Southern Projections: Black Television Hosts, Madison Avenue, and Nationalizing the South in 1950s Primetime

2020 ◽  
pp. 152747642098009
Author(s):  
Phoebe Bronstein
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
The South ◽  
Network Television ◽  
Madison Avenue ◽  
National Network ◽  
Rhetorical Device ◽  
Television Content ◽  
Harry Belafonte

This article situates Nat King Cole’s NBC experience within those of Hazel Scott and Harry Belafonte, whose own programs bookended the first decade of television. While Scott was blacklisted and her Dumont show canceled, the brief primetime stints of Cole and Belafonte on national network television, reveal a shifting rhetoric surrounding the policing of blackness on TV that focused blame on the South. The South, then, became a convenient rhetorical device in the rejection of Black national television content. This article follows these two parallel yet interlocking threads, with the first section detailing the rise of national television in conversation with the South and the deflection of racism onto the region—an easy representational task amidst news coverage of the civil rights movement. The latter portion of the article follows a genealogy of Black hosted variety programs and Black televisual resistance from Scott to Cole and Belafonte.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aniko Bodroghkozy
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Television News ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
Prime Time ◽  
Network Television ◽  
Black And White ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Black Empowerment

This book examines the role played by American network television in reconfiguring a new “common sense” about race relations during the civil rights revolution. Drawing on stories told both by television news coverage and prime time entertainment, it explores the relationship among the civil rights movement, television, audiences, and partisans on either side of the black empowerment struggle. In particular, it considers the recurring theme that America's racial story was one of color-blind equality grounded on a vision of “black and white together.” The book concludes that television had an ambivalent place in the civil rights revolution. More specifically, it argues that network television sought to represent a rapidly shifting consensus on what “blackness” and “whiteness” meant and how they now fit together. Network television premised equality on a largely white definition whereby African Americans were ready for equal time to the extent that their representations conformed to whitened standards of middle-class and professional respectability.

Pedagogies of Protest: African American Teachers and the History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1940–1963

2011 ◽  
Vol 113 (12) ◽  
pp. 2777-2803 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott Baker
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Teachers ◽  
Black Educators ◽  
The South ◽  
Student Protest ◽  
African American Teachers ◽  
Segregated Schools ◽  
Extracurricular Programs

Background/Context Although the dominant narrative of the civil rights movement marginalizes the role of black educators, revisionist scholars have shown that a significant number of black teachers encouraged student protest and activism. There has, however, been little analysis of the work of black teachers inside segregated schools in the South. Purpose/Objective This study examines the courses that Southern African American teachers taught, the pedagogies they practiced, and the extracurricular programs they organized. Using Charleston's Burke Industrial School as a lens to illuminate pedagogies of protest that were practiced by activist educators in the South, this study explores how leading black educators created spaces within segregated schools where they bred dissatisfaction with white supremacy. Research Design This historical analysis draws upon archival sources, school board minutes, school newspapers and yearbooks, oral testimony, and autobiographies. Conclusions/Recommendations In Charleston, as elsewhere in the South, activist African American teachers made crucial contributions to the civil rights movement. Fusing an activist version of the African American uplift philosophy with John Dewey's democratic conception of progressive education, exemplary teachers created academic and extracurricular programs that encouraged student protest. Beginning in the 1940s and continuing through the 1960s, students acted on lessons taught in classes and extracurricular clubs, organizing and leading strikes, boycotts, and demonstrations. The pedagogies that leading African American educators practiced, the aspirations they nurtured, and the student activism they encouraged helped make the civil rights movement possible.

Conclusion: The Long Stride Toward Freedom1

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Kyle Day
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
American History ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
The South ◽  
Postwar America ◽  
Martin Luther King

The conclusion assesses the long term implications of the Southern Manifesto for both the course of the Civil Rights Movement as well as the larger racial dynamic s of Postwar America. Under the circumspect rhetoric of moderation, the Southern Manifesto undermined the efforts of civil rights leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to desegregate the South, and empowered southern officials to ignore the Brown decision for years. This conclusion thus places the Southern Manifesto in proper historical perspective and provides a summary of the implications of this event, the greatest episode of antagonistic racial demagoguery in modern American History.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Scott L. Matthews
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Caste System ◽  
The South ◽  
Folk Revival ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Travel Writings ◽  
Frederick Law Olmsted

The introduction explores why the South became known as America’s “most documented” region beginning in the 1940s and into the twenty-first century. It argues that documentarians saw the region as a fertile place to do fieldwork for two main reasons. First, the region possessed unique and seemingly fragile folk cultures in need of preservation before modern influences erased them. Second, the region possessed seemingly endemic problems associated with its racial caste system and agricultural economies that needed documentation, study, and reform. The introduction also provides an overview of how historians and theorists defined “documentary” throughout the twentieth century and how and why some black and white southerners resisted the intrusion of documentarians into their lives. Additionally, it traces the history of documentary fieldwork in the South from the eighteenth through the nineteenth century and demonstrates how the tradition’s dominant themes developed during this time, particularly in the travel writings and sketches of Basil Hall, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jonathan Baxter Harrison and others. Finally, it highlights the distinguishing features of twentieth-century documentary by emphasizing the role of Progressive and New Deal reform impulses, the Folk Revival and Civil Rights Movement, and the development of portable recording technologies.

The Techniques of Disavowal

2021 ◽  
pp. 159-191
Author(s):  
Erin R. Pineda
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Public Memory ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
Moral Standing ◽  
World's Fair ◽  
The South ◽  
Black Activism ◽  
The Public ◽  
The One

This chapter considers the limitations of civil rights disobedience in transforming white citizens. Building on the work of James Baldwin, Charles Mills, and Elizabeth Spelman and chronicling a “failed” protest at the 1964 World’s Fair, this chapter attends to the discursive techniques of disavowal that white citizens and state officials used to dismiss black activism as inappropriate, irresponsible, gratuitous, and violent—thereby avoiding the claims such protest made upon them, while preserving their own innocence and moral standing. In stepping outside the South and the familiar set of events that make up the public memory of the “short” civil rights movement, this chapter also suggests that some aspects of campaigns like the one in Birmingham were enabled—and publicly legitimated—by the very techniques of disavowal that limited the movement’s radical potentialities.

The Changing Politics of Race in the South and Its Impact on National Politics

2019 ◽  
pp. 83-107
Author(s):  
Charles S. Bullock ◽  
Susan A. MacManus ◽  
Jeremy D. Mayer ◽  
Mark J. Rozell
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
The South ◽  
National Politics ◽  
Past Half Century ◽  
Voter Suppression ◽  
Politics Of Race ◽  
Party Dominance

The long era of racial segregation and black voter suppression coincided with the old “Solid South” of Democratic dominance of the region. Among African Americans who could vote, they were loyal to the GOP, the party of Lincoln. The Voting Rights Act (VRA) and the civil rights movement more generally moved Southern blacks to the Democratic Party. The emergence of African American voters’ rights and their realigning to the Democratic Party have had the most profound impact on the politics of the region of the past half century. Today, Southern African Americans vote at about the same rate as whites and in some recent presidential elections have exceeded white participation. As whites realigned to the GOP, African Americans became a key component of the Democratic Party dominance of the South, with substantial influence on legislative priorities.

The Changing Demographics of the South and Its Impact on National Politics

2019 ◽  
pp. 21-49
Author(s):  
Charles S. Bullock ◽  
Susan A. MacManus ◽  
Jeremy D. Mayer ◽  
Mark J. Rozell
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
High Growth ◽  
The South ◽  
National Politics ◽  
Economic Diversification ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Changing Demographics ◽  
Martin Luther King ◽  
Racial Ethnic

The South has grown more in the past fifty years than any other region, leading to major changes in its economy and the racial/ethnic, gender, generational, socioeconomic, and political composition of its electorate. In the fifty years since the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, the South’s politics have become more polarized, with sharp differences by race, place of birth, age, education, income, and gender. Most of the changes occurred during a period of realignment, during which Republicans expanded their regional dominance. But continued in-migration, accompanied by economic diversification and racial/ethnic and generational shifts, is beginning to push the political pendulum in the opposite direction. This “redirection” is most noticeable in the region’s high growth states, particularly in their fast-growing metropolitan areas characterized by larger concentrations of young, minority (and more Democratic-leaning) voters. Overall, this chapter lends credibility to the “demographics is destiny” thesis.

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