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• 1 2024-09-17T06:02:23+00:00 TV News and the Origins of Black Studies and Ethnic Studies 5 image_header 2025-01-07T05:53:51+00:00

  by Curtis Marez

  Ethnic Studies Department
  University of California, San Diego
  
  Abstract
  
  Part of the Accessible Civil Rights Heritage (ACRH), the Bay Area Television Archive preserves a revealing 1969 news story titled “Book-in at SF State Library” about a student strike for Black studies and ethnic studies. A KPIX-TV Eyewitness News reporter interviews Margedant Hayakawa, wife of San Francisco State College (SFSC) president S. I. Hayakawa, about volunteers who are reshelving and reorganizing an estimated seventy-five thousand books that were purposely misplaced by student protestors. The camera focuses on piles of books that students have stacked on the floor, with seemingly symbolic titles like Administrative Strategy and Dynamics of Management. Indeed, this student action was aimed at disrupting administrative strategies for managing and containing strike demands. Midway through the segment, a group of white, Black, and Asian students attempt to disrupt the reorganization of shelves and are escorted out by campus police (see Figure 1). When the reporter asks Assistant Library Director Dr. Mary McWilliam if the library has ever faced this level of “chaos” before, her answer is not since 1957, when the campus was rocked by an earthquake.¹
  
  Responding to Michel Foucault’s history of western forms of knowledge, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, Roderick A. Ferguson in The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference highlights how student movements for Black studies and ethnic studies questioned the Eurocentric assumptions of educational institutions. Writing about student demands for a “Third World” college at my own university, University of California, San Diego, Ferguson notes that “institutional transformation . . . meant demanding epistemic reorganization,” starting with a new curriculum that “challenges [western] man’s self-representation as the universal basis of life, labor, and language.”² Student strikers at SFSC similarly demanded increased Black enrollment and courses and instructors in Black studies that would bring to campus diverse forms of Black knowledge.
  
  The early teaching experience of Sonia Sanchez, influential Black Arts Movement poet and founding professor of Black studies, suggests that change was needed at the college. Sanchez taught a course in Black literature for the English Department, “a revolutionary idea” at the time.³ It was also a challenging class to teach because many of the required texts were out of print and not in the campus library, so Sanchez had to make mimeograph copies for her students, the purple and blue ink staining her hands. Finally, teaching Black literature made her vulnerable to state surveillance. While working at SFSC, she was visited at home by agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who questioned her for assigning authors such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and Paul Robeson.⁴ With Black books marginalized and policed, the SFSC book-in symbolized the process of epistemic reorganization required to change the college from a disproportionately white institution to one that better represented Black, Latinx, and Asian people.
  
  SFSC’s enrollment was increasing in the late 1960s, but the small percentage of Black students was declining, leading the Black Student Union (BSU) to call for a strike in November 1968. BSU demanded open enrollment for Black students, the formation of a Black studies department, and Black student and faculty control over hiring and curriculum. Their demands were supported by the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF), a coalition of Chicanx and Asian students who demanded an ethnic studies college. The strike lasted for five months and included a boycott of classes and mass marches and rallies, which were often met with police violence. Police arrested almost eight hundred students and injured hundreds. The strike quickly drew the attention of local and national news media. As historian Martha Biondi states, “Overnight, the strike put Black students at the center of the civil rights struggle in California and, increasingly, the nation.”⁵ My contribution to the history of the San Francisco State strike is an analysis of local TV news coverage and what it reveals about race and TV journalism. I ultimately introduce several common themes in news coverage of SFSC and news reports about distinct yet related protests among Black students in Mississippi and South Carolina.
  A few clips in the Bay Area Television Archive foreground BSU and TWLF press conferences. A segment from December 1968, for example, features a press conference with TWLF leader Roger Alvarado, BSU president Ben Stewart, and BSU member Thomas Williams. The panel also includes two unidentified Black women and two small children. Williams, a baby on his lap, tells the assembled reporters: “The militants have been called ‘bandits,’ ‘professional agitators.’ You call us what you want, but we are going to continue to struggle, and we see ourselves as struggling for the generations that are here, and for the generations to come.” The scene suggests the educational aspirations of Black students while visually countering their vilification as threats to white respectability and family values.⁶ Another clip records part of a TWLF press conference where Alvarado reports their unanimous vote to support BSU demands and participate in the strike. His self-presentation—long hair and beard, dark glasses, red bandana, and army-green jacket—signifies solidarity with Latin American revolutionary movements. He is flanked by a Latino student wearing a United Farm Worker button and a female Asian student. The trio suggests the prolabor, anti-imperialist coalition represented by TWLF. They are joined by BSU’s George Murray, who says, “For the first time I can remember we have third world people together, and they’re saying we’re going to stand together and do our thing.”
  Film of student activists articulating their views of the strike is relatively rare, however. Voices of people of color are underrepresented in the local TV news archive, limited to a handful of sound bites. The marginalization of Black student speech in local news coverage is reproduced at the national level. In a 2008 interview, SFSC student striker Don Smothers recalled that BSU members were flown to New York in 1968 for an NBC News segment about Black college students which also included representatives from Ivy League schools, but the producers “didn’t like what we had to say,” so their interviews were cut.⁷ The situation in TV news is matched by movie representations of protests at San Francisco State and other schools. In 1970, about a year after the strike’s conclusion, it inspired several feature films that center radical white male students and decenter Black students. In Getting Straight (Rush, 1970), R.P.M. (Kramer, 1970), and The Strawberry Statement (Hagmann, 1970), Black characters play minor parts, with significantly fewer lines of dialogue than their white classmates. In contrast with the SFSC protests, moreover, which were successful to the extent that they led to the establishment of an ethnic studies college, Hollywood represented student protests as abject failures.
  Black, Chicanx, and Asian student voices are overwhelmed in the archive by footage of helmeted members of the San Francisco Police Department’s Tactical Squad marching in formation and wielding batons against protestors. Such scenes were so ubiquitous they became the object of parody, as in a 1969 local TV segment about a performance at an area fairground in which laughing young white men costumed as riot police use plastic batons to beat other laughing young white men dressed as protestors (see Figure 2).⁸
  In addition to nightsticks, police at SFSC used thermal foggers to spray chemical irritants at students. The US military first deployed these foggers in the Vietnam War, but they were soon adopted by US police departments, which used them against protestors, especially students of color. The San Francisco police employed a model with a trigger firing a concentrated chemical stream as far as two hundred feet. Manufacturer advertisements aimed at police departments declared that the “weaponlike appearance and low, threatening roar” of the devices “have great psychological impact” (see Figures 3a and 3b).⁹
  
  Student protestors, some of whom were reportedly inspired by The Battle of Algiers—Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1967 film about the Algerian struggle against French colonialism—viewed the police as an occupying force on campus and responded with guerrilla tactics of disruption.¹⁰ Some students even set off improvised bombs on campus, at times and places calculated to avoid injury, and in fact, no one was hurt. Nevertheless, police discovered a pipe bomb in a purse and displayed it at a news conference.¹¹ More often, students confronted the police verbally, chanting “Pigs off campus!” and other slogans.
  The media’s fetishization of clashes between students and police can sometimes make us forget that the movement for Black studies and ethnic studies was popular. Archival clips show that in addition to Asian and Chicanx students and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) members, many white students and faculty members supported the strike. It was also endorsed by campus food service unions and members of the American Federation of Teachers, hundreds of whom joined campus rallies and picket lines.¹² Local Black leaders and the Black community of Bayview–Hunters Point embraced the strike as well. A December 4, 1968, KQED News segment titled “Bayview Hunters Point Community Support SF State Strike” reported on a campus rally for BSU that featured Dr. Carlton Goodlett, community civil rights leader and owner of several Black newspapers in California; Reverend Cecil Williams, pastor of San Francisco’s Glide Memorial United Methodist Church; and Ron Dellums, who would become a US congressman. San Francisco Bay Area TV news thus makes visible elements of the broad support for the strike that have been forgotten or obscured over time.
  
  The news segment also features Bayview–Hunters Point activists Elouise Westbrook and Ruth Williams, suggesting that larger Black struggles over housing and policing informed the SFSC strike and helped inspire the formation of Black studies and ethnic studies departments. The Bayview–Hunters Point neighborhood in southeast San Francisco was home to a Black ghetto, adjacent to a US Navy shipyard. Much of the area’s housing was built for wartime workers, and by the 1960s, it was dilapidated and unlivable. Hunters Point lacked grocery stores and public parks, and unemployment there was significantly higher than in non-Black neighborhoods.¹³
  These conditions contributed to an uprising there a few years before the SFSC strike. When a young Black man named Matthew Johnson was shot by a policeman while reportedly fleeing a stolen car, for two days hundreds of people in Bayview–Hunters Point gathered around the community center, broke windows, set fires, and threw rocks at the police. Governor Pat Brown responded by declaring martial law and imposing a curfew, telling local TV news reporters that “we cannot have revolution in this country.”¹⁴ The entire neighborhood was cordoned off and occupied by San Francisco police and thousands of National Guard soldiers, who bivouacked at nearby Candlestick Park. In one incident, police fired on the local community center while hundreds of children were inside.¹⁵ Events at Bayview–Hunters Point were widely covered in the local news, and Black protest and violent military responses in the neighborhood must have been on the minds of both students and the police at SFSC.
  Westbrook and Williams were community activists at the time of the uprising—part of the so-called Big Five of Bayview, a group of Black women credited with successfully organizing protests for federal investment in low-income housing for the neighborhood. Two years later, they addressed the SFSC rally. In contrast with period contexts—including at SFSC—where Black nationalism was articulated in masculine terms, Westbrook tells the enthusiastic crowd: “I want you to know I’m a Black woman, I’m a mother and I have 15 grandchildren. And I want a college that I can be proud of! . . . I only have but one life to give, children, when I die, I’m dead. And you’d better believe it. But I’m dying for the rights of people.”
  
  The struggle for Black rights, Westbrook suggests, is about life and death in both Bayview–Hunters Point and on campus. Implicit in her remarks is a recognition of the distinct yet shared histories connecting the two in their mutual vulnerability to police violence. That shared history represents the conditions of possibility for solidarity between students and community members. As Williams declared to the crowd of striking students, “I’m from the ghetto community and at the sound of my voice, when I rise up just about the masses of Hunters Point rises up too! So I am, I am supporting the Black Students Union, the Third World Liberation group 100 per cent!” (see Figure 4).
  
  The strike’s relative popularity, combined with fears over Black revolution in Bayview–Hunters Point and beyond, helps explain the intensity of the conservative backlash represented at the state level by Governor Ronald Reagan. During his successful 1966 campaign for office, Reagan blamed incumbent Brown for the uprising, proclaiming in racist code that urban streets had become like “jungle paths in the dark.”¹⁶ While his attacks on Berkeley are better remembered, Reagan also honed his law-and-order message in response to SFSC students and faculty, decrying Black students in particular as criminal “blackmailers.”¹⁷ TV news also represented local right-wing opposition to campus protests, including a press conference with conservative students; an antistrike rally in San Francisco’s Union Square, which was met by prostrike hecklers; and a campaign in the overwhelmingly white city of Mill Valley in Marin County encouraging the wearing of blue ribbons to show support for SFSC president
  Hayakawa’s efforts to clamp down on student protests—Hayakawa was a Mill Valley resident.¹⁸
  
  Hayakawa was appointed to control campus protests, with the police if necessary, and he avidly sought media attention to criticize students and faculty and call for law and order. Out of a total of 142 items about the strike in the Bay Area Television Archive, 26 feature the president, many of them at press conferences. Suggesting his zeal for media attention, one clip represents Hayakawa apparently ambushing members of BSU—including a young Danny Glover—who arrive to a classroom expecting to meet privately with the president, only to find he has invited the press (see Figure 5).¹⁹
  
  
  In a conference at the San Francisco Press Club, Hayakawa attempted to project an image of himself as a strong man in control of the situation: “The Chancellor and trustees appointed me to this position as the man in charge of the scene. I make my own decisions.” Shaking both fists, he concludes that “This campus has been in disorder for so damn long, and someone’s got to decide where the thing stops.”²⁰ Hayakawa’s most infamous media stunt, however, was climbing on top of a truck and tearing out the wires to the speakers that students were using to project their voices. The scene was widely covered in the press, including locally, as represented in the archive.²¹
  Hayakawa’s tough-guy posturing during the strike helped him win election to the US Senate in 1976. As the face of conservative law-and-order politics on campus, he gained political power by attacking Black faculty and students in the media, especially on television. The fact that he was himself a person of color served to distract from claims about racial inequality in higher education. An important argument in recent ethnic studies research is that powerful institutions attempt to ward off protest and maintain the status quo by selectively incorporating minorities in small numbers, and Hayakawa represents an important example in the historical emergence of the field of ethnic studies.²²
  
  Finally, the archive reveals the whiteness of TV news. Most of the reporters covering the strike at SFSC were white men. Some questioned Hayakawa’s police tactics in press conferences, and they spotlighted shocking police violence against students. The archive suggests, however, that their potentially critical lens on the strike was limited by historic and institutional structures that overvalued white male perspectives and undervalued others. One segment is emblematic of this kind of taken-for-granted bias: a white reporter surveys opinions on campus about the strike by interviewing three white male students.
  
  By contrast, Black students and other students of color are rarely interviewed. An exception is a clip in which a white male reporter incredulously asks a group of Black male students on campus, “Are you all students here?” One of the group responds by effectively turning the question around, suggesting that it’s not Black students but the police who are out of place on campus: “Everyone’s a student here, [even] the plain clothesman and the Tactical Squad. . . . Ronald Reagan should call the police and remove them because they don’t have a student body card.” The student’s joke draws attention to the racialized perspective of the media, in which whites are clearly visible but Black students are hard to see.
  White male members of the press were therefore not objective observers but active participants in the events they covered on campus. The most extreme example is the Gater incident on November 6, 1967, named after the SFSC student newspaper. Histories of the strike point to this as a flash point that galvanized demands for Black studies on campus. As Biondi writes, “The ‘Gater Incident’ and its legacy signified Black student assertion, a punitive response, an unsympathetic media, and external political pressure to reject negotiation in favor of bringing in the police, a scenario that repeated itself many times over during the next couple of years.”²³ The paper’s staff was largely white and male, and when members of BSU critical of the Gater’s anti-Black racism visited its office to confront the editor, James Vaszko, they reportedly beat him, and a larger struggle ensued. BSU members and student reporters fought each other amid news desks and typewriters, a scene captured by a staff photographer. The only witnesses to the fight were the participants themselves, but news reports seemed to sympathize with the student reporters and presume the guilt of BSU members.
  
  A reporter for KRON-TV visited the newspaper offices in the wake of the conflict to interview its staff and Lynn Ludlow, a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner and a journalism lecturer at the college, who explains that he joined the melee on the side of student reporters, breaking a finger in the process. The two reporters interact like colleagues, as when Ludlow says, “As you know, I work for the Examiner.” The KRON reporter is solicitous toward Ludlow, and the cameraman frames his injured hand in a close-up. Both the reporter and cameraman address him as “Lynn,” suggesting a kind of informal friendliness. KRON-TV’s interview with Vaszko is similarly sympathetic, providing him a platform to dismiss BSU grievances and argue for suspending the students and freezing BSU funds.²⁴
  KPIX Eyewitness News also spotlighted Vaszko. When six BSU members were arraigned on felony charges of assault and conspiracy, a reporter for the TV station interviewed a police officer about the case as he stood next to Vaszko and Ludlow, visually suggesting that the law was on the side of the two white reporters.²⁵ KPIX also interviewed the student and professional reporter as they walked out of court together; in the recording they smile and laugh for the camera before it zooms in on Ludlow’s bandaged hand in a sling. These scenes of sympathy and friendship suggest that some reporters may have identified with Ludlow and the Gater staff. The news segment represents a closing of the ranks among white journalists in opposition to the student protestors they covered, thus undermining pretenses to objectivity.²⁶
  
  Black reporters covering SFSC were the exception proving the rule of white male dominance in TV news. Oakland’s KPIX employed two of the few Black reporters on the West Coast, Belva Davis and Ben Williams, who subsequently reflected on the difficulty of working in anti-Black media (see Figures 6).
  In an interview after he retired, Williams states that police officials and witnesses often refused to speak to him, addressing his white cameraman instead.²⁷ Writers and especially camera operators at the station were also hostile. Davis recalls in her memoir that “a number of the cameramen made it quite clear that they didn’t want to work with a Negro reporter, they didn’t want to work with a female reporter, and they positively did not want to be teamed with someone who was both.”²⁸ They “had a tendency to shoot me from a deliberately distorting low angle so that my breasts and the flare of my nostrils dominated the picture.”²⁹ Davis and Williams were often the only Black people in rooms where white people spoke critically about Black power, Black teachers, Black students, and Black communities. In extreme examples, both reporters confronted members of the American Nazi Party.³⁰ In all these ways, Davis and Williams experienced forms of what Du Bois called “double consciousness,” whereby Black people in the United States are forced to see themselves through the eyes of white people, while white people are freed from having to view themselves from the perspective of Black people.
  
  Reporting under a white gaze while Black was not just awkward but dangerous. Davis’s first assignment, covering the 1964 Republican National Convention with a Black male reporter, was particularly harrowing. Barry Goldwater, who was supported by the John Birch Society and the Ku Klux Klan, was a front-runner for the nomination, and she encountered “snarling” Goldwater supporters in the galleries of San Francisco’s Cow Palace auditorium, where “the mood turned unmistakably menacing.” Davis and her colleague had sought the relative obscurity and safety of seats far from the stage, but after President Eisenhower’s speech attacking the press and using racially coded rhetoric about urban crime, they: “heard a voice yell, ‘Hey, look at those two up there!’ The accuser pointed us out, and several spectators swarmed beneath us. ‘Hey n*****s!’ they yelled. ‘What the hell are you n*****s doing in here?’” As the reporters made their way through “the gauntlet, from the nosebleed rows of the arena down to the sea of well-coiffed whites on the ground floor,” a “self-appointed posse” hurled bottles and racist epithets at them. “Security guards popped into my peripheral vision,” Davis remembers, “but I knew better than to expect them to rescue us—that wasn’t a realistic expectation for any African American in 1964.”³¹ Her status as a reporter, in other words, could not shield Davis from anti-Black racism on the job.
  
  Davis also describes being assaulted by police while she was covering protests on the Berkeley campus: “One reached out, grabbed my shoulders, and began spinning me like a top down his entire row of buddies. . . . By the time the last officer released my shoulders, it took all I could muster to stand still, eyes squeezed shut, waiting for the world to stop hurling around my humiliation. I said none of what I wanted to say to them: they were armed with guns, Mace, and clubs, and had shown little hesitance to use them when challenged.”³² The same day, police clubbed Clifford Vaughs, a Black radio reporter also covering the protests, and “dragged [him] down a flight of concrete stairs, feet held in the air, to the campus police office in the basement of Sproul Hall. . . . The thump of his head bouncing off those concrete steps still echoes in my ears.”³³ Regarding her campus assignments, Davis concludes: “The cops didn’t much care for the press—particularly reporters who were black or female, or in my case, both. The officers regarded us as closet left-wingers who no doubt sympathized with the radical protestors.”³⁴ Davis’s description of Berkeley as a minefield of racial and gender violence for Black reporters matches San Francisco State, where Williams, Davis, and Davis’s husband, Bill Moore—the only Black TV news cameraperson in California at the time—dodged the tactical unit to cover the strike (see Figure 7).
  
  Like their white colleagues, they were participants in the civil rights struggle, but in a different way. Black reporting on efforts to desegregate education, in other words, called attention to the need to desegregate TV news.
  
  Both reporters produced stories on a wide range of topics, but during the 1960s and 1970s, they specialized in stories about Black, Chicanx, and Indigenous demands for justice. Around the time of the SFSC strikes, Davis reported on Bayview–Hunters Point, the Black Panthers, and the Nation of Islam (1969); demands for Chicano studies at Oakland’s Merritt College (1969); the National Chicano Moratorium March (1970); and the Native American occupation of Alcatraz (1971; see Figure 8).³⁵
  Williams also reported on Bayview–Hunters Point, the Panthers, and Alcatraz, as well as the National Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana (1972); the Conference for a United Front Against Fascism in Oakland (1969); efforts to fire Angela Davis at UCLA (1968); a hunger strike among Black prisoners at San Quentin (1969); and Indigenous demands for surplus US Army land near Davis, California (1970; see Figure 9).³⁶
  These stories were part of the larger field of civil rights struggles that matched the interracial, coalitional lens of student activists at San Francisco State.
  Davis’s reports on SFSC present a wider, more complicated view of the student struggle than in most news stories, focusing on poet and teacher Amiri Baraka, one of the founding Black studies instructors at the college, and his work with BSU on a Black Communication program to stage plays and connect the campus to Black communities. She also filmed a sympathetic interview with a prostrike professor, John Gerassi.³⁷ While most reporters focused on male activists, Davis’s report “Black Studies at SF State College” pictures many Black women who were student activists (see Figure 10).³⁸
  
  Williams recorded a rare interview with a Black student activist—composition instructor and Black Panther Party member George Murray, who defends Black studies as an alternative to fighting a racist war in Vietnam. He also interviewed Black studies professor Nathan Hare and an unnamed BSU spokesperson who argues for a Black studies department with “self-determination” (see Figure 11).³⁹
  
  Finally, Williams produced a seemingly sympathetic report about a historic convocation on campus to address educational access:

  This convocation, called in hope, is historic. It’s the first time an American college has stopped its entire pursuit to devote entire attention to the educational needs and demands of American minorities. . . . The three day convocation is not expected to solve any of the problems that plague San Francisco State College, but it will be the most complete airing so far of the issues raised by the Black Student Union, and other minority groups on campus, issues which call for fundamental change in the state college system.

  The reporter suggests not only the historic nature of the convocation but the fact that BSU is on the right side of history. In all these ways, Davis and Williams helped turn a story about civil rights in education into one about civil rights in the media as well.
  
  My prior research and current position as a professor of ethnic studies have influenced my focus on the struggles for Black studies and ethnic studies at SFSC, but the ACRH archive includes extensive resources for thinking about campus protests across time and space, opening possibilities for researchers and students to think comparatively and relationally about different historic flash points. I will conclude by comparing the SFSC strikes to similar yet distinct contexts in the US South during the 1960s. Together, these different case studies suggest the extent to which Black student demands were met with both police force and media bias. At the same time, however, the archive also indicates the prescience of Black student visions for education as part of the means for transcending both racial violence and the limits of historically white-centered institutions of knowledge, from universities to TV news.
  
  Anticipating the struggle over knowledge represented by the SFSC strike and the book-in at the San Francisco State library, film in the ACRH archive captures a 1961 “read-in” by a group of Black college students in a segregated public library in Jackson, Mississippi.⁴⁰ The Tougaloo Nine were from Tougaloo College, a Christian and historically Black institution and important site of civil rights activism in Jackson—one of its advisors was Medgar Evers, field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Drawing attention to separate and unequal library resources, students asked for books that couldn’t be found at the George Washington Carver Library. It’s unlikely that the books were on the shelves at Tougaloo College, which lost its accreditation in 1953 partly because of its inadequate library.⁴¹
  
  Film of the protest reveals that the WLBT news camera arrived before the police, suggesting that the students may have tipped the station off in advance—perhaps to try and break through the local TV blackout on coverage of the civil rights movement in Mississippi. Evers was also involved in an ultimately successful legal battle for equal time on WLBT for civil rights perspectives. The footage is raw, without sound or voice-over narration, and we don’t know how it was framed or if it ever aired. But WLBT was infamous as a white supremacist TV station. Management editorialized against desegregation—including James Meredith’s desegregation of the University of Mississippi—supported the racist white Citizens’ Council and broadcast its talk shows, and refused to give airtime to civil rights advocates. The station, which contained a white supremacist bookstore in its building lobby and employed no Black people in a city that was 40 percent Black, would have been hostile to the students’ demands.⁴²
  
  The WLBT news footage suggests the terror of being Black under a white supremacist gaze in which law enforcement and the media are aligned. Replicating the hierarchical relations of Jim Crow, the students are seated, heads bowed, eyes focused on the books in front of them as white policemen stand over and look down at them, including Captain J. L. Ray, who would oversee the mass arrest of Freedom Riders in Jackson a few months later. At the same time, two standing white male photographers aim cameras at the seated students. The students remain mostly focused on their reading, but two—Meredith Anding Jr. and Evelyn Pierce—anxiously look at the camera and up at the officers, respectively, before quickly turning away (see Figure 12).
  Like at San Francisco State, the story at Tougaloo is about civil rights in public institutions of knowledge as well as on TV.⁴³ Although not represented in the archive, a subsequent peaceful march by students from other local colleges in solidarity with the Tougaloo Nine was met with police clubs, dogs, and tear gas.
  
  My second southern case study is the Orangeburg Massacre (1968), in which white highway patrolmen in Orangeburg, South Carolina, fired on Black students from South Carolina State College (SCSC) who were protesting a segregated bowling alley, killing three and injuring twenty-seven. Many students were shot in the back or the soles of their feet as they fled. While some officers claimed to hear gunfire from the protestors, others testified that they heard none, which was confirmed by civilian witnesses.⁴⁴ Roy Wilkins, NAACP executive secretary, disputed the police account in a speech at SCSC, declaring: “There was no exchange of gun fire. There were no guns discovered on the campus among the students. No officers were shot, and you can’t tell me these kids who’ve been hunting rabbits all their lives couldn’t hit an officer.”⁴⁵
  
  While not well known today—overwhelmed in historical memory by the assassination a month later of Martin Luther King and the National Guard killing of four white Kent State students in 1970—the Orangeburg Massacre was met by protests of thousands of Black college students in front of and inside the state capitol building: one on March 7, followed by two even larger protests on March 13 and 14 (see Figures 13a–13c).
  Organized by SCSC’s Black Awareness Coordinating Committee, the protestors gathered on the capitol steps and occupied the State House rotunda in an unsuccessful effort to meet with Governor Robert McNair, who had previously praised the police, blamed the massacre on a “small minority” of “Black Power advocates,” and wrongly asserted that snipers had fired at police from the campus.⁴⁶ Students held signs reading “McNair Is a Son of a Birch,” “Murder by Law,” and “There Is Evidence That McNair Is on LSD, which may very well be why he behaves so strangely!!” (see Figure 14).⁴⁷
  
  Some of the most striking shots in the TV news reports, however, were taken from the top of the State House stairs looking down at the students, the South Carolina Monument to the Confederate Dead looming in the background. Typical of similar monuments throughout the South, the generic sculpture of a soldier resting on a rifle represented the Confederacy as defensive, not aggressive. It also presented a populist view of Confederate soldiers that balanced their commitment to a larger white supremacist cause with their individual integrity as white men. Confederate memorials were erected in two waves: around the turn of the nineteenth century, as complements to Jim Crow and revisionary “lost cause” narratives about the Civil War, and during the late 1950s and early 1960s, in response to the civil rights movement.⁴⁸ The Confederate monument protesting students saw and marched under at the South Carolina State House was erected in 1882, in celebration of the end of Reconstruction—a prior version of the statue was destroyed by lightning.⁴⁹ The students would have encountered a similar monument, the Orangeburg Confederate Memorial, just blocks from SCSC, the segregated bowling alley, and the police murders. The location of Confederate monuments in front of courthouses, city halls, and seats of state government symbolize state power as a means of terrorizing Black people under a white supremacist gaze. Like the police watching the students in the Tougaloo Nine report, in the TV news footage from the South Carolina State House, a Confederate soldier looks down on Black student protestors (see Figure 15).
  The tradition of violent white supremacist resistance to desegregation represented by Confederate memorials thus informs the student protests, connecting the massacre to the longer history of slavery and its afterlife. Wilkins made the connections explicit in his campus speech, arguing that the forces of violence:
  

  don’t have any dead to carry home, and we do, a lot of dead from way back yonder. Count them over in your mind. These three, here on this campus, 43 dead in Detroit last year, 23 dead in Newark. Medgar Evers. Run on back through history, through Reconstruction, through the Civil War, think of all the dead we’ve buried.

  From that perspective, student demands for desegregation of the all-white South Carolina National Guard drew a line from the Confederate soldier on the State House memorial to contemporary police violently enforcing segregation. At the same time, students demanded a larger budget for the historically underfunded Black college, and the following year the Black College Communication Association, like activists at SFSC, demanded the establishment of a school of Black studies at SCSC, as if recognizing the necessity of Black education in the face of anti-Black violence and a white-dominated news media.
  
  A list of external links featured in this essay can be found here.⁵⁰
  
  A professor in the Ethnic Studies Department at the University of California San Diego, Curtis Marez is the author of Drug Wars: The Political Economy of Narcotics (University of Minnesota Press, 2004), Farm Worker Futurism: Speculative Technologies of Resistance (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), and University Babylon: Film and Race Politics on Campus (University of California Press, 2019). Along with Lisa Duggan he edits the American Studies Now book series for the University of California Press. Marez is the former editor of American Quarterly (2006-2011) and former president of the American Studies Association (2013-2014). His book in progress titled TV in Precarious Places will be published by NYU Press.
  
  Title Image: “Black Studies at SF State College,” KPIX news report by Belva Davis (derived from the Bay Area Television Archive of the ACRH)
  
  TV News and the Origins of Black Studies and Ethnic Studies © 2025 by Curtis Marez is licensed under CC BY 4.0.
  
  The Journal of e-Media Studies is published by the Dartmouth Library.