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.
