "based on an amendment adopted at a time when many of their forebears were disfranchised." 18

For the African American press of Virginia, Birmingham's violence and protests were front page news for weeks. Right away these editors put Birmingham into an international context. "Shocked the World," ran the Richmond Afro-American headline on May 11, 1963. African American papers covered the protests from beginning to well after their end, and they focused their stories on what the protests were about. Their stories quoted a wide range of observers: church leaders, U.S. Senators, political party leaders, Urban League staff, and especially leaders outside of Birmingham. To make clear the disparity between American ideals and their distinctly uneven application, the Afro-American put side-by-side the coverage of the Birmingham demonstrations with an article on the loss at sea of the U.S.S. Thresher. The U.S. military's desegregation, the Afro-American pointed out, extended all the way to its elite nuclear submarine fleet and had been eminently successful. 19

In a direct counter to the white press, African American newspaper editors depicted Birmingham's police as savage and unrestrained while they described the demonstrators as "freedom fighters." The Richmond Afro-American characterized the police action as "bestiality" and "ruthless savagery" and compared it to Hitler's persecution of Jews and Khrushchev's repression of Hungarian freedom fighters. The police were "torturing defenseless citizens," imprisoning "tender-aged school children," using dogs on "unarmed and helpless people," and "having heavily-booted storm troopers grind their knees against the necks of handcuffed, prostrate women." 20

Just a few weeks after the events in Birmingham, women and young people in Danville, Virginia, also faced violent police responses to their demonstrations for civil rights. From May 31st to June 5th, 1963 local civil rights leaders Rev. Lawrence Campbell and Rev. Alexander Isaiah Dunlap led their congregations and students to City Hall demanding equality in hiring practices in city government. They were arrested for "inciting to riot" and "inciting or encouraging a minor to commit a misdemeanor." Eventually, the Danville leaders were indicted under an antebellum Virginia statute which prohibited the incitement "of the colored population to acts of violence and war against the white population." The local judge issued a temporary injunction against the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and a restraining order barring any form of singing, marching, or public demonstration without a parade permit. The civil rights struggles in Danville climaxed on the night of June 10, 1963, when over sixty demonstrators defied the injunction and gathered at the city jail to sing and protest the arrests and injunctions. Thirty-eight demonstrators were arrested and forty were beaten. As in Birmingham, police in Danville turned fire hoses on demonstrators and used nightsticks to beat anyone who refused to disperse. Danville's police chief had deputized the garbage collectors and armed them with night sticks. African American demonstrators were washed under cars and thrown against walls from the force of the fire hoses. Many later recalled that they were swept off their feet and treated "like trash." 21

From the earliest protests in Danville, the white papers in Virginia described the events in ways that highlighted white restraint and black disorder and violence. The Richmond Times-Dispatch's initial coverage described the African American demonstrators and their behavior as threatening a race war. The paper emphasized the group's singing and shouting and the African American youth involved in the street protests, characterizing their behavior as unruly. The police chief, according to the Times-Dispatch, "said the demonstrators taunted policemen and sometimes spat at them." When violence broke out on June 10th, the Richmond Times-Dispatch again depicted a restrained police force and an unpredictable African American population, firing on police, shouting, and defiant. Jack Hunter, the paper's special correspondent in Danville, described the protestors as a "horde of singing, chanting Negro teen-agers" with "only a few adults among them." The Richmond News Leader ran front page photographs a few days after the violence showing Danville Police Chief Eugene McCain in front of a table with weapons with the caption, "taken from Negro demonstrators." The photograph showed ice picks, a baseball bat, and other weapons, and suggested to readers that the police were the victims of African American violence. 22

In a lead editorial titled "Sworn Duty Well Done," the white-owned Danville Bee praised the local police force for restraining and eventually dispersing the crowd of demonstrators. The paper called the struggle "a fight to contain a Communist front which has suddenly emerged within our city limits." 23 Danville town councilmen and some officials firmly believed that the demonstrations were the work of the Communist Party and they fiercely resisted them as dangerous to American interests at home and abroad. Immediately after the Danville violence, Congressman Bill Tuck, a former governor and strong segregationist, introduced a bill in Congress that would have made it unlawful for any person to cross a state line "where the purpose of such travel was to incite a riot or engage in any violation of the law." Tuck had served as governor in the late 1940s and was a top Byrd organization politician. Byrd, Tuck, and other conservative Democrats had organized and promoted "massive resistance" to desegregation in the 1950s and they considered the Supreme Court and federal forces responsible for the racial problems in the South. Tuck described the Warren Court as "the American counterpart to the Russian politburo" because it had tried "to usurp all of the authority of government, executive, legislative, administrative." By 1963 successive court orders stalled massive resistance, but Tuck's and Byrd's opposition to desegregation of any kind continued to energize and direct conservative Virginians to resist change. Tuck explained that it was "perfectly obvious that the participants are responding to incitation from outsiders, people who are not Virginians, who do not know Virginia or her people and who do not have the welfare of Virginians, black or white, at heart." The Richmond News Leader called the measure a bill "to abate racial strife." 24

By early November 1963 political talk among Danville's local Democratic Party regulars focused on the prospects for President Kennedy's civil rights bill. Local Democrats gathered to hear their Congressman's views. They were treated to a barnburner speech against the Supreme Court, desegregation, and television. Tuck strongly opposed Kennedy's civil rights bill. He said it was a danger to free speech on radio and television because, he warned, it would eventually be interpreted by the Supreme Court to disallow voicing any views against integration. Tuck predicted that the bill would be approved by the Supreme Court and Chief Justice Earl Warren, whom he called a "socialist and a student of Gunnar Myrdal." Just before the speech, though, when the local party chairman's introduction of Tuck was delayed a few moments because of radio and television broadcasting's last minute adjustments, the local leader cracked for his audience, "I thought maybe they had to get Martin Luther King off the air before we could start." 25

As it turned out, Tuck should have been less concerned about Martin Luther King on the air and more about the Reverend Lawrence Campbell. King came to Danville in July 1963 and again in November. WDBJ covered King's July luncheon speech in which he called the Danville police force one of the most "brutal and vicious" he had heard about in the South. In stately tones King offered his "full, personal support" to the movement in Danville. "Wherever injustice is alive," King said, he wanted to take a stand, for "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." King's oratory was restrained, his visit short.

But Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, one of the founders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, gave the kind of visually dramatic speech that transcended local news and made for gripping television. "We don't need guns," Shuttlesworth called, "these are the weapons of a people who are afraid." Shuttlesworth spoke through the television to those who believed that protestors carried bottles, sticks, and clubs to hurl at police, as well as reassured protestors that they were right to practice true non-violence. He provided a counter narrative of the events depicted in the white print media at the same time as he tied the Danville struggle to national events and concerns, such as Kennedy's speech on civil rights and the Cold War fight in West Berlin.

Television's visual power was clear from such inspiring scenes as Shuttlesworth's "we don't need guns" speech, but its dramatic force came also in more mundane interviews and the images that accompanied them. WDBJ cameras filmed the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) protest of segregated chain restaurants at a Howard Johnson's on U.S. Route 29 near Danville. White SNCC activist Robert Zellner stood outside the restaurant with James Forman and other African American demonstrators. "In order to explain our position," Zellner carefully told the television audience, "in order to facilitate change . . . we have taken this peaceful sort of nonviolent direct action to give the people the opportunity to change." As the demonstrators stood patiently outside, waiting, the camera lingered on the locked doors of the Howard Johnson restaurant, a stark, strong image of discrimination and exclusion.

In the summer of 1963, as civil rights protests increasingly made for excellent television drama and news, authorities in places such as Danville tried to control the media, however unsuccessfully. Police Chief Eugene McCain, who had deputized garbage collectors and armed them with batons to enforce a local judge's injunction against demonstrations, was on the scene the evening of June 10th. McCain recalled in court testimony later that he had ordered the protestors to disperse and given them what he considered was fair warning. McCain also recalled smashing SNCC organizer Robert Zellner's camera on the ground when a flash, he said, went off in his face. McCain testified that "there was so much confusion" that he could not remember who was arrested that night, but he was especially concerned about Zellner's camera and how information of the event might be used and twisted by the media. As protests continued after an outbreak of violence on June 10, 1963, arrests were made and national news organizations came to Danville. One day in July, McCain's men picked up three NBC newsmen and held them for questioning for 45 minutes at police headquarters. They were filming a demonstration, but the police gave no reason for their detention. McCain told the news media by way of explanation, "We want to talk to them about our business and theirs." 26

Television coverage not only revealed the reasoned appeals of those seeking change and the dramatic words and gestures of the struggle, it also spread news and exposed events in a way that put pressure on business leaders in these small towns. In Danville after the tension and violence in June 1963, the president of Dan River Mills, which employed over 6,000 people, sent the company's public relations coordinator to become the "press officer" for the embattled Danville mayor. The New York Times was running articles that questioned Dan River Mills' "corporate image" after television reports broadcast stories on the violence in the company's home town. Danville civil rights demonstrators took their protests to the Dan River Mills corporate headquarters in New York City where Reverend Lawrence Campbell led the picket line protest. Dan River officials met with Campbell and, according to news reports, the company moved to seek resolutions to the racial problems in Danville. 27