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• 1 2024-09-17T06:02:22+00:00 Revisiting Newsfilm of the 1970 Jackson State Killings: Digital Humanities As Antiracist Praxis 4 image_header 2025-01-07T19:19:38+00:00

  
  by Dimitrios Latsis

  University of Alabama
  
  To Ava
  
  Abstract

  Introduction

  Because of their inherently technical nature, complex copyright status, and ephemeral interest, broadcast recordings have often been the last category of cultural heritage to be considered for restoration, digitization, and curation.¹ Debates around the preservation of the moving image date to the medium’s beginnings, and its ability to record history—subject to manipulation though that may be—is unquestionably valuable, yet the cost, equipment, and know-how needed to safeguard the films and sounds of the twentieth century have often been invoked as excuses to defer such projects to an unknown future. This situation is especially pointed in the archives of the so-called global South, where environmental conditions and the lingering effects of colonialism have compounded these challenges.² Genre and mode have also been used to marginalize certain works as somehow too low in prestige, relevance, and aesthetic or monetary value to be deemed worthy of systematic conservation. 
  

  The orphan film movement was born partly as a response to the legion of educational, industrial, amateur, and sundry other varieties of visual culture that constitute the forgotten bulk of cinema’s output but have only recently begun to be “rediscovered.”³ All orphans are not equal, however. Attention has gravitated to older and rarer formats, which has resulted in exclusions and unwarranted biases stemming from often well-intentioned efforts of scholars and archivists that work with few resources and have to make difficult decisions.

  An example of this disparity can be seen in the disproportionate attention traditionally paid to newsreels and newsfilm over more recently broadcast programming, even when they are captured on a cornucopia of magnetic media that archives regard as ephemeral, difficult to preserve, and of questionable quality.⁴ Yet these more vernacular forms of image-making—from public access TV programs to activist videos—arguably provide a more representative picture of the upheavals and social movements of the past half century and are more crucial to civic and visual literacy in our polarized times of instant amnesia than ever before.⁵ If archives are to remain powerful engines of sociocultural engagement, their penchant for uniqueness, provenance, and clarity on copyright status must be reassessed, as indeed their predilection for initiating and executing preservation projects without much consultation with the communities documented or affected by their work. 

  Certainly exceptions abound, from community archiving initiatives like the South Side Home Movie Project to long-standing collaborations like the Outfest UCLA Legacy Project. In the area of broadcast archiving, the impetus provided by the American Archive of Public Broadcasting and the tools furnished to grassroots archivists by websites like the Activists’ Guide to Archiving Video have brought a welcome infusion of creative energy and decentralization to the still predominantly top-down, dusty world of GLAMs—galleries, libraries, archives, and museums.⁶

  For all that, audiovisual archives in the West have rarely been tapped explicitly for the purpose of amplifying antiracist or anticolonial causes, and then primarily by documentarians and historians. The reckoning with the past that Verne Harris called for in South Africa and which more traditional archives in postcolonial societies have successfully engaged in remains largely unfulfilled in the global North.⁷ Technology has been suggested as a potential solution to broaden access, democratize curation workflows, and decolonize metadata, among many other possibilities. For time-based media, the need for more granular information that can improve a recording’s discoverability at the scene or shot level, user annotation, transcription, and the application of functionalities familiar to social media users are just some of the parameters motivating the work of innovative digital humanities collaborations like the Media Ecology Project and Critical Commons.⁸

  What is also needed is a new kind of scholarship that marries rigor with ethical reflection, openness to experimentation with what Paulo Freire calls a dialogical praxis that commits the writer, the reader, the teacher, and the student to “the act of analyzing a dehumanizing reality, [denouncing] it while announcing its transformation in the name of the liberation of man.”⁹ No better evidence of this praxis can be found than in a recent crop of documentaries—Attica (2021), Tulsa Burning (2021), and Karen Slade’s upcoming Kent State—that tell the stories of well- and lesser-known episodes of the civil rights movement through archival footage and firsthand testimony. Older projects like Eyes on the Prize (1987–1990) have given rise to online repositories of interviews and other primary materials that can be used by educators and activists in ways that a linear documentary film, however extensively researched, might never allow.¹⁰ It is in making available the raw visual materials of recent American history that the deployment of cutting-edge technological solutions can have the most wide-reaching impact. In what follows, I will try to articulate the promise of media annotation and multimedia digital archiving by briefly examining a collection of films that directly address or contextualize the killings that took place on May 15, 1970, on the campus of Jackson State College, one of Mississippi’s oldest historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs).

  Historian Nancy Bristow and journalist Tim Spofford have drawn attention to the paucity of coverage of the 1970 shootings by national media and the undisguised prejudice and racism in the rhetoric of local newspapers and channels.¹¹ Both attitudes contrast sharply to the widespread condemnation of the Ohio National Guard’s murder of four white Kent State University students only a week earlier. Fifty years later, the site of the shootings in Kent is a National Historic Landmark, and there have been over two dozen nonfiction books, documentaries, TV programs, and even plays and graphic novels dedicated to the tragedy. Meanwhile, a formal apology from state politicians for the killing of Phillip Lafayette Gibbs James and James Earl Green by Mississippi Highway Safety patrolmen at Jackson State was only issued in 2021, and the incident is rarely remembered in accounts of the turbulent seventies, even inside the state.¹² Even the report of the Commission on Campus Unrest tasked by President Richard Nixon to investigate the two outbreaks of violence was disproportionately concerned with Kent State, dismissing the event in Jackson as an episode in the “black student movement” and bemoaning the “crisis of understanding,” among other, similar platitudes.¹³

  Despite the widespread neglect of this important moment in the trajectory of the broader civil rights movement, a substantial amount of primary material documenting the aftermath of the murders is held at the WLBT Newsfilms Collection of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History.¹⁴ When considered as a whole in their digitized form, these recordings make up a tree-like structure where eyewitness accounts contest the official narrative and statements by visiting dignitaries are contrasted with the eulogies delivered during the victims’ funerals. 

  I would like to turn to the pedagogical and analytical value of cross-referencing these films against the received wisdom and misperceptions about the Jackson State killings. Unedited footage of this kind constitutes an untapped source for scholars of media seeking to understand how raw materials—the first draft of history—can be deployed in the context of today’s struggles for equity and representation.

  Like many other stations throughout the South, WLBT, which was owned by the Lamar Life Insurance Company, did not favor the civil rights movement or the unrest occasioned by the state and federal governments’ heavy handling of it as subject matter.¹⁵ In nearby states like Alabama and North and South Carolina, some stations went so far as to cut ties with major networks so they wouldn’t be forced to carry content of this nature. Among networks, NBC had a reputation for being more vocal about racial justice issues, and it repeatedly complained to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) about the partiality and racism in its affiliate WLBT’s news programming. As a result of the subsequent litigation, which led to the station becoming only one of two in American history to have its license revoked for violating FCC regulations on fairness, by 1970 WLBT had moderated its rhetoric somewhat and even hired its first Black announcers and reporters. 

  One of these reporters—Spofford identifies him as Corris Collins—can be seen interviewing students and bystanders on the scene of the shootings: bullet holes are visible in the dormitory windows the patrolmen had fired upon (Figure 1), and protestors are holding up signs that read “Shoot Me My Back Is Turned” and “Premeditated Murder” (Figure 2)—messages that foreshadow the more recent “Hands Up! Don’t Shoot!” seen and heard in demonstrations in the wake of the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The bullet holes form a motif that recurs throughout this visual corpus. Their importance is revealed by the students’ refusal to allow the university to cover up or repair them so they can stand as a “monument to dehumanization” (Figure 3). A partly obscured sign reading “slaughter of students” hangs above the bullet-riddled window (Figure 4). 
  As important as visual continuities are the stark differences in the discourse of those involved in or affected by the events. In the first tape, the reporter interviews students who dispute any assertion that there was a riot following the shootings while expressing the opinion that the latter were premeditated. This would seem to accord with the evidence discussed during a press conference given by Alex Waites, Charles Evers, and Mississippi Representative Robert G. Clark of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The NAACP leaders allege a deliberate pattern of firing by highway patrolmen and voice their solidarity with the students while calling for a local boycott of white businesses. 

  Representing a diametrically opposed view of the events, Ken Dean of the Mississippi Council on Human Relations sees the events as the unavoidable outcome of the “death of the civil rights movement” (Figure 5), which has split its constituents, according to him, into those pursuing change using peaceful, legislative means and those like the Jackson State students that are violently “impatient” in their desire for change. This reactionary opinion closely mirrors that of state violence apologists today who still try to sow division by talking up a false dichotomy between the approaches of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X (Figure 6). Dean does show some insight into the root causes of unrest in Mississippi when he lists the killing of twenty-two-year-old Ben Brown by Mississippi Trooper Lloyd Silas Jones in 1967, as well as the contemporaneous controversy over Muhammed Ali’s refusal to be drafted into the US Army.¹⁶ Left unmentioned is the assassination of Medgar Evers (Charles Evers was his brother) a mere four miles away from the Jackson State campus in 1963.
  Somewhere in between Dean and the students on the ideological spectrum are the legislators who visited the college on a fact-finding mission. Senators Walter Mondale of Minnesota, Birch Bayh of Indiana, Edmund Muskie of Maine, and Charles Percy of Illinois surveyed the scene of the crime and in statements to the press condemned the governor’s seeming indifference, contrasting it to the willingness of Senator Edward Kennedy to visit with the families of the deceased.¹⁷ Two Kent State students joined them in their visit, directly marking the disparity in the public response toward the two incidents. Jackson State students are presented as combative but civil, debating journalists who claim to be interested in “both sides of the truth” (Figure 7), challenging the “big lie” of Mississippi governor John Bell Williams that there would be violence at the victims’ funerals, and marching in front of the college campus (Figure 8). In a different recording, this march is edited together with footage of National Guard tanks and machine guns advancing on the fairgrounds area, filmed through a chain-link fence. This recording approaches in potency the Eisensteinian intellectual montage, crosscutting between a firebombed grocery store on Wood Street (Figure 9) and Jackson’s mayor Russell Davis’s tepid proclamation of a day of prayer (Figure 10).
  

  This is not to deny that faith and church services were an important corollary of the events, as testified by the lengthy services for the victims captured by WLBT cameramen.¹⁸ It is rather to stress the degree to which technicians and journalists working on the ground often showed a greater degree of sophistication about the historical and even aesthetic nature of the events they were covering than scholars and posterity have given them credit for. A similarly masterful contrast between A- and B-roll can be found in D270_0642, where a white audience clapping during US Attorney General John M. Mitchell’s address to the Delta Council in Cleveland, Mississippi (Figure 11), is interspersed with scenes of people protesting the AG’s visit and Charles Evers, Senator Edward Brooke, and Dr. John Peoples examining bullet holes in the student dormitory (Figure 12). It might be objected that the nature of an on-location TV camera operator’s work is syncretic, and the accumulation and arrangement of footage on a given topic is heuristic, rather than ideological in nature. Nevertheless, the dialectic that inheres in these tapes is ripe for nonlinear and genetic examinations that might show what portions of the raw footage ended up on the televised reports and what has remained unseen until now.

  One often thinks of nightly TV news broadcasts as only a first draft of history, and a fairly slapdash one at that. Yet if scholars do a better job at connecting broadcasts across time, crucial context that is otherwise lost in the daily avalanche of sound bites can emerge. Indeed, this is the effect that the systematic digitization of newspapers by the Library of Congress (Chronicling America) and the University of California, Riverside (California Digital Newspaper Collection) has already had on historical scholarship.¹⁹ In our own field of media studies, the work of Mark Garrett Cooper and the University of South Carolina’s Moving Image Research Collections with the Fox Movietone News Collection is a good example of what happens when large-scale digitization of newsfilm enables critical readings of these audiovisual resources instead of their more customary deployment as somehow neutral sources of visible evidence.²⁰

  What results would this methodology have if applied to the case of Jackson State? We might look at the prehistory of student activism in Jackson, such as the attempt of Black students at Tougaloo Southern Christian College to integrate the city’s public library; when they were arrested, Jackson State students marched in solidarity with them, leading to more arrests and a sit-in at a local Walgreen’s lunch counter. Or we could look at footage of the 1971 National Evaluative Conference in Black Studies that took place at Jackson State for a powerful corrective to the widespread perception of HBCUs as sites of clashes and incubators of radical activism in the seventies, important as these were. This conference played a seminal role in the legitimization of African American and ethnic studies within academia. Speaking in front of the same portraits of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King in the auditorium where eulogies for the victims of the Jackson State shooting had been delivered only a few months prior, Eric Lincoln, at the time a member of the faculty of Clark Atlanta University, spoke eloquently about the stakes of the success and failure of racial understanding:

  The cryptic racial mystique which protected the white man and whatever he said and cautioned the black man not to stray from the place assigned to him has been shattered. The result is a rapidly spreading generalized resistance to the old ways of accommodation and the progressive abandonment of the traditional ways of thinking which have always precluded the possibility of the black man having an adequate sense of self and which made self-realization for the average black man something to be dreamed of rather than to be pursued. Nowhere is there greater evidence of these facts than here in the great state of Mississippi.

  This analysis of the root causes of violence in the state was never broadcast by the channel, nor were Senator Brooke’s remarks at a press conference following the 1970 killings. Brooke argued that “law enforcement agents must have no immunity” (Figure 13) and systemic issues like the quality of education in HBCUs as compared to the state’s flagship institutions must be addressed before the cycle of violence can be interrupted.
  Considering the traces these historic events left in the audiovisual record and juxtaposing these broadcasts with one another and the broader coverage of the civil rights movement in the press show that our assumptions about the biases of broadcast media should not preclude us from seeking out a more holistic understanding of their impact at the time. This method of analysis also reveals the diversity of opinions that stakeholders expressed and the roots of a symbolic imaginary surrounding similar occurrences—bullet holes, flowers, marches, but also peaceful discourse and intersectional collaborations—that still form the basis for their representation today. Ultimately, digital tools and methodologies are not, in and of themselves, more or less productive than traditional forms of textual or visual analysis. Rather, we need to deploy these new tools in “recovering, recording, and preserving historical data” and “recognizing spaces for uplift and joy.”²¹

  A list of links relevant to this essay can be found here.²²
  
  Dr. Dimitrios Latsis is a historian and digital humanist working at the intersection of archiving and visual culture. He is Assistant Professor in Digital and Audiovisual Preservation at the University of Alabama's School of Library and Information Studies where is also coordinator of the EBSCO Scholars program in audiovisual preservation. His work on American visual culture, early cinema, archival studies and the Digital Humanities has been supported by the Smithsonian Institution, Domitor, Mellon and Knight Foundations and Canada’s Social Studies and Humanities Research Council, among others. He has published and lectured widely in these fields, including co-editing a special issue of The Moving Image, the journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists on the topic of “Digital Humanities and/in Film Archives” and an anthology on documentaries about the visual arts in the 1950s and 60s for Bloomsbury Academic. His book on the early historiography of American cinema, How the Movies Got its Past is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
  
  Title Image: Jack Thornell, AP News (1970). Image modified by editors.
  

  Revisiting Newsfilm of the 1970 Jackson State Killings: Digital Humanities As Antiracist Praxis © 2025 by Dimitrios Latsis is licensed under CC BY 4.0.
  
  The Journal of e-Media Studies is published by the Dartmouth Library.