Chapter 11 - Pushing Civil Rights Into the National Agenda

The struggle to achieve equality for African-Americans wasn’t over with the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Polling taxes, grandfather clauses, and outright intimidation were some of the tactics used for the next hundred years to restrict voting rights for people of color.

“Separate but equal” was the slogan and driving force behind the segregationist movement. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, considerable momentum began to build around the idea that segregation was as harmful as voter suppression. Journalism, and TV, to be more precise, was the catalyst for that change in public opinion.  Brown vs Board of Education was a landmark Supreme Court case in which the Court declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students to be unconstitutional. “Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal”, the Court ruled. In the summer of 1957, African-American leaders in Little Rock tested the Supreme Court decision by enrolling nine black students in the most respected public school of the city which was, coincidentally, all white. All but one of the nine students managed to arrive at the school with a police escort. Elizabeth Eckford was then confronted by a mob of angry white men and women. All of this unraveled in front of tv cameras, for all the nation to see.

This was the first salvo in a chain of events and television coverage that would culminate with President Lyndon B. Johnson’s signing of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, establishing that discrimination in public places and discriminatory voting practices adopted in many southern states after the Civil War was illegal, provided for the integration of schools and other public facilities, and made employment discrimination illegal. None of this would have been possible without the dissemination of images provided by the tv networks’ cameras present. The next phase of the integration process in the education world involved its higher branch. Hamilton Holmes and Charlayne Hunter were the first African-American students enrolled and admitted at the University of Georgia. This was the consequence of a Federal Court ruling that directed the institution to do so. As a male, Holmes was allowed to live off-campus, but Hunter was required to live in a dormitory. Images of the frightened eighteen-year-old being bullied and intimidated where shown on a nightly basis. Similar images came later from the University of Mississippi and the University of Alabama in 1961 and 1963 respectively, as they became desegregated.

In early 1961, after a Supreme Court decision that outlawed segregation in interstate travel, a group of college students set out to test the acceptance and compliance of the recent social achievement. Footage of the “Freedom Riders” trip from Washington, DC, to New Orleans, was broadcasted for everyone to see, but somewhere through Alabama the police cars escorting the bus disappeared. When the bus reached Montgomery, an angry mob of 2,000 segregationists attacked the students with bricks, pipes and baseball bats. No footage of the beating was recorded because the protestors smashed the camera of NBC’s cameraman Moe Levy, who was assigned to follow the students during that trip. Anyhow, the networks did show footage of the bruised and severely injured travelers in the hospital.

Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was a central figure in the civil rights fight of the early 1960s. During this time he was the face of a series of non-violent demonstrations in the city of Birmingham that aimed to challenge the power structure, dominated entirely by white citizens. After a series of sit-ins and demonstrations, the campaign expanded to organized marches. Television was, again, at the center of the journalistic efforts to bring this wave of change to every house in America. The excesses committed by the white folk of Birmingham and Police force against the peaceful acts of civil disobedience of the protestors were shown night by night, across the country, and started to change the tide of public opinion. It wasn’t only young men marching on the streets, but also dignified elder women, as well as youngsters and children.  “It is indisputable that nonviolence…, played a central role in the victory of the Civil Rights Movement. The moral high ground it seized garnered mass support both domestically and internationally, decisive in its success (Nimtz 2)”.

The now famous march on Washington that culminated with Reverend King’s “I have a dream” speech, as well as the events that unfolded in Selma, Alabama, in 1964, were the final push that society needed to turn its gaze into a real issue that had afflicted a significant portion of the American population since the early days of this Nation. A problem that wasn’t erased with the Emancipation Proclamation and that the Civil Rights acts of 1964 and 1965, as well as subsequential higher court rulings and policy changes,  would try to rectify, to this day, an open wound in the fabric of society. Even then, the amplification provided by the tv networks was crucial.

“Even before the March on Washington in 1963, Martin Luther King
Jr. had come to realize that his dream was in trouble. None of the
marches or demonstrations, none of the sit-ins or mobilizations altered
significantly the deteriorating schools, the hostile police departments,
the discriminatory trade unions, or the greed of the slumlords and their
political associates (Litwack 11)”.

On the other side of the spectrum was another young, polarizing activist named Malcolm X. “Even though many activists campaigned for the recognition of the Black person
in the society as a human being, as well as clamoring for a decent life for the African-American
like any other race, their methods of achieving this were different ”(p. 175), says R. M. Yeboah in his paper “From the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter: The African Union and the African-Americans in the United States”.

Due to space and subject constraints, Streitmatter might not have had the opportunity to include and explain the role of other key figures in the Civil Rights Movement like Malcolm X, Elaine Brown, Ralph Abernathy and others. At the same time and for obvious reasons, the book centers its analysis on the influence that the portrayal of these stories had on public opinion and seldom stops to contemplate if the events by themselves had the transformative power to affect society and influence change in a meaningful way.

Works Cited

Litwack, Leon F. “‘Fight the Power!’ The Legacy of the Civil Rights Movement.” Journal of Southern History, vol. 75, no. 1, Feb. 2009, pp. 3–28. EBSCOhost

Nimtz, August H. “Violence and/or Nonviolence in the Success of the Civil Rights Movement: The Malcolm X–Martin Luther King, Jr. Nexus.” New Political Science, vol. 38, no. 1, Mar. 2016, pp. 1–22. EBSCOhost

Streitmatter, Rodger. Mightier than the Sword: How the News Media Have Shaped American History. 4th ed., Westview Press, A Member of the Perseus Books Group, 2016.

Yeboah, Roland Mireku. “From the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter: The African Union and the African-Americans in the United States.” Journal of Pan African Studies, vol. 12, no. 1, Sept. 2018, pp. 166–189. EBSCOhost