The Chosen Instrument of the Revolution?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aniko Bodroghkozy
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Television News ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
Black Activism ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
News Reporting ◽  
Television Coverage ◽  
The University ◽  
The Revolution

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.

Selma in the “Glaring Light of Television”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aniko Bodroghkozy
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Television News ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
News Story ◽  
Voting Rights Act ◽  
News Reporting ◽  
News Program ◽  
American Press ◽  
Television Coverage

This chapter examines television news' reporting of the Selma campaign for voting rights that led directly to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Television cameras present on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Sunday March 7, 1965, were able to capture the beating, gassing, and brutalizing suffered by voting rights demonstrators as they attempted to march to Montgomery. The uproar generated by that footage generated more support, volunteers, and moral clout for the civil rights movement. This chapter considers how one news program, The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, presented the Selma campaign as an ongoing nightly news story, with particular emphasis on its coverage of the campaign's three martyrs: Jimmie Lee Jackson, Rev. James Reeb, and Viola Liuzzo. It also discusses the response of white Selmians in the “glaring light of television” and the commentary in the African American press regarding the television coverage of the campaign.

Television News and the Making of the Boston Busing Crisis

2017 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 218-234
Author(s):  
Matthew Delmont
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Television News ◽  
School Desegregation ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
Department Of Health ◽  
Local Television News ◽  
Production Techniques ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Television Coverage

People outside of Boston came to know and care about the city’s “busing crisis” because television news featured the story regularly and this essay examines how television news framed this story for national audiences. This essay illuminates the production techniques of a medium that framed the “busing crisis” in Boston for millions of national viewers. First, I examine how the television coverage of Boston busing in the mid-1970s focused on reports, analysis, and predictions regarding antibusing protests and violence. This day-to-day focus on current and emergent scenes of crisis ignored the history of desegregation efforts since the 1960s, including those that received television coverage in earlier years, like the community-funded Operation Exodus program to bus black children to schools in other neighborhoods and the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare’s suspension of federal school aid to Boston for violating the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Second, I consider how television news framed the use of force in the Boston busing story. Much of the footage from Boston focused on confrontations between antibusing protestors and authorities from the Boston Police and other law enforcement. Third, I look at how television news offered viewers background reports on two of the places at the center of the busing story, South Boston and Charlestown. Finally, I analyze how local television news programs in other cities presented busing in Boston as a failed policy and regularly replayed the archived footage from Boston to underscore efforts to educate viewers on the importance of upholding the law and avoiding violence. Boston was neither the first nor the last city to witness violent resistance to school desegregation, but extensive television news coverage fixed Boston as the emblematic busing crisis and shaped popular conceptions of the history of busing for school desegregation.

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.

Equal Time

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aniko Bodroghkozy
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Television News ◽  
The United States ◽  
News Story ◽  
University Of Mississippi ◽  
Network Television ◽  
High Profile ◽  
The University

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.

The March on Washington and a Peek into Racial Utopia

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aniko Bodroghkozy
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Television News ◽  
News Story ◽  
Single Event ◽  
News Reporting ◽  
Black And White ◽  
American Press ◽  
March On Washington ◽  
Television Coverage ◽  
Martin Luther King

This chapter examines how television networks handled the coverage of the March on Washington on August 28, 1963 to a national audience of millions. The March on Washington drew a quarter of a million civil rights activists who converged on the nation's capital to press for “jobs and freedom.” Television cameras and reporters focused on the demonstrators' placards and signs. All three networks broadcast the event live. With the exception of presidential inaugurations and nominating conventions, no single event had ever commanded such extensive television coverage. This chapter first considers how the CBS news team framed and packaged the March on Washington as a news story, and particularly Martin Luther King Jr.'s “I Have a Dream” speech, before discussing various responses to the television news reporting of the march in the African American press. It suggests that the March on Washington functioned as a paean of “black and white together,” as the networks invited viewers to share in a utopian taste of achieved equality.

Federal Policy and the Racial Integration of Southern Industry, 1961–1980

1999 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy J. Minchin
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
Racial Integration ◽  
Single Issue ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Federal Intervention

In the last two decades, one of the central debates of civil rights historiography has concerned the role that the federal government played in securing the gains of the civil rights era. Historians have often been critical of the federal government's inaction, pointing out that it was only pressure from the civil rights movement itself that prompted federal action against Jim Crow. Other scholars have studied the civil rights record of the federal government by analyzing a single issue during several administrations. In this vein, there have been studies of the federal government's involvement in areas as diverse as black voting rights and racial violence against civil rights workers. These studies have both recognized the importance of federal intervention and have also been critical of the federal government's belated and half-hearted endorsement of civil rights.

scholarly journals Buses from nowhere: television and anti-busing activism in 1970s urban America

Urban History ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 643-643
Author(s):  
MATT DELMONT
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Television News ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Vice President ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
Washington Dc ◽  
School Buses ◽  
Urban America ◽  
School Superintendent ◽  
Television Coverage

ABSTRACT‘Busing’, in which students were transported by school buses to achieve court-ordered or voluntary school desegregation, became one of the nation's most controversial civil rights issues in the decades after Brown vs. Board of Education (1954). Focusing on Florida Governor Claude Kirk and Pontiac housewife activist Irene McCabe, this essay examines how busing opponents turned the conventions of television news – its emphasis on newsworthy events and crisis; its selective use of historical context; and its nominal political neutrality – to their advantage, staging television friendly protests that positioned mothers and children as victims of activist judges and federal bureaucrats, and framed their support for segregated neighbourhoods and schools in the colour-blind rhetoric of homeowners’ rights. For politicians who aspired to the national stage, like Florida Governor Claude Kirk, busing offered a recognizable issue on which to take a stand. When Kirk protested court-ordered busing by suspending a local school board in Manatee County (Bradenton, Florida) and appointing himself school superintendent, he was not only appealing to Florida voters but also to television viewers in cities like Nashville, St Louis and Seattle, many of whom wrote to convey their support. When Vice-President Spiro Agnew complained that television network news ‘can elevate men from obscurity to national prominence within a week’, he was referring to Black Power author and activist Stokely Carmichael, but television news also propelled grassroots anti-busing activists like Irene McCabe to national prominence. McCabe, who staged a widely covered six-week march from Pontiac to Washington DC to protest busing, made frequent television appearances because networks deemed her newsworthy, not necessarily because newscasters agreed with her politics. Repeated television coverage turned relatively minor busing battles in Bradenton and Pontiac into national news and established Kirk and McCabe as icons of busing opposition in the early 1970s.

scholarly journals INSTITUTIONAL RACISM IN AMERICAN POST-CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT IN DEAR MARTIN BY NIC STONE (2017)

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Afifah Indriani ◽  
Delvi Wahyuni
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Institutional Racism ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Systemic Racism ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Group Interest ◽  
Post Civil Rights

This thesis is an analysis of a novel written by Nic Stone entitled Dear Martin (2017). It explores the issue of institutional racism in the post-civil rights era. The concept of systemic racism by Joe R.Feagin is employed to analyze this novel. This analysis focuses on four issues of systemic racism as seen through several African-American characters. This analysis also depends on the narrator to determine which parts of the novel are used as the data. The result of the study shows that African-American characters experience four forms of institutional racism which are The White Racial Frame and Its Embedded Racist Ideology, Alienated Social Relations, Racial Hierarchy with Divergent Group Interest, and Related Racial Domination: Discrimination in Many Aspects. In conclusion, in this post-civil rights movement era, African-Americans still face institutional racism.

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.

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