Introduction

Author(s):  
Aniko Bodroghkozy

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.

Author(s):  
Aniko Bodroghkozy

This book has explored how network television mobilized a certain type of image that, when appropriately paired with figures of whiteness, was presumed to make whites less anxious about social change. It has highlighted a common link in these representations of a dignified blackness intertwined with an accommodating and welcoming whiteness. It has considered a number of television shows, including East Side/West Side and Good Times, to emphasize the propensity of networks to tell narratives relating to “black and white together,” the “worthy black victim,” and the aspirational “civil rights subject.” This epilogue examines television news coverage of Barack Obama's historic election as president of the United States. It suggests that networks were returning to the familiar discourse about the civil rights movements during the 1960s as they packaged stories that celebrated black and white voters coming together to put a biracial black man into the White House, to make Americans feel good about their country and its race relations.


Author(s):  
Aniko Bodroghkozy

This book explores the crucial role of network television in reconfiguring new attitudes in race relations during the civil rights movement. Due to widespread coverage, the civil rights revolution quickly became the United States' first televised major domestic news story. This important medium unmistakably influenced the ongoing movement for African American empowerment, desegregation, and equality. The book brings to the foreground television news treatment of now-famous civil rights events including the 1965 Selma voting rights campaign, integration riots at the University of Mississippi, and the March on Washington, including Martin Luther King's “I Have a Dream” speech. It also examines the most high-profile and controversial television series of the era to feature African American actors—East Side/West Side, Julia, and Good Times—to reveal how entertainment programmers sought to represent a rapidly shifting consensus on what “blackness” and “whiteness” meant and how they now fit together.


Author(s):  
Aniko Bodroghkozy

This chapter examines whether television news was “the instrument of the revolution” during the civil rights era. It first considers early television news coverage of the civil rights story, focusing on the seminal news documentary series, See It Now (1957) and its strategy to privilege the white moderate. It then turns to television coverage of the James Meredith crisis at the University of Mississippi, along with network news' ambivalence with black activism and CBS Eyewitness coverage of the Albany Movement. The chapter asks whether television news amplified and publicized the goals, politics, and agendas of the civil rights movement, its activists, demonstrators, and spokespeople for the cause of voting rights, desegregation, and African American empowerment. It suggests that news reporting, whether print or television, is obviously not a neutral mirror reflecting reality.


2020 ◽  
pp. 152747642098009
Author(s):  
Phoebe Bronstein

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.


Author(s):  
Jeffrey Scholes

Race, religion, and sports may seem like odd bedfellows, but, in fact, all three have been interacting with each other since the emergence of modern sports in the United States over a century ago. It was the sport of boxing that saw a black man become a champion at the height of the Jim Crow era and a baseball player who broke the color barrier two decades before the civil rights movement began. In this chapter, the role that religion has played in these and other instances where race (the African American race in particular) and sports have collided will be examined for its impact on the relationship between race and sports. The association of race, religion, and sports is not accidental. The chapter demonstrates that all three are co-constitutive of and dependent on each other for their meaning at these chosen junctures in American sports history.


Author(s):  
Michael R. Greenberg ◽  
Peter M. Sandman ◽  
David B. Sachsman ◽  
Kandice L. Salomone

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 135
Author(s):  
Qiong Li ◽  
Jie Yang

<em>Based on the background of American civil rights movement in which religious factors participated, this study analyzes the function of religious factors in civil rights movement from the perspective of political participation and the principle of separation of politics and religion, in order to consider the research paradigm of the relationship between religion and social conflict. It is believed that religious participation is helpful to exert the positive force of social conflict, the right of religious freedom has, to a certain extent, become the “safety valve” of social stability, and the development of religion is the embodiment of social pluralism and symbiosis.</em>


Troublemakers ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Kathryn Schumaker

The introductionexplains how and why student protest became common in the United States in the late 1960s and places these protests in the context of shifts in the history of education and in broader social movements, including the civil rights movement, the Chicano Movement, and black power activism. The introduction also situates students’ rights within the context of children’s rights more broadly, explaining the legal principles that justified age discrimination and excluded children and students from the basic protections of American constitutional law. The introduction identifies the two decades between the 1960s and 1980s as a constitutional moment that revolutionized the relationship of students to the state. It also connects students’ rights litigation to the issue of school desegregation and the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education.


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