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.

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.

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.

scholarly journals The effects of constructive television news reporting on prosocial intentions and behavior in children: The role of negative emotions and self-efficacy

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Iris van Venrooij ◽  
Tobias Sachs ◽  
Mariska Kleemans
Keyword(s):  
Self Efficacy ◽  
Positive Emotions ◽  
Television News ◽  
Negative Emotions ◽  
Emotional Responses ◽  
News Story ◽  
News Reporting ◽  
News Video ◽  
Prosocial Intentions ◽  
And Behavior

Abstract To reduce negative emotional responses and to stimulate prosociality, constructive journalism promotes the inclusion of positive emotions and solutions in news. This study experimentally tested whether including those elements indeed increased prosocial intentions and behavior among children, and whether negative emotions and self-efficacy are mediators in this regard. To this end, children (N = 468; 9 to 13 years old) were exposed to an emotion-based, solution-based, or non-constructive news video. Results showed that emotion-based and solution-based news reduced children’s negative emotions compared to non-constructive news. No direct effects for prosocial intentions were found, but solution-based news led to less prosocial behavior (i. e., money donated) than emotion-based and non-constructive news. Moreover, negative emotions served as a mediator, self-efficacy did not. The more negative emotions were elicited by a news story, the higher the prosocial intentions and behavior. In conclusion, a constructive style of reporting helps to reduce children’s negative emotional responses but subsequently hinders prosociality.

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.

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.

scholarly journals Trends in Black-White Church Integration

2009 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Q. Yang ◽  
Starlita Smith
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Americans ◽  
White People ◽  
Civil Rights Act ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Blacks And Whites ◽  
Martin Luther King ◽  
The Church

Historically, the separation of blacks and whites in churches was well known (Gilbreath 1995; Schaefer 2005). Even in 1968, about four years after the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. still said that “eleven o'clock on Sunday is the most segregated hour of the week” (Gilbreath 1995:1). His reference was to the entrenched practice of black and white Americans who worshiped separately in segregated congregations even though as Christians, their faith was supposed to bring them together to love each other as brothers and sisters. King's statement was not just a casual observation. One of the few places that civil rights workers failed to integrate was churches. Black ministers and their allies were at the forefront of the church integration movement, but their stiffest opposition often came from white ministers. The irony is that belonging to the same denomination could not prevent the racial separation of their congregations. In 1964, when a group of black women civil rights activists went to a white church in St. Augustine, Florida to attend a Sunday service, the women were met by a phalanx of white people with their arms linked to keep the activists out (Bryce 2004). King's classic “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” was a response to white ministers who criticized him and the civil rights movement after a major civil rights demonstration (King [2002]).

A Nonnegotiable Right

2018 ◽  
pp. 118-144
Author(s):  
Joseph R. Fitzgerald
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Constitutional Rights ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Black And White ◽  
White Majority ◽  
March On Washington ◽  
Black Voters

This chapter discusses Richardson’s decision to boycott a referendum vote initiated by white Cambridge residents to maintain segregated public accommodations. She argued that the referendum was a tyrannical action by the white majority over the black minority and that it undermined the latter’s constitutional rights. She advocated a boycott of the vote, and most black voters agreed with her. Black and white critics of the boycott alleged that Richardson behaved irresponsibly by encouraging voters to stay away from the polls, a stance they considered unnecessarily radical and ultimately counterproductive to the national civil rights movement. The chapter also covers Richardson’s participation in the March on Washington and one of the speeches she gave a few weeks before the march in which she outlined in detail her social, economic, and political philosophies concerning black liberation.

Is This What You Mean by Color TV?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aniko Bodroghkozy
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Black Family ◽  
Black Panthers ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Entertainment Television ◽  
March On Washington ◽  
Color Blind ◽  
Mainstream Press

This chapter examines how entertainment television addressed color-blind equality through an analysis of NBC's Julia, considered the most significant entertainment show of the civil rights years. Created by writer-director Hal Kanter and starring Diahann Carroll, Julia presented viewers with whites only as supporting characters. However, the image Julia provided could only clash uncomfortably with dominant news imagery of exploding ghettos, Black Panthers and other non-nonviolent militants, as well as the generalized chaos and upheaval characterizing the period. This chapter argues that Julia was a fictional vision of the “black and white together” utopia promised in the networks' March on Washington coverage. It also considers how black and white audiences as well as mainstream press critics all made sense of the show in notably different and, at times, contradictory ways. Finally, it discusses the concerns of black viewers and some white critics about Julia, including its depiction of the black family.

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.

The Return of Civil Rights Television

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aniko Bodroghkozy
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Television News ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
The United States ◽  
Network Television ◽  
White House ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Television Shows ◽  
Civil Rights Movements ◽  
The 1960S

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.

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