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• 1 2024-09-17T06:02:00+00:00 Volume 7, Issue 2: Accessible Civil Rights Heritage 15 image_header 2025-01-04T20:28:30+00:00 The Journal of e-Media Studies is a blind peer-reviewed, on-line journal dedicated to the scholarly study of the history and theory of electronic media, especially Television and New Media.  It is an inter-disciplinary journal, with an Editorial Board that is chiefly grounded in the methodologies of the field of Film and Television Studies. We welcome submissions across the fields and methodologies that study media and media history. For other issues, submission guidelines, and more information about the Journal of e-Media Studies, go to the journal's homepage.
  
  Volume 7, Issue 2 (2025)
  by Mark Williams and John Bell, assisted by Lauren Spencer and Abigail Murdy

  About This Issue

  Issue Introduction:

  [title here]

  by Mark Williams
  Download PDF (doi: 10.1349/PS1.1938-6060.A.505)

  Articles

  Remembering the Little Rock Central High Crisis: The Pryor Center's Distinctive Insights

  by Jay Barth
  Download PDF (doi: 10.1349/PS1.1938-6060.A.506)

  Insurgent Leisure, Aquatic Angst: Postwar Newsfilm, Civil Rights, and Coastal Imaginaries

  by Stephen Charbonneau
  Download PDF (doi: 10.1349/PS1.1938-6060.A.507)

  The Newsfilm Archive and the Struggle for Civil Rights

  by Joseph Clark
  Download PDF (doi: 10.1349/PS1.1938-6060.A.508)

  "The Most Frightening Thing I Have Ever Seen": Moving Images and the South Carolina Civil Rights Movement

  by Bobby Donaldson
  Download PDF (doi: 10.1349/PS1.1938-6060.A.509)

  Mexicans in Your Town: Histories of Mexican Migration to the United States in Local Television Documentaries

  by Rodolfo Fernández and Deborah L. Jaramillo
  Download PDF (doi: 10.1349/PS1.1938-6060.A.510)

  In Living Color: Chicano Televisual Media at the Dawn of the Movement

  by Desirée J. Garcia
  Download PDF (doi: 10.1349/PS1.1938-6060.A.511)

  Historical Distance and the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement: Opening Windows into Mississippi's Civil Rights History

  by Jeffery Hirschy
  Download PDF (doi: 10.1349/PS1.1938-6060.A.512)

  Revisiting Newsfilm of the 1970 Jackson State Killings: Digital Humanities as Antiracist Praxis

  by Dimitrios Latsis
  Download PDF (doi: 10.1349/PS1.1938-6060.A.513)

  TV News and the Origin of Black Studies and Ethnic Studies

  by Curtis Marez
  Download PDF (doi: 10.1349/PS1.1938-6060.A.514)

  "Atlanta's Image is a Fraud": Fragments of Black Protest in Local TV Newsfilm

  by Brandy Monk-Payton
  Download PDF (doi: 10.1349/PS1.1938-6060.A.515)

  Black and White Together?: National Educational Television and Civil Rights in the 1960s

  by Alison Perlman
  Download PDF (doi: 10.1349/PS1.1938-6060.A.516)
• 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.
• 1 2024-09-17T06:02:22+00:00 The Newsfilm Archive and the Struggle for Civil Rights 4 image_header 2025-01-06T06:16:22+00:00

  
  by Joseph Clark

  Simon Fraser University
  Abstract

  Making Black America Visible
  The Film Archive and the Struggle for Civil Rights in World War II
  A Filmed Record

  
  Making Black America Visible

  The newsfilm archive has played a particularly significant role in the Black documentary tradition since the 1930s, acting as a crucial record of African American life and history while making visible what white supremacy has sought to erase. From All-American News to the landmark civil rights documentary Eyes on the Prize (1987), Black filmmakers have drawn on archival newsreel footage in order to write African Americans into US history—or rather, to prevent their being written out. At a time when the forces of white supremacy are once again mobilizing to erase African American history, the Accessible Civil Rights Newsfilm Collection represents an invaluable record and, along with the Semantic Annotation Tool (SAT), a vital resource for a new generation of filmmakers. By studying those documenting the civil rights movement and charting their use and reuse of archival footage, we can see how the on-screen visibility of the Black community was central to the cause. We can also see how the Accessible Civil Rights Newsfilm Collection continues this tradition and represents an opportunity today to make Black history visible anew.
  
  When All-American News refreshed the opening titles to its newsreel in 1945, it added scenes of Black accomplishment, presumably drawn from its own archives, to illustrate its emphatic slogan—“All-American News: bringing you our people’s contribution to America and Freedom.” African American sailors, soldiers, and members of the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps were shown marching on parade, followed by shots of Black athletes playing baseball, football, and tennis, boxing, and running track. Paired with patriotic music, the flag, and All-American’s logo of an eye with a globe as its pupil, these titles drove home the newsreel’s ambition to make African American achievement and sacrifice visible.
  
  At a time when the newsreels produced by the major Hollywood studios all but ignored Black news, All-American filled a crucial niche in the American moving picture industry. By documenting Black excellence along with African American contributions to the war effort, All-American held out a promise to Black viewers that their community would finally be represented and acknowledged on film. Nevertheless, in the 1940s, many in the Black community debated the value of All-American News to the cause of civil rights. While the company and its supporters pointed out that All-American finally represented African Americans on-screen, critics worried that the segregation of the news meant that white audiences would never see these stories. 

  The question of Black representation was especially important in the context of the “Double Victory” campaign during World War II, which urged African Americans to do all they could to defeat Nazism in order to fight racism at home. The Pittsburgh Courier introduced the notion of a Double Victory—or “Double V” for short—in February 1942. Adapting the “V Is for Victory” campaign slogan, the Courier suggested that African Americans should rally to support the war effort while pushing for civil rights on the home front, urging its readers to fight for democracy by waging: “a two-pronged attack against our enslavers at home and those abroad who will enslave us. WE HAVE A STAKE IN THIS FIGHT . . . WE ARE AMERICANS, TOO!”¹

  Key to the aims of the Double V campaign was making the wartime participation and sacrifices of African Americans visible to white America. As one reviewer wrote in the Pittsburgh Courier: “Now we can ‘see’ the news as we read it in The Pittsburgh Courier, [and] other publications of the Negro Press. . . . [The All-American newsreel] is another ‘Double V’ advancement!”² Many hoped that All-American, along with other documentary filmmakers focused on African American war efforts, would not only promote more such wartime contributions but ensure that the Black community was seen to be making these contributions and thus help secure the second half of the Double Victory. By providing visual evidence of the contributions African Americans were making to the war effort, All-American would lend undeniable moral weight to the cause of equality.

  The emphasis on being seen during the Double V campaign underlines the crucial role of newsfilm in the struggle for civil rights. As media scholars such as Sasha Torres and Aniko Bodroghkozy have shown, the civil rights movement as it emerged in the 1950s and 1960s relied significantly on the power of moving pictures and television to take its case to the American people.³ Images of racial violence and peaceful resistance were key to confronting Americans with the realities of racial injustice and shaming the nation into action on civil rights. The civil rights movement well understood the power of the image. But just as it did during World War II, the power of these images rested in their being seen—not just by Black audiences but by white ones as well. The Accessible Civil Rights Newsfilm Collection is both a product of this understanding and a record of it. Newsfilm made by and about African Americans during the civil rights era shows a movement self-consciously engaging the mass media in order to address the nation as a whole as well as the Black community itself.

  This paper examines the potency of the film archive in the struggle for civil rights, as both a record of the push for equality and a tool in that struggle. Since World War II, Black documentaries have drawn on the film archive in order to bolster the argument for equality. From 1944’s The Negro Soldier and All-American’s Negro America documentary series (1952) to epic civil rights documentaries like Eyes on the Prize (1987) and King: A Filmed Record . . . Montgomery to Memphis (1970), archival film has played a crucial role in telling the story of civil rights. By making films like those of All-American News available to scholars, students, and documentarians, the Accessible Civil Rights Newsfilm Collection continues this tradition. The Media Ecology Project's SAT makes this archive accessible and legible in exciting new ways. By adding detail and depth, SAT makes the content of All-American News and the other newsfilm in the collection searchable, allowing for a deeper understanding of individual films as well as making connections between films. In particular, SAT allows researchers to trace the use of footage over time to see how archival film is used and reused by news agencies, documentarians, and civil rights activists. As we shall see, such reuse was especially meaningful in documenting the civil rights movement.

  Although genealogical film research has been done where extensive production records already exist, such records are rare. The Accessible Civil Rights Newsfilm Collection and SAT open up exciting new opportunities for this kind of scholarly work. By tracing the afterlives of specific footage and the filmic lineage of compilation documentaries, we can make important connections across time, affirming the historical potency of the indexical image and recognizing the influence—sometimes posthumous—of Black filmmakers and civil rights activists. In the 1940s, All-American promised to show the world Black “people’s contributions to America and Freedom.” The Accessible Civil Rights Newsfilm Collection ensures that it can continue to do so.

  The Film Archive and the Struggle for Civil Rights in World War II

  All-American News was launched in 1942 by Emmanuel Glucksman, a film producer and veteran of the motion picture and theatrical entertainment businesses.⁴ Glucksman was a so-called “white angel,” a white producer of “race movies”—films featuring mostly Black casts and marketed to African American audiences. Glucksman employed African American talent behind the camera as well as in front of it. Charles Wilson was the voice of All-American, providing commentary in most of the reel’s stories, and William Alexander—who went on to produce films for African American audiences, including a documentary series called By-Line Newsreel—worked as a cameraman, director, on-camera interviewer, and for a time, as All-American’s Washington bureau chief.⁵

  Glucksman also relied heavily on advice and support from Claude Barnett, the head of the Associated Negro Press, a wire service for Black newspapers and magazines modeled on the Associated Press. This combination of white money and Black talent was typical of the race movie market of the late 1930s and 1940s.⁶ As with other race movies of this era, the primary audience for All-American’s films—including its newsreel—was the Black theater circuit, which included the segregated theaters of the South and Black neighborhood houses in northern cities. In November 1943, Glucksman boasted to American Cinematographer that four million people saw All-American News each week. He claimed it was screened “regularly in 365 of the 452 civilian negro theatres” and the films were distributed to seventy military camps throughout the country.⁷

  A typical issue of the All-American newsreel featured prominent figures in the Black community, sports and lifestyle stories, and Signal Corps footage covering Black units in the war. For example, an issue from the summer of 1945 included W. E. B. Du Bois giving a speech in Denver about his experience at the United Nations Peace Conference in San Francisco, which he had attended as a delegate for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; a story on Mary McLeod Bethune and efforts to raise $55,000 for the National Council of Negro Women; a piece about Edward Washington, a successful pigeon fancier from Pittsburgh; and several war-related stories. 

  The war coverage included two items based on Signal Corps footage: Black GIs in Burma finally returning home on leave after thirty-five months in theater and a memorial service in Italy to honor the members of the all-Black 92nd Infantry that “gave their lives for liberty.” A third war story covered General Mark Clark and fifty GIs arriving in Chicago after their return from Europe. Along with dignitaries like Clark and Chicago’s Mayor Kelly, All-American focused on the four Black soldiers in the party, naming each of them as they appeared on screen: “Sergeant Chenny of Chicago,” “Lieutenants Jefferson and Levine,” and “Sergeant Love.” Other shots captured African Americans among the mostly white crowd greeting the soldiers, while Clark was described as having “paid a special tribute to the negro men in his command.”
  
  While this issue’s focus on the war was typical of All-American’s news coverage, so was its attention to regular members of the Black community. Placing a profile of a mail carrier and pigeon breeder from Pittsburgh alongside stories featuring prominent civil rights leaders like Du Bois and Bethune might seem jarring, but it spoke to All-American’s emphasis on the everyday accomplishments of African Americans. Naming the four soldiers returning from Europe and showing each of them on-screen honored their individual contributions to the war effort while allowing the broader community a sense of shared racial pride. Such gestures were an important feature of the newsreel’s coverage and crucial to accomplishing the stated goal of bringing audiences Black “people’s contribution to America and Freedom.”

  All-American’s efforts to document these contributions were part of a wider wave of documentaries aimed at meeting demand for African American coverage of the war in the early 1940s. The beginning of World War II had made newsreels and other documentary films more popular than ever before. Across the United States, dedicated newsreel cinemas opened in busy downtown areas and near transit hubs in order to provide audiences with a steady supply of news. The Hollywood studio newsreels these theaters showed, however, largely excluded African Americans from the screen. Race movie producers stepped in to fill this gap. In addition to Glucksman, several other companies began to invest in nonfiction films targeted at the African American market. In October 1942, Toddy Pictures announced plans for a Negro Newsreel of Victory that would “go down in history as one of the most effective means of enlightening the public of today and posterity of the major and minor roles played by the Negro during these perilous times.”⁸ The series never materialized, but Toddy did produce Fighting Americans, a “documentary showing scenes of air cadet activities at Tuskegee Army Air Field in Alabama and Black WACs at Fort Devens in Massachusetts.”⁹ Negro Marches On Inc., a company owned by brothers Jack and Bert Goldberg, produced a documentary called We’ve Come a Long, Long Way about Negro contributions to America’s various wars. The film, narrated by Elder Solomon Lightfoot Michaux, a prominent Black preacher and syndicated radio evangelist, was marketed to African American audiences as a “picture to make you proud, to make you cheer.”¹⁰

  While these independent production companies competed to satisfy African American demand for documentary accounts of Black military service, it was the US government that made the best known and most widely seen film dedicated to the African American war effort. Produced for the War Department as part of Frank Capra’s Why We Fight series, The Negro Soldier was a landmark in government-sponsored motion pictures and a success with critics and audiences. It was the first film by the War Department to address Black morale and a rare opportunity for African American audiences to see themselves represented on-screen in a well-financed, Hollywood-style production. 

  Given the near-total omission of African Americans from Hollywood studio newsreels at the time, the film was welcomed by the Black press. Even though it avoided discussion of segregation or racial tensions within the military, reviewers saw the film as “brave, powerful and hopeful.”¹¹ Poet Langston Hughes went so far as to call the film “the most remarkable Negro film ever flashed on an American screen.”¹² More importantly, the film’s high quality and professionalism held out the possibility of it being shown to white Americans. Indeed, reviewer Ernest E. Johnson argued, “the picture will have been made in vain if it does not appear before white audiences.”¹³ For these reviewers, The Negro Soldier represented exactly the kind of visibility necessary to achieve the goals of the Double V campaign.

  The Negro Soldier largely lived up to these expectations. As film historians Thomas Cripps and David Culbert detail, although the film was initially planned for use in the basic orientation of Black troops, “millions of white soldiers viewed it as part of the Information and Education Division’s standard orientation program.”¹⁴ It was also distributed commercially and for noncommercial civilian screenings in the United States. The film reportedly showed in three hundred cinemas in New York alone, including “capacity audiences” at screenings at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in July 1944.¹⁵ It was even requested by thousands of exhibitors in the South.¹⁶ The film was seen by military personnel and civilians, Black audiences, and—crucially for the Double V campaign—white ones too. 

  The Negro Soldier’s favorable reception, especially in the Black community, can be credited to Carlton Moss, a Black writer who played a key role in creating the film’s final script. Framed around a sermon given in a Black church and told through a series of flashbacks, Moss’s script details the contributions of African American soldiers to past war efforts before turning to the conditions and contributions of Black soldiers in World War II. The film did this using archival material. Drawings, paintings, and monuments were used along with dramatic reenactments to give visual evidence of the African American presence in the fight for American Independence, the War of 1812, and the Spanish-American War, while archival footage attested to African American contributions since World War I. 

  Moss’s script made clear what was at stake in representing African American contributions to American history. He understood that for the African American community, the respect and recognition that could be achieved by a film like The Negro Soldier would, in itself, have a profound effect on Black morale, and despite its fairly conservative politics, the film could still contribute to the Double V goals. He told Time he had “assured white friends who were discouraged by its mildness that the picture would mean more to Negroes than most white men could imagine.”¹⁷ In an interview with Phyllis Klotman, Moss discussed the film’s aims to make visible both the reality of Black participation in the current war and the role African Americans had played in America’s military past:

  What we determined ourselves was to record two things: the first was the fact that black citizens were participating in every branch of the service. No one had any record of that. The other thing which had immediate importance was to let the parents know something of what the routine was like and how it physically appeared. Then we said let’s handle this other stuff. Let’s say that not only have we been in this war, we’ve been in all wars.¹⁸

  Moss’s intention was to not only make a visual record of his present but also invoke African American service in the past. In this sense, the film archive itself became a tool in the struggle for respect and Black civil rights.

  The Negro Soldier culminated in footage of the Nazi destruction of a French monument built to honor African American soldiers who fought in World War I. After showing the plaque inscribed with a dedication “to the negro troops who fought and died here,” the film cuts to German soldiers marching and then to the monument being blown apart by explosives. The preacher tells his congregation and the film audience, “Yes, the Nazis destroyed our monument in France, but our monuments at home stand and will always stand,” before showing footage of prominent African Americans in fields like science, education, and law. Crucially, in this sequence Black achievement and the filmed record of those achievements are framed as monuments in themselves. As such, the preservation of these achievements—and by extension the preservation of the film archive documenting them—is at stake in the fight against Nazism. The Nazis are figured as a threat to freedom and America as well as the very possibility of remembrance and the recognition so crucial to the Double Victory. By destroying the monument in France, the Nazis threatened to erase the collective memory that the film worked hard to make visible. Insofar as this visibility was key to the achievement of civil rights in the future, African Americans had a duty to their race as well as their country to join the fight. 

  While The Negro Soldier made clear exactly what was at stake in All-American News’s attempts to document Black “people’s contribution to America and Freedom,” its success simultaneously raised questions about All-American’s ability to represent these contributions to white Americans. While All-American succeeded on the race circuit, unlike The Negro Soldier, the newsreel largely failed to reach white viewers. Indeed, critics from within the Black community worried that All-American was having the opposite effect—it prevented white Americans from seeing such contributions. 

  Truman K. Gibson Jr., assistant civilian aide to the secretary of war and a member of Roosevelt’s so-called Black cabinet, wrote a letter to Barnett expressing his concern about All-American’s use of the Signal Corps footage. He felt that All-American’s access to material dealing with African American subjects was exclusive and thus prevented footage from being used by the other newsreels. “You will see,” he wrote, “the maliciousness of the All-American when you realize that it means a total exclusion of Negro material to white audiences.”¹⁹

  Shortly after this letter, Harry McAlpin of the Chicago Defender repeated these allegations, citing a source in the War Department. “The membership of the All-American News Reel in the major pool,” he wrote, “includes an arrangement whereby all Negro news subjects are the exclusive prerogative of All-American. The other major newsreel companies are forbidden by the arrangement to touch any such subjects.”²⁰ For McAlpin and Gibson, All-American’s deal with the War Department ensured newsreel coverage of the war remained segregated. 

  Whether or not All-American’s arrangement was a deliberate attempt to keep Black contributions to the war effort from the wider American public, Barnett and Glucksman understood the value—both political and financial—in reaching white audiences. After the end of the Second World War, Glucksman looked for ways to distribute the newsreel even more widely. One idea was to distribute a version to television stations around the country. This plan held out the promise that white audiences as well as Black might see the newsreel. In a letter to Barnett, Glucksman stressed the importance of television in reaching audiences beyond the race theater circuit:

  As you no doubt know, it is very difficult for us to put the accomplishments of the Negro race before the white theatre goers but, with television reaching the most influential class of people of all races, we feel a subject [devoted to African American achievement] would be one of the most potent presentations put into the American parlor. . . . 

  You, who are so very much interested in visual education, will realize what a presentation of this kind once a week would mean nationally. I am sure you are aware as much as I am how little people know about the accomplishments and achievements of the American Negro and what a program of this kind would do while a family is sitting around the television set relaxed in their own home.²¹

  Although Glucksman’s plan to produce a weekly All-American newsreel for television did not materialize, he did partner with Barnett to produce a series of documentaries sponsored by Liggett and Myers, the makers of Chesterfield cigarettes. Released in 1952, the six-part Negro America series featured episodes on “The Negro in” education, sports, entertainment, science, industry, and national affairs.²² The series aimed to highlight Black achievement in various areas of American life. Having secured sponsorship for the films, Glucksman also made prints available at low cost to “interested social and fraternal organizations, trade unions, colleges and educational groups.”²³

  The Negro America series featured new interviews and documentary footage, but it also made use of All-American’s existing archive of newsfilm. Although only a small portion of the All-American newsreel’s extensive archive is extant, the Accessible Civil Rights Newsfilm Collection allows us to trace some of these instances of reuse. For example, a story on singer Todd Duncan and his preparations for a new tour in this 1945 issue of All-American News provided footage for use in “The Negro in Entertainment” (1952). SAT allows scholars to locate and note such genealogical relationships.
  
  Connections like this one are not trivial. They point to the ways in which the film archive functions as a resource for the civil rights movement. By reusing newsreel footage in this way, All-American obviously saved on the costs of producing its documentaries, but it also demonstrated that, despite the limited reach of the newsreel itself, its film record of Black achievement might still have a role to play in the struggle for recognition and racial equality. 

  As The Negro Soldier emphatically showed, the film archive had the potential to work as a monument to African American commitment to the nation. While All-American News never quite succeeded in its lofty goal of bringing Black “people’s contributions to America and Freedom” to white audiences during its theatrical run, it did create a significant visual archive. In the Negro America series, it drew on this archive to document African American achievement in all aspects of life. Now that some of All-American News is available to a broader public through the Library of Congress and the Accessible Civil Rights Newsfilm Collection, this archive might finally be able to live up to the newsreel’s aspirations for visibility. As the Duncan example illustrates, SAT enables new kinds of connections across the archive. As the Accessible Civil Rights Newsfilm Collection becomes more thoroughly annotated, the names and contributions of hundreds of historical figures, activists, celebrities, and regular people will become searchable and known to a new generation of viewers. 

  A Filmed Record

  If The Negro Soldier demonstrated the relevance of the film archive in the struggle for equality during World War II, the civil rights movement that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s fully realized the potency of the film record. As the movement grew, the politics of recognition embodied in the Double V campaign and All-American’s rhetoric of visibility were left behind. At the height of the civil rights movement, newsfilm did not simply record Black achievement, it documented inequality and injustice, as well as a movement that bravely stood against such injustices and the violence that movement faced from the racist forces of the status quo. 

  Martin Luther King Jr. and others in the movement understood the power of the mass media to move white public opinion and put pressure on federal politicians. The sit-in movement, Freedom Rides, and the marches from Selma to Montgomery were all conceived and executed with newsfilm cameras in mind.²⁴ Thus, while its politics were decidedly different, the relevance of the film record was undiminished. It is the centrality of the film archive in the civil rights movement itself that makes the Accessible Civil Rights Newsfilm Collection so important. The collection offers unprecedented access to this archive and new possibilities for thinking about its relevance to both the civil rights movement and the public memory of its history. The dense content of the newsfilm archive offers scholars and documentarians exciting opportunities to tell new stories and reconsider existing narratives.

  Given the central role that newsfilm played in the movement, it is no surprise that archival documentary has been likewise central in the ways the movement has been remembered. Henry Hampton’s monumental Eyes on the Prize is perhaps the quintessential visual account of the civil rights movement. The six-part series, which first aired on public television in 1987, incorporated both historical footage and extensive interviews. Much of this material is available in the Accessible Civil Rights Newsfilm Collection, including complete versions of the many interviews conducted for the series. 

  Hampton’s series was a deliberate attempt to widen the public memory of the civil rights movement beyond a pantheon of iconic leaders. His focus on the foot soldiers of the movement challenged histories that focused almost exclusively on King and a few other prominent leaders.²⁵ Eyes on the Prize countered these narratives by supplementing the archive with a collection of corrective interviews that change the way we understand the civil rights movement. But the Accessible Civil Rights Newsfilm Collection and SAT offer additional tools for students, scholars, and filmmakers looking to complicate traditional narratives of the movement. By tracing the footage used in documentary films on the civil rights movement and annotating this material, scholars can recontextualize these images and document the participation of a wide variety of civil rights leaders, foot soldiers, and allies. 

  Ely Landau and Richard Kaplan’s 1970 documentary King: A Filmed Record . . . Montgomery to Memphis was the first feature-length film dedicated to the life of King. Made in the aftermath of his death, the film drew on the huge volume of newsreel and television footage of King and his movement over the thirteen years between his rise to national attention with the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 and his assassination in Memphis in 1968. The three-hour film told the story of King’s public life almost exclusively through archival footage, without narration. In doing so, Landau and Kaplan’s film forces viewers to confront the violence and repression of the civil rights movement anew. By drawing on this material without further comment, Landau and Kaplan did not just tell the story of the movement and King but allowed their audience to feel the power of the moment again and better understand its significance. As Reverend Andrew Young, the executive vice president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, said of the film:

  Most of us don’t really remember, because we’ve never sat down and watched this whole period from 1955 to 1968 put together in one lump where we can see and sense the social significance of what took place there . . . this is the first time in the history of any nation that a period of such dramatic change has been so thoroughly documented by the news media and now packaged and produced by the motion picture industry.²⁶

  Young’s comment points to the role of the film archive—not just to document but to reproduce the movement in a way that allows the audience to “sense the social significance of what took place.” This is the power of the film archive at work.

  But for all its power, the film helped establish a narrative that centered King almost to the exclusion of all others in the civil rights movement. Without a narrator, the principal voice in the film is King’s. The viewer watches and listens to him give impassioned speeches, talk to journalists, and interact with individual members of the civil rights movement. King’s voice—and his eloquence—dominates the film. There is no mistaking this film for a document of a broader movement—this is the story of one man.

  Although King: A Filmed Record focused exclusively on King himself, the newsfilm record is replete with foot soldiers, activists, and other participants in the civil rights movement. SAT offers the opportunity to identify and document these people and, with the Accessible Civil Rights Newsfilm Collection, potentially restore them to public memory. One way to do this is to perform the same kind of genealogical film research we did with All-American News by locating and annotating archival footage that has been reused in subsequent documentary films. An example of footage that was reused by Landau and Kaplan in King: A Filmed Record can be seen in a Universal newsreel from March 1965. At about the two-minute mark in a long item dedicated to what Universal calls “The Selma Story,” a medium close-up shows King marching with Ralph Abernathy to his right and Fred Shuttlesworth to his left. This shot was used—reversed—in King: A Filmed Record in a section dedicated to the second Selma march, which culminated in a confrontation between the marchers and Alabama state police. 
  

  By locating and annotating footage like this, researchers can enrich the newsfilm archive, adding names, places, and other details that might be subsequently searched by others. Scholars and even family members might identify others in the crowd in addition to Abernathy and Shuttlesworth. This annotation can help counter the monolithic narrative that raises King above the wider movement.

  The potential of this kind of genealogical research in the newsfilm archive is exciting. Not only can we trace connections between archival documentaries and the newsfilm that acted as source material, we can begin to broaden and deepen our knowledge of this footage. Scholars and students can bring the archive back to life, enabling a new generation of documentarians and writers to tell new stories and reinvigorate the public memory of the civil rights movement. Just as SAT might allow one scholar to recognize and document the presence of Shuttlesworth at the Selma march, it might offer another historian the opportunity to tell the story of Sergeants Chenny and Love and Lieutenants Jefferson and Levine, who were filmed by All-American after returning from Europe with General Clark. By annotating the newsfilm archive and making these names searchable, the Accessible Civil Rights Newsfilm Collection makes their stories knowable. It also demonstrates the lasting potency of the film archive for African Americans. Over seventy-five years later, this collection offers the possibility that these men’s “contributions to America and Freedom” might finally be recognized.
  
  A list of external links featured in this essay can be found here.²⁷
  
  Joseph Clark teaches film studies in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University. His research and teaching focus on archival and non-theatrical media, including newsreels, home movies, and sponsored film. He is the author of News Parade: The American Newsreel and the World as Spectacle (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) and is currently working on a book on extraction cinema and the role of moving pictures in the forestry industry of the Pacific Northwest. His previous work appears in The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, The Moving Image, Media+Environment, Useful Cinema: Expanding Film Contexts (Duke), Allied Communication during the Second World War: National and Transnational Networks (Bloomsbury), Rediscovering US Newsfilm: Cinema, Television, and the Archive (Routledge) and Getting the Picture: The History & Visual Culture of the News (Bloomsbury).
  
  Title Image: All-American News [1945-07, no. 3].
  
  The Newsfilm Archive and the Struggle for Civil Rights © 2025 by Joseph Clark is licensed under CC BY 4.0.
  
  The Journal of e-Media Studies is published by the Dartmouth Library.

• 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.

• 1 2024-09-17T06:02:22+00:00 Mexicans in Your Town: Histories of Mexican Migration to the United States in Local Television Documentaries 4 image_header 2025-01-07T21:13:34+00:00

  
  by Rodolfo Fernández and Deborah L. Jaramillo

  University of Connecticut (Fernández) / Boston University (Jaramillo)
  Abstract

  Migrants and Locals
  A Brief Overview of Mexican Migration to the United States
  >Filling a labor gap
  >The Johnson–Reed Act and revolution
  >Economic crisis and forced removal
  >The Bracero Program
  Televising Mexican Labor
  >"Braceros"
  >"Division in His House"
  Reclaiming History, Space, and Achievement: Hispanic Presence in Oregon (1980)
  “A grace period of understanding”: Una Vida Mejor (1997)
  “Even Jesus Christ couldn’t unite the locals and the Mexicans”: Postville: When Cultures Collide (2000)
  “Maybe more of them are better than the gringos”: Resettling the West: Mexicans in Wyoming (2001)
  Reflections on Immigration Narratives after 9/11
  >La familia
  >Homeland Security
  Assessing the Archive
   

  Migrants and Locals

  The prominence of immigrants’ rights on a national level fluctuates according to waves of immigration, media coverage, and political responses.¹ Coverage and responses likewise shift according to the wave and makeup of the migrants. And although national coverage speaks with the loudest voice, it does not necessarily account for regional developments and attitudes. In their study of Mexican immigration in the 1920s and 1930s, Flores underscores the influence wielded by regional media in “the public shaping of immigrants and immigration.”² The shaping and crafting of these terms can vary by city and state and by the orientation and language of the media outlet. Using the American Archive of Public Broadcasting and the Bay Area Television Archive, this paper taps into regional narratives constructed about Mexicans’ migration and labor in the late twentieth century.

  The case studies in this paper are locally produced television documentaries that belong to what we are calling the “Mexicans in” category. Each program explores Mexican immigration in a particular town or state far from the southern United States border. Most of these programs situate the appearance of Mexican nationals as a surprise and a disruption to the community’s way of life. Una Vida Mejor: A Better Life (1997), Postville: When Cultures Collide (2000), and Resettling the West: Mexicans in Wyoming (2001) show townspeople in Arkansas, Iowa, and Wyoming, respectively, struggling to adapt to a growing Mexican population in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Only Hispanic Presence in Oregon (1980) stresses the deep roots of the state’s Mexican population. Some of the other programs attempt to join their narratives to a longer history of immigration even as their conceit rests in the sudden appearance of Mexicans in their state.

  In approaching archival television as, in writer and producer John Wyver’s words, “one vital component of our shared social, cultural, and political histories and a key element in the composition of our individual and collective identities,” we argue for the enduring relevance of local television in the construction of shared histories and diverse experiences.³ Using textual and historical analysis, this paper shows how television documentaries from different regions of the country interact with and contribute to the history of Mexican migration to the United States in the late twentieth century. Taken together, the immigration narratives constructed on local television reveal not just patterns of responses to demographic shifts happening around the country but regional negotiations of race, gender, class, and civil liberties. We begin by surveying the history of Mexican migration to the US, and we subsequently approach the programs chronologically, situating them within the periods and policies that inform them.

  A Brief Overview of Mexican Migration to the United States

  Despite the common tropes that conceptualize the US as a nation of immigrants, relationships between the state, local communities, and newcomers to the country have a complicated history. Policies that encourage or discourage migrants are subject to generational fluctuations, resulting in different waves and patterns of settlement. The main driver of Mexican migration to the US in the last five or six decades has been economic. Before the 1960s, Mexicans resettling in the US faced few legal requirements or could rely on guest worker permits like those of the Bracero Program (1942–1964). Workers could head north for a season or even a few years to make money and then return to their families in Mexico. After 1970 this circular migrant flow slowed as laws became more restrictive and border enforcement increased. 

  Filling a labor gap

  The first significant wave of migration from Mexico to the US took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—a period characterized by global migrations. Mexicans arrived without having to clear any significant legal hurdles. Historically, few federal restrictions on migrants existed until the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred Asians from moving to the US. A strict enforcement mechanism was added almost a decade later, in 1891, when the Immigration Act codified deportations and created a Federal Bureau of Immigration. Significantly, it did not target Mexicans. 

  The late nineteenth century saw rapid capitalist development in Mexico defined by an export-oriented economy and the building of infrastructure. Despite its expanding economy, Mexico was one of the few large countries in the hemisphere that did not attract large inflows of foreign workers. The asymmetries between the economies of the neighboring North American countries primarily account for this case of Mexican exceptionalism in an era known as a golden age of migration.⁴ Agents recruited Mexican agricultural workers to the United States even as Mexico’s commercial agricultural sector was booming. Capitalist agriculture in the US needed to fill the labor gap created by the Chinese Exclusion Act, which was reaffirmed and strengthened by the Geary Act of 1891. To convince workers to join the US workforce, recruiters had to offer substantial advances on wages; these enganches attracted Mexican workers to commercial farms for decades.⁵ The enganche system became even more necessary when the US government enacted new restrictions on Asian (specifically Japanese) migration in 1907, leading to increased demand for Mexican workers.⁶

  The Johnson–Reed Act and revolution

  US capitalist agriculture found it easier to attract Mexican workers after the beginning of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920). In his demographic analysis, Robert McCaa estimates that about 300,000 Mexicans were displaced north during the conflict; 230,000 more were displaced during the 1920s. These numbers are considerable given that Mexico’s population hovered around twelve million.⁷ This age of migration began to decline in the 1920s with restrictive laws like the Johnson–Reed Act of 1924.

  Coming at the end of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century waves of migration, the Johnson–Reed Act restricted migration in an unprecedented way. It practically banned immigration from Asia while assigning strict quotas for migration from Europe. These quotas did not affect countries in the Western Hemisphere, so people continued to arrive from Mexico throughout the 1920s, still mostly attracted to agricultural work. The Mexican population in the United States rose more than sevenfold in the first three decades of the twentieth century—from 100,000 in 1910 to 740,000 in 1929.⁸ The Johnson–Reed Act did not apply to migrants from the Western Hemisphere for three reasons.⁹ First, Mexican agricultural labor was essential to industrial farming, especially in the Southwest. Second, from a diplomatic perspective, the United States did not want to antagonize the governments of Mexico and Canada. Finally, as articulated by Bon Tempo and Diner:

  a widespread assumption existed that Mexicans would eventually return home, so allowing Mexican workers into the country would not lead to their permanent settlement. Inherent in this thinking was the belief that Mexicans could not fit easily into the United States. Even some of the harshest critics of national origins policy, such as Representative Samuel Dickstein of New York [ . . . ] supported this position: “One can not say, for instance, that a Mexican alien readily becomes Americanized, or is of the same blood or language with us.”¹⁰

  The idea that Mexicans were fundamentally unassimilable and therefore incompatible with—and uninterested in—a permanent living situation in the US has endured, as we will discuss later. Another enduring concept is that of “illegal” immigration, which was created during these debates. In 1929 Congress made unauthorized entry a misdemeanor. It also expanded the Border Patrol for the first time. Even when not officially barred from entering the US, Mexicans were excluded and harassed by Border Patrol through arbitrary health inspections and literacy tests.¹¹

  Economic crisis and forced removal

  The first large wave of Mexican migration in the twentieth century ended with the start of the Great Depression. In the decade following the 1929 crash, the government forcibly removed (deported, repatriated, or otherwise expelled) almost half a million (469,000) people to Mexico.¹² Many of those deported were US citizens, sons and daughters of those who fled the chaos of the Mexican Revolution. The number is particularly shocking considering that between 1931 and 1940, only 528,431 immigrants came to the United States from all over the globe.¹³ In other words, “from 1932 to 1935, more people left the [United States] than arrived.”¹⁴

  The organized and systematic expulsion of Mexicans and Mexican Americans during the Great Depression after decades of being invited in has been characterized by Balderrama and Rodríguez as a “Decade of Betrayal.”¹⁵ The lack of jobs in the depressed US economy discouraged migrants from arriving, but the US government’s actions played as much of a role in the flow of migration. The federal government was not alone in the forced removal of Mexicans during this period; states like Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico, and even local governments like that of Los Angeles, organized the expulsion of Mexicans and Mexican Americans.¹⁶ The expansion of government into the economy during the Great Depression also entrenched racial segregation by targeting jobs and relief programs to people perceived to be more “American” than others.¹⁷

  The Bracero Program

  Policy toward Mexican migrants did another about-face after a decade. Border enforcement grew lax after the beginning of World War II in 1939, and the migratory flows reversed as growing industry in the US attracted Mexican workers. The US negotiated the Bracero Accord with Mexico in 1942 to offer temporary worker visas for Mexican laborers. The government struck similar agreements with other nations in the Western Hemisphere.¹⁸ Although the agreement was designed to help with the war effort, it ended in 1964, outliving WWII by almost two decades. 

  The vast majority of those who arrived in the United States through the Bracero Program came to work in agriculture. Mexicans who joined this program were not technically allowed to migrate; nevertheless, the number of Mexicans living in the United States increased. Many overstayed their visas, while others were born as US citizens. Less than half a million immigrant visas were provided to Mexicans during the 1960s, but the Mexican-born population in the US grew by more than six times that number.¹⁹ By the mid-1960s, migration from Europe slowed while Mexican migration continued to accelerate, even as the Bracero Program came to an end in 1964.

  Televising Mexican Labor

  The Bracero Program began and ended as television was still maturing. While national television broached the subject of migrant farmworkers along the eastern United States in a CBS Reports documentary, Harvest of Shame (1960), local California stations confronted the agricultural labor crisis closer to home. Before attending to our late twentieth-century case studies, we must touch on two earlier examples of this regional engagement with Mexican workers. These documentaries warrant attention because they fix on the rights of Mexican and Mexican American populations at a key juncture in immigration and labor history. Additionally, they set the stage for a sizable shift in the response to the presence and rights of people of Mexican heritage in the US. The Bay Area Television Archive houses two documentaries we would like to highlight: Assignment Four: Braceros (1963) from KRON-TV and Division in His House (1965) from KPIX-TV. 

  “Braceros”

  Although only a mostly silent rough cut of Braceros exists, its images and few words indicate a notable intervention in the public’s awareness of the farmworkers’ welfare. Coming one year before the end of the Bracero Program, the documentary features interviews with Braceros facing deportation and a dramatic change to their livelihoods. Viewers see evidence of labor organizing as well as evidence of the impoverished living conditions of the Braceros and their families. Without more audio, it is impossible to ascertain the documentary’s agenda fully, but the images themselves evince a respect and sympathy for the workers. Additionally, the words and actions of the farmworkers demonstrate their agency in such a tumultuous moment.
  

  “Division in His House”

  The end of the Bracero Program in 1964 did not mean Mexicans disappeared from the agricultural sector. Mexican Americans and undocumented Mexicans continued their lives as farmworkers in the southwestern United States. Coming on the heels of this abrupt policy change, Division in His House grapples with the role of religion, specifically the California Migrant Ministry (CMM), in the struggle for the rights of presumably Mexican American—rather than Mexican—workers after the Bracero Program but does not attempt to distinguish between the two groups. Stark, silent footage of farmworkers laboring, living, and marching unfolds throughout the program, visually contextualizing the stakes of the divide between CMM and church members. The voices that dominate the narrative, however, are those of Chris Hartmire, director of CMM—who explains why Christianity requires activism and organizing on behalf of the workers and their families—and various church members, including those from the agricultural industry—who oppose CMM’s activities. Opponents of Hartmire’s work use “Mexican” and “Mexican American” interchangeably as they address the unacceptability of “radical” ideas in their church. Indeed, one landowner sees CMM’s activities on behalf of Mexicans as endangering his livelihood.

  Division in His House crafts a story of migrant civil rights championed not by government but by Protestant activists. It concludes with no real resolution, its images of farmworkers’ children cramped together in a shabby room clashing with the silliness of the children’s story being read to them by a white woman. Without a voice of their own, the farmworkers at the center of the issue are made passive; their toil and poor living conditions, demonstrated for the camera, define them just as Hartmire and his opposition define the workers’ struggles. Crucially, where Braceros gives a voice to workers from Mexico on the brink of expulsion from the US, Division speaks to the movement that arose in opposition to the Bracero Program (see Figure 1). 

  Hartmire made waves in the Presbyterian community by calling for an end to the program, arguing that it stifled the upward mobility of Mexican Americans by favoring cheaper Mexican labor.²⁰ Indeed, labor unions, immigrant rights groups, and religious organizations pushed back against the program.²¹ This political conflict escalated because industrial farms had mechanized to the point where they required less labor.²² Hartmire’s concern for Mexican Americans dovetailed with Cesar Chavez’s pursuit of a union for Mexican American farmworkers. Spaced only two years apart but bookending the final year of the Bracero Program, these two documentaries share a preoccupation with labor but indicate the presence of a sizable fault line: immigration, or specifically, how the rights of immigrants were perceived to infringe upon the rights and well-being of US citizens. Our “Mexicans in” case studies, all accessible in the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, seize upon this issue, but our analysis reveals a shift in emphasis from labor to culture and from the group toward individual achievement. 

  Reclaiming History, Space, and Achievement: Hispanic Presence in Oregon (1980)

  For Hispanic Presence in Oregon, the first of our “Mexicans in” programs, the problem at hand is not so much the labor struggles of the 1960s and 1970s but rather the erasure of Mexicans and Chicanos from Oregon’s history. The context of this production is key to understanding its mission; it was created at a time when the passage of Mexicans back and forth across the border was growing more difficult. Consequently, Mexicans started settling permanently. 

  The end of the Bracero Program in 1964 marks the beginning of what has come to be known as the “Era of Undocumented Migration,” when guest worker visas virtually disappeared.²³ There were 438,000 temporary work visas available in 1959; in 1979 only 1,725 were issued.²⁴ Nevertheless, employers still expected workers to cross the border irregularly and work without authorization, a condition that translated to lower wages and an erosion of their rights and security. Even though crossing the border to find work became more expensive, dangerous, and potentially exploitative, workers were still able to return to Mexico. 

  Packaged as a lecture-style narrated slideshow, Hispanic Presence in Oregon—made for Southern Oregon Public Television by José Ángel Gutiérrez—builds a bridge from the earlier labor-oriented programs to those concerned with social and cultural integration. Here we see a celebration of the group and the emergence of individual achievement. Gutiérrez positions the film as a refutation not of anti-Mexican or anti-Hispanic sentiment but of the “official white version of history”; the facts contained within the film articulate an overarching concern with correcting the record. Indeed, the narration implicitly argues against narratives that erase Mexicans from US history, downplay Mexican influence on US places and names, and diminish or negate the achievements of Mexicans in the US. 

  Gutiérrez takes viewers from the period of Spanish exploration to the migration spurred by the Mexican Revolution, to the Bracero guest worker program, and finally to anti-Mexican discrimination and the rise of Chicano activism. His breakdown of Mexicans’ generational attitudes toward migration speaks to one set of reasons for settlement north of the US–Mexico border and for the movement of the children of immigrants into the political mainstream. Referred to by Gutiérrez as “Oregon’s best kept secret,” Hispanics put down roots, and Chicanos, especially, transitioned out of farm work to occupy blue- and white-collar fields.

  Hispanic Presence in Oregon calls on history to establish longevity as well as hardship. It straddles two major themes: (1) settlement and Mexican-Americanness and (2) the reality of continued immigration and perilous flows to and from Mexico. For example, Gutiérrez lauds the achievement of individual Hispanics but concludes by reminding viewers of the economic contributions of undocumented Mexicans and the ongoing efforts to deport them. The program precedes additional restrictive policies that worsen conditions at the border and heighten tensions between immigrants and citizens.
  

  “A grace period of understanding”: Una Vida Mejor (1997)

  The era of circular migration began to decline in the second half of the 1980s and 1990s, first with the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, known as IRCA, the Simpson–Mazzoli Act, or Amnesty Bill. IRCA regularized 2.7 million undocumented people and created a limited number of guest worker visas but also increased enforcement at the border and beyond. In the 1990s, the Cold War stopped being the logic that structured relations between the United States and other countries in the hemisphere. Instead, an escalating number of drug wars led to violence, militarization, and a hardening of the border to human transit. As a result, border communities became less hospitable to migrants from Mexico. Workers also stopped envisioning their travels north as temporary and began looking to settle and form families farther inside the country.

  We see this shift reflected in our remaining primary sources, which lean in to the “surprise” migration of Mexicans to non-border states. These programs were produced at a time when families, not just temporary workers, were arriving in the United States. The combination of restrictive border enforcement and the decline of nonindustrial agriculture in Mexico after the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994 had profound consequences for migration flows. Fewer single men moved back and forth across the border, and more migrant families sought roots in US communities and became more visible beyond the border states. After IRCA and throughout the 1990s, restrictions on migration became significantly more onerous. The Mexican economy also suffered as neoliberal reforms like NAFTA devastated traditional agricultural ways of life, forcing many to leave the Mexican countryside. 

  Una Vida Mejor: A Better Life, from Arkansas Educational TV Network, examines Mexican migration to Arkansas and relies heavily on the stories of a select group of migrants from the Mexican states of Guanajuato, Zacatecas, Durango, and Jalisco. The program opens with the statement “America was built by immigrants,” and it stands out for its willingness to let Mexican migrants tell their own stories. 

  Una Vida Mejor introduces viewers to the entrepreneurial spirit that newcomers have brought to towns like De Queen and Rogers, Arkansas. One such newcomer, Robert Martínez of Zacatecas, bought a 40-acre farm and over time expanded it to 450 acres. His case is not presented as the norm, but it supports the themes of opportunity and hope that representatives from the Catholic church espouse in the film. At the other end of the spectrum is Israel Sánchez, who holds a degree in engineering but must work in the poultry plant.

  Institutional responses to this new wave of migration appear constructive. The Catholic church plays a central role in helping migrants adjust to Arkansas and the US more generally. Services include workshops on immigration law, discrimination in the workplace, civil rights, and the citizenship process. City officials and educators present themselves as “proactive,” tackling information gaps and language issues early while also building community by spotlighting Cinco de Mayo and celebrating multiculturalism. But the daily lives of immigrants test the tolerance of the locals. The mayor of Rogers describes the initial problem of men clustering in homes when only men made the journey to Arkansas and then the problem of “cookouts,” “loud music,” and the “slaughtering of animals” once the men’s families arrived. He explains that town ordinances had to change to address these new issues. But he insists that the “biggest challenge” has been “growth” rather than demographics. 

  The program’s conclusion pardons Arkansans for any attitudinal problem because overall, the experience has been less tumultuous than in the border states. According to a lawyer interviewed for the documentary, there was “a grace period of understanding and maybe checking each other out” because Arkansas was new to this wave of immigration. The last words come from immigrants who discuss leaving home, retaining the culture for their children, and becoming “a full part of American society” while remembering “where they came from.”

  Ultimately, the program underscores the efforts made by town institutions to address acculturation and civil rights, but the documentary also attends to the personal sacrifices made and emotional weight carried by the immigrants and their families in Mexico. Here, the category of Mexican is understood in relation to individual hardship and achievement as well as acceptable and unacceptable cultural displays. 

  “Even Jesus Christ couldn’t unite the locals and the Mexicans”: Postville: When Cultures Collide (2000)

  Mexicans are not the sole focus of Postville: When Cultures Collide; in this program from Iowa Public Television, the movement of Hasidic Jews and Mexicans to Iowa broadens the conversation about immigration in some ways and contracts it in others. Postville is presented as an isolated town of 1,500 grappling with the influx of 700 new migrants. At the heart of the documentary reside the clash of cultures and the longing for a “small-town code of ethics.”

  Postville opens playfully, if simplistically, with shots of Jewish people praying and Mexican people eating tacos. In doing so, it establishes the rudimentary understanding of cultural difference that dominates Postville residents. On the soundtrack, a rendition of “America the Beautiful” is played in the styles of stereotypically Jewish and then Mexican music. The narrator adopts a slightly ironic and playful tone, describing Iowa as “all but removed from melting pot America.” Less concerned with telling the story of Mexican migrants, the film relies primarily on the voices of locals to expose their fear, bigotry, and hypocrisy.

  The narrative about Jewish migrants, which emphasizes their economic value to the small town and their insulated lifestyle, illuminates religious and class-based tensions, while the narrative about Mexican migrants, whom the new Jewish residents hired, centers on policing and the fear of crime “because the Mexicans hang around in groups.” Despite the migrants’ close-knit families and membership in the local Catholic church, the locals fixate on skin color and non-European heritage. As the narrator states, it “became clear that even Jesus Christ couldn’t unite the locals and the Mexicans.”

  Postville ultimately understands immigration and the meeting of cultures as a “struggle” while also advancing the idea that immigrant labor has saved this and other towns across the nation. The documentary also renders Mexicans simultaneously mysterious and bland; without an on-camera spokesperson, they exist solely in clips that tie them to religion, work, food, and the townspeople’s fear of crime (see Figure 2).
  

  “Maybe more of them are better than the gringos”: Resettling the West: Mexicans in Wyoming (2001)

  Concerned with the integration of Mexican immigrants in several regions of Wyoming, Resettling the West, from Wyoming PBS, constructs its narrative through personal stories and broader context from both sides of the border. The film begins with a Mexican cumbia on the soundtrack and a montage of Mexicans living and working in Wyoming. We see them working construction, housekeeping in a hotel, driving, playing soccer, making tortillas, broadcasting, performing roadwork, cleaning a pool, doing laundry, and performing folkloric dances. Despite the strange comment at the outset that Native Americans “shake their heads” and say, “now it’s happening to you,” implying that white people are now suffering the same intrusion that Native Americans did, the film works throughout to explain the systemic problems that have met Mexican immigrants as they settled and established homes. In this way, the documentary echoes Hispanic Presence in Oregon; it is a primer on the positive contributions of Mexican immigrants and the challenges they have faced. It also acknowledges that Mexicans have lived in some parts of Wyoming, like Torrington, “for more than one hundred years.”

  The latter half of the documentary, which focuses on Jackson, explores migration from Tlaxcala in central Mexico. Through interviews with family members in Tlaxcala and Jackson, the film situates Mexican migrants as people with roots rather than just as recent arrivals. Indeed, the inclusion of a visit by a Tlaxcalan priest to Jackson nods to the connections forged between US and Mexican cities because of migration flows.²⁵ The problems and institutional responses in these Wyoming communities revolve around access to health care, benefits for agricultural workers, public education, domestic violence, literacy, and deportation. Familiar sights and sounds emerge: migrant workers—“good, conscientious, reliable employees”—are credited with filling sizable gaps in the labor market, as is the case with a hospital in Jackson; the Catholic church advocates for the welfare of the migrant community; and doubts are raised about the local population’s ability to handle the influx of immigrants. As the documentary notes, more pressing than the migrants’ trouble with English “may be that Wyoming residents lack the skills to relate to people who are different.”

  The conclusion repeats the refrain of the documentaries mentioned previously: the US is the “land of hope.” The Mexican cumbia that closes out the program is notable because it amplifies an internal conflict that the Mexican interview subjects express about their identities. The lyrics are translated as “From here, I’ll never go, I’ll never leave this place.” The program presents the situation as more complex than that, however. The subjects of the documentary represent a spectrum of regional, national, and cultural identities regardless of their legal designations as Mexicans or newly naturalized Americans. Their sentiments indicate different levels of attachment to the US. The documentary’s discussion of whether immigrants will stay considers economics and factors such as changing immigration law and the citizenship of children. A scene in San Simeón, Tlaxcala, shows the construction underway that is funded by the Tlaxcalans living and working in Wyoming (see Figure 3). If they are building, they will likely return. Significantly, this documentary, unlike the others, shows a fluid situation that hinges on personal and governmental decisions.
  
  

  Reflections on Immigration Narratives after 9/11

  La familia

  Una Vida Mejor, Postville, and Resettling the West preceded the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001; they were contextualized by the restrictive immigration policies of the 1990s but free of the fallout from the War on Terror. These pre-9/11 texts raise two primary sets of questions for us. The first pertains to one major feature of the documentaries: the family unit. The freedom of movement suggested by the “Mexicans in” documentaries—an exaggerated freedom, to be sure—contracted after 9/11. In the last decade, parents' inability to return to their places of origin has increased family resettlement, leading children to travel north—often unaccompanied—to reunite with them. Although the four texts we analyzed devoted more time to adults than children, the theme of children’s education and acculturation appeared consistently in the latter three. The documentaries generally situated the family as a wholesome and legitimating unit, particularly when contrasted with the earlier arrival of single men. Located within a distinct set of immigration policies, the programs trumpeted the resilience of family, community institutions, and hard work. The family separation policies of the late 2010s, which ultimately saw migrant children from multiple countries held in cages at the border, demonstrate the instability of previous narratives in the face of political transformations.

  If the Bracero era documentaries first showed children in dirty and cramped California labor camps and the “Mexicans in” documentaries showed them in schools in small western and midwestern towns, how does contemporary local television grapple with these latest developments? Has the legitimating image of the Mexican nuclear family shifted as children have become a more prominent part of migration narratives in the twenty-first century? And how has the expansion of Spanish-language broadcasting treated these narratives? 

  Homeland Security

  Our second set of questions centers on a topic the documentaries avoid: perilous journeys across the border. The Homeland Security Act of 2002 (HSA) further militarized and hardened the border. Predictably, crossing the border became more expensive to migrants, offering criminal organizations a boost in their income and increasing violence along the border, especially on the Mexican side. HSA marked an escalation of the pattern of criminalization and repression against people coming from Mexico. How has local television portrayed the militarization of the border and increase in violence? How have immigration narratives on local television changed with the War on Terror and the expansion and entrenchment of drug wars? How have these narratives interacted with the growing political polarization since the 2010s?

  Assessing the Archive

  Having located these documentaries within the history of Mexican migration to the United States, we wish to weigh their strengths and weaknesses as primary sources. The documentaries provide evidence of real people reacting to immigration trends. They highlight threats to immigrants, such as nativist attitudes, aggressive policing, and deficient educational services. Further, the documentaries’ focus on the mobilization of individuals and community institutions to educate and organize immigrants underscores power in small numbers. However, the programs’ attention to local attitudes, problems, and solutions understandably results in a view of immigration tilted toward the personal rather than the systemic. Issues like violence at the border, restricted movement, and federal targeting of immigrants do not figure into how these documentaries portray demographic change at a local level. The vastness of immigration is beyond the scope of any of these documentaries, to be sure, but they remain invaluable snapshots of interrelated nation-building processes, such as evolving notions of race, class, gender, and citizenship.

  In this time of border walls and resurgent, vocal nativism, this sample of documentaries can help students understand how xenophobic attitudes have shaped other generations and how local media can respond when a community is going through a transitional period. The most important strength we see is the archive itself. Taken individually, each documentary offers a record of Mexicans at various stages of immigration history. Taken together, the group of texts offers evidence of change and continuity. The six programs discussed in this paper demonstrate a shift in attention from labor rights to culture clash and individual achievement. The four “Mexicans in” programs show patterns of immigration and local responses, even though each represents a particular community’s personality and perspective. Significantly, responses are not limited to interview subjects and townspeople; the documentaries themselves adopt perspectives perceptible in their narrative strategies. Furthermore, when contrasted with contemporaneous immigration narratives in national media, these local artifacts can steer researchers and students to divergent interpretations of immigrants and immigration trends. And if the documentaries allow immigrants to speak, they can steer researchers and students to immigrants’ interpretations of their own experiences before the country turns another page in its border policy.
  
  A list of external links featured in this essay can be found here.²⁶
  
  Rodolfo Fernández is a historian and Assistant Professor in Residence at the University of Connecticut’s El Instituto (Institute for the Study of Latino/a, Caribbean and Latin American Studies). His research interests include the history of Mexican capitalisms and the US-Mexico borderlands. He is currently working on a book manuscript that analyzes the converging histories of Mexican urban-industrial capitalism and the breakdown of politics during the Mexican Revolution. His recent publication, “Desastre, crisis política, y capitalismo: la inundación de Monterrey de 1909 y los orígenes de la revolución maderista,” appears in México Revolucionario: La crisis del orden porfiriano y el ascenso maderista, a volume on the origins of the Mexican Revolution.
  
  Deborah L. Jaramillo is associate professor of Film and Television Studies at Boston University. Her research areas include contemporary cable television and early broadcast television. She has written about the televised representation and coverage of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in Ethnic and Racial Studies and Television History, The Peabody Archive, and Cultural Memory (University of Georgia Press 2019). Together with Dr. Rodolfo Fernández, she has also co-authored an article on farm radio and the U.S.-Mexico border in Journal of Radio & Audio Media. Dr. Jaramillo’s first book, Ugly War Pretty Package: How CNN and Fox News made the Invasion of Iraq High Concept (Indiana University Press 2009), analyzes how cable news covered the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Her second book, The Television Code: Regulating the Screen to Safeguard the Industry (University of Texas Press 2018), analyzes the U.S. television industry’s attempts to censor its programs in the early 1950s.
  
  Title Image: Una Vida Mejor (Arkansas Educational TV Network 1997)
  
  Mexicans in Your Town: Histories of Mexican Migration to the United States in Local Television Documentaries © 2025 by Rodolfo Fernández and Deborah L. Jaramillo is licensed under CC BY 4.0.
  
  The Journal of e-Media Studies is published by the Dartmouth Library.

• 1 2024-09-17T06:02:22+00:00 In Living Color: Chicano Televisual Media at the Dawn of the Movement 3 image_header 2025-01-07T05:48:37+00:00

  
  by Desirée J. Garcia

  Dartmouth College
  
  Abstract

  Making Chicano Media
  Chicano
  Chicano and Chicano Media in the early 1970s
  “Producciones Chicanas Presents”

  Making Chicano Media

  Working as an associate producer for WGBH Boston in the early 2000s, I was part of a small group of filmmakers who endeavored to persuade the nationally broadcast American history series American Experience to produce programming for and about Latinos. We succeeded twice. The series produced two hour-long historical documentaries—Zoot Suit Riots, which aired on March 1, 2002, and Remember the Alamo, which aired on February 2, 2004. Both films revisited seminal events in Latino history: the Sleepy Lagoon murder trial (1942) and Zoot Suit Riots (1943) in the first and the Battle of the Alamo (1836) in the second. Both films were created by a Latino production team, a rarity then as now. But the path toward completion was not simple for either film. While we had extensive Latino scholarship to draw upon, synthesizing that scholarship for mainstream consumption proved to be a hindrance to the objective of exploring the complexity of Latinos and their history. 

  One example is from a screening of an early edit of Zoot Suit Riots. We hoped the film would explore the interwoven dynamics of race, gender, and citizenship that led to a mass trial and conviction of Latino and Latina youth and the ensuing race riots. When we presented the film to WGBH executives, however, they responded with confusion about the mere presence of so many Mexicans in Los Angeles. In response, we included a section on the history of Mexican migration to the city and lost much of the complexity of the film as a result. Given that American Experience’s audience demographics were—and still are—majority white and middle class, we realized that in order to educate viewers on relatively isolated events in Latino history, a more general history of Latinos would have to be told first. And in keeping with the style and form of American Experience films, Zoot Suit Riots and Remember the Alamo deliver their content in accessible language. Using talking heads, a male narrator—actor Hector Elizondo in both instances—and archival footage and photographs, the films strive for objectivity in tone, scholarly authority in content, and legitimacy in their argument that Latino history is American history. Despite the gains made by Latino scholars and the turn toward multiculturalism in the 1990s, it was clear to us that an argument had to be made for the viability of Latino content on national television, and to win over a general audience, that content should be delivered in the most accessible and straightforward means possible. 

  Watching the series Chicano, made three decades before the films on American Experience, I am struck by how earlier generations of Latino television producers struggled with these same issues. Produced by Sal Castro, a teacher and one of the leaders of the East Los Angeles walkouts (1968), and Frank Cruz, then associate professor of Chicano studies at Cal State Long Beach, Chicano (1971–1972) represents a landmark event in the history of Latino media.¹

  Like the American Experience films I worked on, Chicano was broadcast nationally. It first aired “in living color” in Los Angeles on KNBC but also showed on television screens in Chicago, New York, Cleveland, and Washington, D.C. In this way, it was both local and national in its orientation, attempting to educate audiences on the history and contemporary issues facing Chicanos—a term that the series uses self-consciously to reflect a new political and cultural consciousness for Mexican Americans. One of the earliest attempts to define and shape Latino history for television audiences, Chicano represents a moment early in the Chicano movement when Latino scholars, activists, and producers recognized the importance of televisual media to the telling of Latino stories. Cruz and his fellow Latino collaborators knew this was a “unique opportunity” that would broaden their audience beyond the classroom. They viewed television as the key to “inform literally thousands” about the “Latino experience and to explain what a Chicano was.”² The series’ scope—to tell the history of the Chicano from before American and Spanish settlement to the present—was ambitious. Its effects would be long-lasting. Cruz, the host, would go on to serve as president of the board of directors for Latino Public Broadcasting, an organization that funds and advocates for Latino programming on PBS, including the two American Experience films mentioned here and many, many others. 

  Chicano

  The series consists of twenty episodes approximately thirty minutes long; the first program aired on July 5, 1971.³ Screening the day after America’s day of independence, the episode “Aztlan” had special resonance as it educated audiences on the history of the present-day American Southwest, which once was the homeland of the pre-Columbian Aztecs. It appeared at 5:00 p.m. in Los Angeles, just as Angelenos were sitting down to their dinner. Although we do not have audience demographics for the series, the large number of episodes that extended over two years of programming, combined with its national syndication, indicates that NBC considered Chicano to be a critical part of its summer lineup. 

  Cruz and Castro created the series at a time when the United States was in turmoil. The assassination of civil rights leaders Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. in 1965 and 1968, respectively, set off a firestorm of protests against racism and witnessed the rise of cultural nationalism in which peoples of color rejected the assimilationist narratives of the past. Latinos were among them. Calling themselves “Chicanos,” Mexican Americans who radically embraced and celebrated their differences from white America, they identified a range of issues where the United States was failing them. They were galvanized by the efforts to organize farmworkers by Cesar Chavez, Gil Padilla, and Dolores Huerta, who jointly founded the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee along with Filipino laborers led by Larry Itliong. 

  But beyond the rights of workers in the fields, Chicanos pointed to extensive, systemic forms of racism and inequality in all realms of life, including education, employment, the writing of American history, culture, and the media. Many scholars trace the birth of the Chicano movement to two seminal events: the East Los Angeles walkouts of 1968, when thousands of students and teachers protested their discriminatory treatment in the public school system, and the 1970 Chicano Moratorium, a mass demonstration against the disproportionate number of Chicanos who were drafted into the Vietnam War.⁴ By the time Chicano aired the following summer, the grievances had reached a boiling point, and the need for a broader understanding of Chicanos and their objectives was paramount.

  Responding to the outcry, KNBC turned to Castro, Cruz, and other Latino scholars to produce programming that addressed issues of social responsibility. As Cruz notes in his autobiography, it is likely that the station merely sought to “justify their license renewal” or demonstrate their commitment to employee diversity as per the newly created Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.⁵ The series had a low budget, and its scholars, including Cruz, did not receive any pay for their work. Nevertheless, what they created was a significant documentation of a tumultuous but generative moment in time that reached thousands in the early 1970s and remains a unique televisual program to this day. 

  “Aztlan,” the first episode, clearly demarcates the connection between Chicanos and the American Southwest. As with the episodes to follow, Cruz first addresses the television audience. He sits behind a desk, dressed in a suit and tie, with an indigenous Aztec symbol as the backdrop. His credentials as an associate professor at Cal State Long Beach appear on the lower third of the screen as he introduces the series:

  I will be your host for the next several weeks on a series of programs on the subject of the Mexican American or Chicano. The subjects and people we will be considering are as old as the intrepid explorer who first crossed the Bering Straits 30,000 years ago and as recent as tomorrow’s immigrant who will legally walk across the United States and Mexico border to join relatives in the United States. The people are as rural as a mountain villager of New Mexico and as mobile and urban as a United States congressman. The series will include in its programming the contributions our ancestors made to the area and consequently to American culture.

  Cruz’s opening remarks are oriented toward a non-Chicano audience unfamiliar with the history of Mexicans in the United States and their heterogeneity. He specifies that the series will focus on the “Mexican American or Chicano,” suggesting a continuity between the two terms in order to lend the latter intelligibility. And he dramatically juxtaposes the many types of Chicanos to be found in the United States, identifying the sort that most Americans would be familiar with—the “immigrant”—alongside those who are not so familiar, including the “explorer,” who predates American settlement, and the “United States congressman.” Cruz emphasizes the legal status of the immigrant in an effort to counter the stereotype of the “wetback,” or illegal Mexican, that had attracted outsized media attention and public uproar. 

  In each episode, Cruz dialogues with a guest host, typically an academic from the earliest Mexican American and Chicano studies programs in the country. They include anthropologist José B. Cuéllar (University of California, Los Angeles), sociologist Tomás Martinez (Stanford), psychologist Manuel Ramírez (University of California, Riverside), historians Richard Romo and Carlos Arce (San Fernando Valley State College) and Federico Sánchez (Cal State Long Beach), and labor organizer and scholar Ernesto Galarza, as well as local administrators and activists. Taken together, they provide historical context, rooted in scholarship, regarding the Chicano’s evolution in American society. 

  At a moment when the Chicano movement had succeeded in creating an entirely new field of study, the episodes are remarkable for the ways they deeply mine the complex dynamics of race, citizenship, and belonging. The episode “Barrio Life and Cultural Democracy,” for example, examines how young Mexican American children experience a bicultural existence, which has long been demonized by the American public school system and met with confusion by Mexican families. The episode examines the structural inequalities of public education and segregation in housing as contributing factors to social marginalization and goes further to demonstrate how embracing bicultural identities, including the encouragement of bilingualism and cultural heritage in schools, can yield positive results for Mexican American children. The episode, and indeed the entire series’ emphasis on structural systems of power rather than certain problematic individuals, is in keeping with the Chicano movement’s broader agenda. But it also represents a sincere effort to deliver a more complex portrait of society—and the Chicano’s place within it—to mainstream America. It does so with a carefully crafted visual narrative that is in dialogue with, and counterpoint to, the way that televisual media had presented the Chicano movement up to that point. 

  Chicano and Chicano Media in the early 1970s

  Chicano fits into the loosely defined genre of “newsfilm” on television in the late 1960s and early 1970s. While newsfilm was often a reference to the raw footage that television reporters used to create their news programming, it was also, as Chicano exhibits, a reference to short-form documentaries in which producers curated archival footage and images and edited them alongside talking heads and interviews to create a cohesive examination of a particular topic. The local television news station—KNBC Los Angeles in this case—played an important role in supporting and hosting such programming, giving it a reach that was simultaneously regional and national. While televisual news media often falls outside the scope of film and media studies, Chicano reveals how paying attention to newsfilm allows us to examine some of the earliest Latino media for the mainstream in a time well before Latinos had access to mainstream film production.⁶

  Positive depictions of people of color were still rare in the early 1970s. And the stories of people of color, their long journey through racism and other forms of inequality, were rarer still. For context, it was not until ABC premiered Roots in 1977 that Americans first experienced a comprehensive treatment of the history of Black Americans on their television screens. As Nielsen ratings confirmed, white Americans were eager for such programming by the late 1970s, having experienced a resurgence in immigrant and ethnic pride over the course of the decade.⁷ But at the time of Chicano’s premiere, Americans were still reeling from the ongoing protest movements by a range of groups, but perhaps most visibly by people of color.

  Chicanos taking angrily to the streets were given significant airtime by major networks. With the exception of television’s attraction to Chavez and his nonviolent grape strike—which, as Randy Ontiveros argues, fits into the more familiar type of the “humble Mexican” in the American popular imagination—it was the out-of-control and violent brown body that received attention, if any was paid, in the Chicano movement. As Ontiveros observes, “activities such as voter education and antipoverty programming do not televise well, which meant that apart from the grape strike and its iconic leader [Chavez], the networks usually only ran stories that involved rioting, vandalism, and other forms of public disorder.” Television, as a result, mediated Chicanos as a violent mass, “threatening to bring the American experiment to an end.”⁸ Even a relatively benign series, The Mexican American, broadcast by NBC the summer before Chicano, led with an inflammatory statement by the mayor of San Antonio about the innate inability of Mexicans to be successful in American life.⁹ Chicano was truly unique for its perspective on and by Latinos in an extended, multipart televisual program.

  “Producciones Chicanas Presents”

  Cruz and his producers supported another of the Chicano movement’s goals—to both interrogate and take control of the media. The last episode to be aired in 1971, “Stereotyping in the Mass Media,” focused precisely on this issue. While this episode explains how mass media, from Frito Bandito to children’s programming, revels in stereotype, it is the series as a whole that carries out the movement’s goal of creating Latino-produced media.¹⁰ It does so in conversation with the ways that television has depicted the movement up to that point—namely, without context, complexity, or respect. 

  The series offers a corrective visually and aurally from its very beginning. The opening title sequence is a montage of archival footage depicting mostly Latinos, and in particular Latino youth, marching in protest at schools and walking down city streets. A compilation of footage from the walkouts and the Chicano Moratorium, the opening sequence would seem to reinforce the media’s correlation between brown bodies and chaos. And yet a closer look at the footage shows that these are peaceful and orderly protests. The participants, both male and female, march in formation or walk across fields and streets carrying their schoolbooks. Chicano animates this sequence with a tuneful and upbeat soundtrack of wind and string instruments that suggests an optimistic, rather than threatening, tone. Far from the out-of-control masses, the series presents a fervent and insistent protest movement, but one that is ultimately law-abiding and firmly within the rights of all Americans.

  The series also works to assign a diversity of faces to the movement. Out of the undifferentiated groups portrayed in the title sequence comes an attention to individuals. Using medium shots and close-ups, Chicano frames Cruz and his Latino guests so they are made accessible to American audiences. These guests are experts, the series is quick to explain through Cruz’s commentary and with the use of lower-third identifications of the guest’s name, degree, and academic affiliation. Furthermore, the majority of these guests are dressed formally in a suit and tie, like Cruz himself, revealing themselves to be civilized, intelligent, rational, and educated. But strategically, their commitment to the movement and Mexican culture is firmly established, as we see from the Aztec symbol that constitutes the backdrop for their commentary and their complex descriptions of historical context and the Chicano movement’s fight for equality. This fight, the series reveals, is not led by one man or about a single issue. It is a fight by many for a range of solutions to problems that have been years in the making. Framed by the same opening montage, each episode takes the viewer on a journey from what they are familiar with—the protests of nameless people of color—to a methodical examination of who those protestors are and why they do what they do.
  Chicano complicates and broadens our understanding of the history of Latino media production in all of its living color. Created at the dawn of the Chicano movement and the beginning of Chicano studies as an academic field, the series positions itself in dialogue with the often harmful depictions and willful neglect of the media. While its visual language is not as radical or multimodal as the works of other Latino media productions such as Luis Valdez’s I Am Joaquín (1969) or Sylvia Morales’s Chicana (1979), it nevertheless occupies a significant place in the history of Latino storytelling. It set out to correct mainstream American viewers’ understanding of people of color and a complex social movement—no small feat, given the stakes.

  
  A list of links relevant to this essay can be found here.¹¹
  
  Desirée Garcia is an Associate Professor in the Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies Department at Dartmouth. She is the author of two books, The Movie Musical (2021) and The Migration of Musical Film: From Ethnic Margins to American Mainstream (2014), both published by Rutgers University Press. She has a PhD in American Studies from Boston University and BA in History from Wellesley College. Garcia has also worked as an Associate Producer for American Experience/PBS and as an actress in the first feature film by director Damien Chazelle (La La Land), the original musical film called Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench (2009).
  
  In Living Color: Chicano Televisual Media at the Dawn of the Movement © 2025 by Desirée J. Garcia is licensed under CC BY 4.0.
  
  The Journal of e-Media Studies is published by the Dartmouth Library.
  
   
• 1 2024-09-17T06:02:22+00:00 “The Most Frightening Thing I Have Ever Seen”: Moving Images and the South Carolina Civil Rights Movement 3 image_header 2025-01-07T19:18:50+00:00

  by Bobby Donaldson

  University of South Carolina-Columbia
  
  Abstract

  Introduction
  Setting the Stage: January 1, 1960, Newsfilm Footage of the Greenville Airport March
  Three Demonstrations in South Carolina: Orangeburg, Bouie, and Edwards
  >March 1, 1960, Orangeburg, South Carolina
  >Orangeburg Newsfilm Annotated
  >Photojournalist Cecil J. Williams
  March 14, 1960, Columbia, South Carolina: Bouie
  >Bouie Newsfilm Annotated
  March 2, 1961, Columbia, South Carolina: Edwards
  >Integration demonstrations at State House—outtakes
  >Edwards Newsfilm Annotated
  Conclusion: Stories Matter

  Introduction

  The Center for Civil Rights History and Research at the University of South Carolina works to uncover the grassroots history of the African American freedom struggle in South Carolina, promote research into that history, and create programs and exhibitions to share that history. From its inception in 2015, the Center has been a collaborative effort with the university’s libraries. We have found vital history unidentified in the libraries’ existing collections. Equally important, we have found that history in the community—in the memories and desk drawers and storage spaces of civil rights movement veterans. Then we have worked with these movement veterans to document and archive their history through oral history interviews and new collections in the university libraries. Those interviews and new collections deepen and enrich our understanding of the state’s history and provide engaging items for our programs and exhibitions.
  
  One of the most fascinating, revelatory, and important collections at the university is the local television newsfilm of the Columbia NBC affiliate: the WIS-TV News Collection. Then-Mayor Stephen Benjamin called me in 2012 to propose a public history initiative with several other Southern cities to highlight the Civil Rights Movement events of each city by focusing on 1963. That gave me the impetus to search the WIS-TV collection for compelling footage of the student movement.
  
  On December 8, 2012, I sent an email attachment to Ramon Jackson, my graduate assistant, titled “Possible Civil Rights Moving Images.” The list included a silent film from March 2, 1961, titled Integration Demonstrations at State House. At the time, Chris Frear—another graduate assistant—Ramon Jackson, and I were conducting research to lay the foundation for an ambitious public history project, Columbia SC 63: Our Story Matters, an effort to give greater voice and visibility to largely overlooked and understudied chapters of the long Black freedom struggle in the capital of South Carolina and in the nation.¹ We sought to document and promote the individuals, organizations, and key events that shaped the modern civil rights movement in the Palmetto State. Armed with newly discovered photographs and local newsfilm, including the March 2, 1961, State House footage, our project provided ample evidence that directly challenged scholars and journalists who suggested that South Carolina played a minor or insignificant role in the civil rights movement. The short newsfilm clips, now preserved and digitized, provide an extraordinary repository of historical detail and context that has supported exhibitions, public programming, course instruction, and oral interviews. 

  On March 3, 2013, civil rights veterans and journalists met for a town hall forum hosted in the headquarters of the South Carolina Education Television Network in Columbia. The forum’s moderator, Beryl Dakers, observed:

  South Carolina prides itself on the fact that we accomplished “peaceful desegregation and integration” for the most part. South Carolina is very pleased it was not compared with Selma or Montgomery. . . . Here we are fifty-odd years later and we can say that we did not see all this activity, but we are uncovering many things that actually happened. Did the news media fail us by not giving prominence to the things that were going on?

  Bob Hickman, news director at Columbia’s WIS-TV in the early 1960s, responded:

  We missed the boat on some occasions, and we did not go deep enough and follow through as to the results of these things. We were constantly criticized by our white peers. Did that bother me that much? No, it didn’t bother me at all because I was trying to do a job that needed to be done. But we were criticized to the extent of if you all don’t put the cameras on them, they will quit doing this kind of thing and it will all just fade away into the background and it will be ok.²

  Congressman James E. Clyburn, a student leader in the early 1960s and a former history teacher, was not present for the 2013 roundtable. But he has repeatedly shared Dakers’s sentiment about an intentional effort by white state leaders and journalists to “to black out or, it might be more appropriate to say, white out civil rights activities taking place in South Carolina.”³

  In Clyburn’s memoir, Blessed Experiences: Genuinely Southern, Proudly Black, he observes:

  There was something impersonal about the way the public perceived the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Aside from a few high-profile leaders, demonstrations were reported in terms of masses of humanity surging against the walls of those defending the status quo. Protestors came across as being some sort of faceless force recruited for a tour of duty in the streets. The shame of it all is the utter misrepresentation of the courageous young men and women who made those marches. Each of them was there to express a strongly held opinion and to risk personal safety and security to make certain those feelings were heard and felt. Their motivation went back days, weeks, and months prior to the actual demonstration, and it endured long after the event itself passed.⁴

  Drawing upon news footage found in the University of South Carolina’s Moving Image Research Collection (MIRC), this essay unmasks the “faceless force” of the movement and examines three key civil rights demonstrations in 1960 and 1961 led by student activists who refused to “fade away into the background.”

  MIRC holds an extensive collection of local television newsfilm that highlights South Carolina’s critical role in the Black freedom struggle, including the dynamic contributions of young activists from the state’s historically Black high schools and colleges. Utilizing outtakes from local newsfilm, this essay examines the men and women who were on the front lines of transformational change in South Carolina and the nation in the early 1960s. 

  A person who was instrumental in preserving the Columbia NBC affiliate’s newsfilm—and who witnessed many of the events recorded as a television journalist—remains active in providing background detail, context, and technical information about specific clips in the newsfilm collection. James Covington, ninety-two in 2023, lives in Columbia and regularly engages with us in extended conversations about the movement. His memories of his career and specific events offer an irreplaceable lens on that moment. 

  Throughout the development of Columbia SC 63 and the University of South Carolina’s Center for Civil Rights History and Research, Covington has proven to be an invaluable asset and collaborator. As demonstrations escalated in the spring of 1960, Covington completed his senior year at the University of South Carolina. As a student, he freelanced for WBTV in Charlotte, North Carolina. When he learned about demonstrations from sources, he called in the information to editors. Once cleared, he was on the scene, camera rolling. He was paid for coverage, plus three dollars per day for using his own camera, a Bolex 16mm, which he purchased in 1956. “When I covered the demonstration, I would send my film by bus or plane. I knew every bus schedule between Columbia and Charlotte by heart.” 

  As a journalist on the ground for civil rights protests, Covington was mindful that he too was under police observance. During a major demonstration in Orangeburg in March 1960, he came under attack. “Three white men grabbed me and one of them hit me for taking pictures of blacks,” Covington recalled. “They were upset that the demonstrations were happening, but they certainly didn’t want any TV coverage. . . . They didn’t want you to contribute to the news that was happening,” he surmised.⁵

  From that experience, Covington learned to protect his film. “When law enforcement wanted to take my film, I had a trick. I carried two or three extra canisters of film in my coat. As soon as I finished one, I would put in a fresh roll, so when they asked for it, I would give them a roll of fresh film with nothing on it.”

  Covington, a native of Bennettsville, South Carolina, played a role in the preservation of WIS-TV’s original newsfilm and, decades later, its donation to MIRC. A veteran of the United States Air Force and a former student at the Citadel, he majored in journalism and was a member of the campus press club. From 1961 to 1972, he worked for WIS-TV, the NBC affiliate. When WIS-TV station managers made plans to discard old news footage, Covington packed stacks of film from the television station’s basement and carted home fifteen boxes in the family station wagon. “It bothered me to throw anything away,” he said. For more than a decade, he stored the film and some news scripts in his garage. 

  When the Cosmos Broadcasting Corporation and its station, WIS-TV, planned to donate the company’s remaining newsfilm to the University of South Carolina in 1984, Covington restored the footage he preserved to the collection. “It was not my film,” he said, “I was just trying to protect it.” The WIS-TV collection consists of the complete film library of news stories shot by WIS-TV from 1953 through 1979. The collection also includes the teleprompter news scripts from 1963 through 1979; the WIS-TV archive for Awareness, a weekly African American–focused news show; Carolina Magazine; a photo library from late 1950 through the late 1960s; documentaries and extended stories on film dating back to 1959; and photo slides from the early 1970s.⁶ MIRC also holds newsfilm collections from other South Carolina stations, WLTX-TV and WBTW-TV, giving scholars the ability to compare coverage across years and locations. The size of the collection, the span of years it covers, the availability of the scripts, and the comparative newsfilm from other stations combine to give the collection national significance.

  Two years prior to the transfer of the WIS-TV footage to the University of South Carolina, Joseph Wider, a former instructor in the university’s Media Arts Department, gained permission to use WIS-TV archival newsfilm dating back to 1952 for the South Carolina Political History Project, a proposed television documentary that “evolved out of the need to document the oral recollections of individuals involved in the most dynamic cultural change since the Civil War, before they pass and their perceptions of this history, its personalities, issues and events die with them.” Wider planned to duplicate the relevant newsfilm and create a collection at the university.⁷

  The remarkable collection that Covington and Wider worked to preserve both visualizes and documents chapters of the civil rights movement that many have long forgotten and some have overlooked. Coupled with oral testimony, still photographs, and archival documents, the news footage enables scholars and journalists to deepen and broaden their fundamental questions about what transpired decades ago. MIRC constitutes a rich repository that provides new frames of evidence that expand research, reflection, pedagogy, and documentation. We have before us moving visuals that offer geographical and spatial context that confirm or challenge court testimony, news articles, oral interviews, and longstanding historical interpretations. 

  Setting the Stage: January 1, 1960, Newsfilm Footage of the Greenville Airport March

  Before the student sit-ins started, the largest civil rights demonstration took place in South Carolina, and the MIRC archive has a record of it. During an Emancipation Day protest on January 1, 1960, amid sleet and snow, state leaders used an embarrassing police encounter with famed baseball great Jackie Robinson months earlier as backdrop to launch a blistering attack against segregation. Reverend James Hall, the pastor of Springfield Baptist Church and leader of the local Congress on Racial Equality (CORE), remarked: “There’s more involved here than just Jackie Robinson. It is a matter of citizens’ rights, be it Jackie Robinson or a ditch digger. Human dignity is involved.” 

  At a service held at Hall’s church, Ruby Hurley, the southeastern regional director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), spoke. “South Carolina needs prayer like no other state. . . . Integration is coming real soon, sooner than some of us realize. . . . Stop thinking colored, start praying a little bit more and start praying right. Use your mouths and use them the right way.” In her remarks, Hurley highlighted the miseducation of citizens regarding historical events. “South Carolina has been wrong so long that it is hard for her to turn around and get right.” She mentioned the Reconstruction era and the period’s contributions to education. “A lot of other things came about because of 60 Negro members in the State Legislature. . . . Honest history will show you this. You have been brainwashed if you believe otherwise.”⁸

  At the service, Reverend Horace Prince Sharper, a minister in Florence and the newly appointed state president of NAACP, turned to a group of white journalists and railed against the press. “I’ve been waiting for this opportunity and finally got it,” he said. “One of the greatest disappointments to me has been with the press, these men who’re supposed to print the news unbiasedly. . . . The press is not here because they are interested in your welfare,” Sharper insisted. “They are here because they want to make money.”⁹

  Following the meeting at Springfield Baptist Church, hundreds joined a caravan from downtown Greenville to the city’s municipal airport—the very site where Robinson was threatened with arrest. Reverend Matthew McCollum, a Methodist minister in Orangeburg, served as a spokesperson in the airport’s waiting room, reading from a printed press release as leaders stood before journalists. In silent MIRC footage, McCollum can be seen speaking emphatically as a group of ministers and civil rights leaders read along with him. McCollum remarked, “We will no longer make a pretense of being satisfied with the crumbs of citizenship while others enjoy the whole loaf only by the right of a white-skinned birth.” A part of McCollum’s statement read, “That with faith in this nation and its God we shall not relent, we shall not rest, we shall not compromise, we shall not be satisfied until every vestige of racial discrimination and segregation has been eliminated from all aspects of our public life.”¹⁰

  Resurgent civil rights organizations in Greenville in the late 1950s propelled the movement into the next decade. When a bus seating confrontation brought new attention to segregation, Hall guided the energy and determination of Dorris “Deedee” Wright and other students into reviving the city’s NAACP youth council. At the same time, the next generation of key NAACP officers taking over in the post–Brown v. Board era were working in nearby Spartanburg. Reverend Isaiah DeQuincey Newman, a Methodist minister, became state conference president, and attorney Matthew J. Perry Jr. was building his practice and taking on the role of NAACP’s lead civil rights attorney in the state. When students in Greensboro, North Carolina, ignited a new movement, students in Greenville were primed. 

  Three Demonstrations in South Carolina: Orangeburg, Bouie, and Edwards

  For students in Columbia, Orangeburg, and across the South, the sit-ins in Greensboro, initiated by Ezell Blair Jr., David Richmond, Franklin McCain, and Joseph McNeil at a Woolworth’s store, sparked a revolution—“a new era of standing up to indignities and atrocities.”¹¹ And as the sit-ins and the counterattacks mounted, the students’ resolve deepened. In spring 1960, as young activists across the American South challenged longstanding barriers to racial equality, young and determined students in South Carolina joined the powerful and transformative civil rights movement. At lunch counters and department stores, in theaters and hotels, on the grounds of the governor’s mansion, the State House, schools and public parks, in courtrooms and the press, and in the corridors of city halls, South Carolina citizens faced strong opposition and threats of arrest as they challenged a long legacy of racial discrimination and injustice. Led by Perry and Lincoln C. Jenkins II, a team of dedicated NAACP attorneys counseled thousands of clients, defended freedom of speech and assembly, and successfully challenged continued segregation in public schools, institutions of higher learning, and public accommodations. 

  By 1960 America was several years into its television age, and television newsrooms were adjusting to covering what some prominent national reporters termed “the race beat.” By 1957 80 percent of American homes had televisions, and the country had five hundred television stations. Significantly, that same year, the number of homes with television sets surpassed those subscribing to a daily newspaper. Through the Little Rock school desegregation standoff and the Montgomery bus boycott, movement leaders knew the value of news media attention to public demonstrations—particularly the value of the African American press, northern newspaper reporters, and television cameras. Still, the emergence of the student movement and its signature lunch counter sit-ins took the news industry by surprise, and it took more than a week for northern reporters to recognize the importance of the fast-spreading movement. While established civil rights organizations decided whether and how to support the students, southern city newspapers wrestled with how to report on the protests and how prominently, or even whether, to report on sit-ins.¹²

  In the week leading up to the Orangeburg demonstration, the Charleston News and Courier ran the story “Negroes Continuing Segregation Strike,” which reported student protests in Orangeburg and Rock Hill. In Rock Hill, CORE leader James T. McCain, a native of Sumter, conducted training workshops for students attending Friendship Junior College. On February 12, 1960, the first documented student sit-ins began in Rock Hill when close to one hundred African American students sat down at Woolworth’s and McCrory’s stores. Their actions forced the lunch counters to remain closed until February 23. In Orangeburg, on Thursday, February 25, about forty-five students, many from Claflin College, walked to the S. H. Kress store, where close to twenty-five demonstrators took seats at around eleven in the morning. Stools were removed, and signs reading “Closed in the interest of public safety” were displayed.¹³ On the following day, protests continued when a Claflin student was attacked at the Kress store by a group of onlookers. NAACP officials claimed Melvin Fludd was jumped by several white people at the Kress lunch counter. The Orangeburg police chief called the accusation ridiculous. “]The only disturbance that occurred at Kress dime store today was between the Negro and white man, who was arrested. . . . No youths were involved in the incident. No one was hit over the head. No one jumped anyone. It was just a mild exchange of blows. . . . Any other claim is absolutely ridiculous.”¹⁴ Incensed by the turn of events, Senator Marion Gressette, the head of the state legislature’s Segregation Committee, attended a Rock Hill White Citizens’ Council meeting and declared before an audience of 350 people, “No one can be forced to serve someone he doesn’t want to serve.”¹⁵

  Building on the growing student movement across the region, which was magnified by the media attention focused on Greensboro, students at Claflin and South Carolina State expanded their public demonstrations. Clyburn, a founder of the newly formed Orangeburg Student Movement Association, recalled, “A whole new dimension of public expression took form and became a powerful force for change and political power.”¹⁶

  March 1, 1960, Orangeburg, South Carolina

  Days after the protests in Rock Hill, over four hundred students gathered in downtown Orangeburg at a local Kress store on Tuesday, March 1, 1960, shortly before one o’clock. As news footage documents, they traveled from their campuses to East Russell Street and gathered in Memorial Plaza. 

  According to the Charleston Evening Post, hours before the planned demonstration, an African American leader telephoned the United Press International (UPI) newswire office and stated that between “1,000 and 1,200 Negro students would stage the protest march beginning at 12:30 p.m.” Corroborating a critical moment in the MIRC footage, a reporter for the Post observed that some students held up victory signs as they “walked slowly and silently toward downtown Orangeburg, not talking to anyone.”¹⁷ They carried signs that read “Segregation Must Die,” “Down with Segregation,” “We Want Liberty,” “Our Money Is As Good As Theirs,” and “Segregation Is Dead.” As the march unfolded, law enforcement officers admonished students that the “banners could not be displayed.”¹⁸

  As the MIRC footage illustrates, Charles F. McDew, a South Carolina State student from Ohio, served as one of the leading spokespersons for “a group of about 250 Negro men and women” who “marched through downtown Orangeburg today in protest to segregated seating at lunch counters.” While McDew and the students walked through the city streets, they were stopped (as seen in the film) by J. Pete Strom, the head of the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED). According to newspaper accounts, “Strom addressed his warning to the two persons leading two twin columns of marching Negroes.”¹⁹

  In the MIRC footage, McDew is followed by a student bearing a sign that is difficult to see. The Charleston News and Courier published a front-page article and a photograph taken by Covington in which McDew is followed by a student with a sign that is easy to read: “What Do I Have to Do, Bleach Myself Mr.?”²⁰

  The students were halted on the sidewalk by Strom and Orangeburg police chief C. Harold Hall. Strom spoke with McDew—a scene clearly featured in the MIRC footage. “I have informed you all you had to have a permit to come to town with signs,” Strom warned. He then asked, “What college are you from?” McDew, described as a “neatly dressed young negro,” by Norman Spell, a Charleston newspaper reporter, responded, “I respectfully decline to answer on the grounds that it might tend to incriminate me.” According to Spell, Strom advised McDew that any incidents would compel him to “charge you with inciting a riot.” Seemingly unfazed by the warning, McDew and his colleagues cast their signs “aside when Strom ordered them to,” then continued their march under the watchful eye of local police, SLED agents, and the State Highway Patrol.²¹ This fact may explain why the protest placards are missing later in the film footage. In fact, some students can be seen walking with signs rolled in their hands.

  In the days following the protest, the Times and Democrat published an editorial titled “Marching Demonstrations,” which characterized McDew and his fellow marchers as “apparently students organized and directed by outside agitators. . . . Had someone—as a result—provoked an incident it would have played into the hands of the agitators, who are seeking publicity, and who would probably welcome violence. As a reflection of our orderly way of life, no incident occurred.” 

  Of course, this editorial—focused on a communist effort directed by outside “professional agitators”—failed to account for the organizing skills of the student leaders, the series of workshop trainers, and their firm commitment to nonviolence, all of which were clearly on display in the brief film footage from that day.²²

  Mindful of deliberate efforts to reconstruct and obscure the historical details of the student movement, a few young activists committed their memories to paper. Thomas Gaither, a Claflin student and a key leader of the Orangeburg Student Movement Association, recalled that he and others “became inspired by the example of the students in Rock Hill, the first South Carolina city where lunch counter sit-ins occurred. We, too, feel that stores which graciously accept our money at one counter, should not rudely refuse it at another. We decided to request service at Kress’s lunch counter.”²³ In training sessions over several days, Gaither and his peers studied nonviolence, the pamphlet CORE Rules for Action, and Reverend Martin Luther King’s Stride toward Freedom. 

  Gaither’s written account of events follows key moments captured in the MIRC footage:

  The first such demonstration started at 12:30 on March 1. Over 1,000 students marched through the streets of Orangeburg with signs saying: “All Sit or All Stand,” “Segregation is Obsolete,” “No Color Line in Heaven,” and “Down With Jim Crow.” . . . Not long after reaching the main street, the marchers were met by a contingent of state police who requested identification of leaders and asked that the signs be taken down. The group leaders were informed that they would be held responsible for any outbreak of violence and that if this occurred, they would be charged with inciting to riot. There was no violence. Only two persons were arrested, and these were not participants.²⁴

  The growing student demonstrations in Orangeburg and South Carolina presented vexing challenges for local and state leaders who claimed their control of law and order was slipping away. The large demonstration on March 1, 1960, prompted S. Clyde Fair, mayor of Orangeburg, to issue a statement forbidding future marches without permits.

  We regret that the situation in Orangeburg has led to a public demonstration in the form of marching students apparently designed to force integration of services to all races at the lunch counter of a local store. . . . As far as we can determine, this student demonstration is the outgrowth of a movement engineered by outside non-Southern organizations to force integration of lunch counter services and to foment troubles that might be used to influence the current Senate debate in Washington on the so-called Civil Rights bill.²⁵

  The mayor asserted that the new measures were urgently needed to prevent “an outbreak of rowdyism should someone lose his temper.” He stated, “Therefore, as mayor and member of Council responsible for the preservation of law and order, I have ordered the police not to allow another such demonstration in the city of Orangeburg."²⁶

  The historical record of Orangeburg student demonstrations is enhanced by the silent two minutes and forty-seven seconds of footage in the MIRC archive. Originally misidentified as student demonstrations from March 15, 1960, the footage outtakes offer a compelling portrait of what transpired when students departed the campuses of Claflin and South Carolina State.²⁷

  The footage is likely the first documented television recording of McDew, one of the principal organizers of the early Orangeburg movement, who several weeks later became a founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Raleigh, North Carolina. Born in Massillon, Ohio, in 1938, McDew arrived on the South Carolina State campus in 1959. After experiencing the violence of the South’s rigid Jim Crow laws and customs, he agreed to lead the Orangeburg student movement.²⁸

  Orangeburg Newsfilm Annotations

  00:02–0:12     African American male students walking in dress clothes along sidewalk, pan right to students walking down dirt path on grass hill to cross train tracks, evidently to join march. Some look right into the camera. 

   

  0:13–0:14     Claflin University campus entrance sign.

   

  0:15–0:18     South Carolina State campus entrance sign. 

   

  0:18–0:22     Line of students on sidewalks on downtown Orangeburg streets. Law enforcement is in distance. 

   

  0:23–0:31     Close view of students passing by in columns walking on streets. 

   

  0:32–1:05     Different location, 365 Russell Street, students walking on streets, pan to left, SLED Chief J. P. Strom and other uniformed (Chief Hall) and plainclothes officers (possibly Harry C. Walker, Governor Hollings’s legal aide) block their path and approach them. Charles “Chuck” McDew in the lead, dressed in a striped blazer, with a tall student next to him. Cut to side view of Strom blocking path of students and questioning McDew, who is speaking to a city officer in uniform. Cut to three-quarter-angle shot of McDew and angle of police chief and Strom. Lower to shot of chief’s and McDew’s hands, McDew opening wallet to show identification or permit. Cut to close side shot of students in columns behind McDew and pan right to show close shots of more faces. This segment is filmed near Fersner Hardware store, 335 Russell Street.

   

  1:05–1:13     Line of uniformed state law enforcement officers in a traffic island. Cut at 1:09 to students walking on sidewalk under gaze of uniformed police officer. Pan to right shows a line of students. Cut to shot of a Kress store sign. This segment is filmed at the corner of Russell and Middleton Streets.

   

  1:14–1:24     Male student with hand raised at street crossing to guide marchers, first in line with woman beside him. At light change, long columns of students cross the street. Note a tall male student has his sign held down. This segment is filmed on Russell Street near a Belk-Hudson store.

   

  1:25–1:35     Police officer in uniform wrestles an older white man in a suit while a line of students look on, stopped in their march in front of the Fischer Rexall Pharmacy, located at 196 Russell Street. The camera looks over the shoulder of an African American man watching from across the street. Other officers run to the white man, and the group wrestles him to the ground as students clear additional space on the sidewalk. At 1:33 a pistol flies from the man’s body, and a uniformed officer picks it up immediately. An African American police officer is present. No documentation has been located to clarify what transpired in this scene beyond a brief mention.²⁹

   

  1:40–1:45     Different location, columns of students walking side by side. Close shot from right of students walking to the right, facing camera as they walk. The remainder of this footage appears to come from Montgomery, Alabama, where a thousand students marched from the Alabama State College campus to the capitol.³⁰

   

  1:45–1:47     Different location, residential neighborhood, shot from car driving along the street, students walking away from camera to the right. Possibly two police officers walking to the side of students. 

   

  1:47–1:55     Farther along same street, now commercial/warehouse district, long columns of students walking on sidewalk. Camera now stopped, not moving in car. 

   

  1:55–2:00     Distant shot of City Hall, Greek revival–style white building with dome and columns. Low-angle shot as female students walk between camera and City Hall. 

   

  2:01–2:22     Students massed in front of City Hall. Camera angle from elevated angle in City Hall looking down on students. Cut to wider-angle shot of students. Cut right to wider angle, showing crowd of more than three hundred students. Cut to shot of City Hall dome. 

   

  2:23–2:29     Ground-level shot across lawn to students walking on sidewalk, from right to left of frame. Three men, likely officers, watch from across the street in the distance. 

   

  Blank to 2:47.

   

  The students’ plan for greater public attention and scrutiny of Jim Crow practices succeeded as they attracted news coverage in South Carolina. Clearly the demonstrations and the subsequent media attention sparked considerable alarm among white citizens and elected officials. On March 5, 1960, George F. Coleman, a solicitor and lawyer based in Winnsboro, wrote a five-page letter to Governor Hollings outlining his reaction to the escalating cases of student protests in Rock Hill, Columbia, and Orangeburg.

  Almost daily, now, we hear on the radio, see on television, or read in the newspapers of well organized negro demonstrations designed to implement what is apparently a plan which is state-wide in scope. I am certain that you fully appreciate the extreme racial tensions which result from such activity in the unusual difficulties experienced by our law enforcement people. I’m afraid our effort to abate these demonstrations has achieved little success. Events of the past several days would indicate that the demonstrations, instead of lessening, are increasing geographically and in intensity. I believe our failure to control these local situations is due to the novelty of the many problems incident to the demonstrations and the inadequacy of the law of our state to abate the causes of these problems. 

   

  This is a lengthy letter and I apologize for the volume of words, but I have deep convictions about what is happening to us now unless these demonstrations are curbed I am convinced that we are witnessing the beginning of the end of segregation as we know it.³¹

  The MIRC footage provides a visual narrative of critical scenes that deepened Coleman’s anxiety about the “end of segregation.” Undoubtedly, Gaither and his peers strategically used television news to their advantage as they illuminated the stark racial boundaries that impacted nearly every facet of life in the Jim Crow South. The media attention also sparked greater participation among students. Despite facing a spate of negative attacks, public admonitions, and an antipicketing ordinance in Orangeburg, Gaither noted that “some 1,000 Claflin and South Carolina State students” attended training sessions to prepare for future protests.

  Gaither observed: “After the March 1 demonstration, the lunch counters were closed for two weeks. With a view to strengthening our local movement and broadening it on a statewide basis, the South Carolina Student Movement Association was established. I was named chairman of the Orangeburg branch. We initiated a boycott of stores whose lunch counters discriminate.”³²

  Two weeks after the March 1 demonstration, the student struggle in Orangeburg captured the lead headline and photograph in the New York Times: “350 Negro Student Demonstrators Held in South Carolina Stockade.”³³ According to Gaither:

  March 15 was the day of the big march—the one in which 350 students landed in the stockade. The lunch counters had reopened the previous day and a sit-in was planned in addition to the march. Governor Hollings had asserted that no such demonstration would be tolerated. Regarding us, he said: “They think they can violate any law, especially if they have a Bible in their hands: our law enforcement officers have their Bibles too.” 

   

  Of course, we were violating no law with our peaceful demonstration. As for the law enforcement officers having their Bibles, they may have them at home, but what they had in their hands the day of our demonstration were tear gas bombs and fire hoses, which they used indiscriminately. The weather was sub-freezing, and we were completely drenched with the water from the hoses.³⁴

  When John Brehl, a white journalist for the Toronto Daily Star, toured Orangeburg, he visited with a local white leader who described the student protests as the “most frightening thing I have ever seen.” Brehl observed, “There is something awesome about these Orangeburg boys and girls who have pledged themselves to take blows without returning them and yield to an arrest without a fight.” When he interviewed McCollum, the Methodist minister noted: “Sometimes I think the white man really thinks we are a different kind of human being. He doesn’t seem to understand us; he doesn’t realize how many times the human spirit is murdered every day.”³⁵

  Photojournalist Cecil J. Williams

  Cecil J. Williams, a classmate of Gaither’s at Claflin College, witnessed the student demonstrations as both a participant and a documentarian. Trained in photography before he attended high school, Williams was a leading African American journalist in his hometown of Orangeburg. Typically, he received advanced notice of NAACP events from activists such as James Sulton, McCollum, and Newman. Usually equipped with two cameras, Williams attended preliminary briefings with students, then joined them in the march lines. During one demonstration in 1960, he recalled, “Highway patrolmen actually picked me up in the air, onto the patrol car, took my camera from me and exposed my film.” In late February, a Columbia reporter observed, “A negro accompanying the group began taking pictures of the sitdown as soon as the demonstration began.” The unidentified photographer was very likely Williams. On March 1, 1960, Williams closely followed his classmates and captured their protest walk through the city.³⁶ Today his collection of negative images from the 1960s provides a rich complement to the moving image archives and stands as “a vivid testament to the people who gave much of their lives in the struggle for freedom, justice, and equality.”³⁷

  March 14, 1960, Columbia, South Carolina: Bouie

  On the day the large student demonstration caught Orangeburg law enforcement and political officials off guard, the local Times and Democrat ran a short article, “Two Arrested in Columbia Demonstration.” It noted that Simon Bouie of Allen University was the secretary of the “Student Movement Assn., an organization of Negro college students formed to protest segregation policies.”³⁸ Earlier in the month, Bouie and approximately fifty students from Allen University and Benedict College conducted the first sit-in protests in Columbia at the Woolworth and S. H. Kress stores. The next day, five hundred students followed suit and staged protests at other establishments in the heart of the city’s commercial district. 

  The MIRC newsfilm of the larger march, titled Allen and Benedict students demonstrate on Main Street, Columbia—outtakes, has more than a minute of footage documenting young African American men and women siting in at the Woolworth’s lunch counter at the corner of Hampton and Main Streets. Just as soon as the students take their seats, white waitresses begin removing condiments. The camera quickly turns to another set of booths where a white man in a light-colored trench coat can be seen carefully guarding his camera. A waitress places a “This Section Closed” sign on the counter. In the next segment, Simon Bouie can be seen sitting at the lunch counter writing with a book before him. For just a few seconds, the side profile of a gentleman with a camera (likely Covington, filming for the Charlotte station) appears in the frame. Another white photographer is seen passing through the crowd, holding his camera to his chest. Reverend David Carter and Reverend Moses Javis, students at Benedict College, are filmed talking while seated. The students and a tall white man wearing a hat and holding a camera exit the building on Main Street. A few minutes later, walkers—including Simon Bouie—can be seen in front of the Kress store.³⁹

  Weeks earlier, Bouie, the head of the Allen University NAACP chapter, traveled with his twin brother and other students to Greensboro, where they conferred with friends at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical University who were involved in the downtown sit-ins. “We talked to them, you know, and they were telling us that it was time for us to do something. . . . I think that’s where I got my inspiration, from them, and we stayed and talked to them the whole afternoon about their strategies and how they kind of organized. . . . I knew I had to do something. If they could do it, then we could do it,” Bouie recalled. Within days of the March 2 and 3 protests, the South Carolina Student Movement Association (SCSMA) was established, and it received a strong endorsement from the South Carolina Council on Human Relations (SCCHR). The council described the sit-ins as “understandable protest against continued unequal treatment in the use of public facilities and services.”⁴⁰

  During this formative moment, obvious misgivings and concerns were evident. Later during the afternoon of March 3, Bouie and his peers drafted and circulated a formal letter to city officials, journalists, and law enforcement officers. While the letter pledged to forgo further public sit-ins “with the hope and prayer of the achievement of first-class and full American citizenship,” the students maintained their opposition to “unfair, inequitable, discriminatory treatment at public and transportation services patronized by Negroes. . . . We as students fully understand that freedom has a price tag on it and that those who wish to be free must be willing to suffer and pay the penalty.”⁴¹

  On the Benedict College campus, Carter, a military veteran, and his peers obviously disagreed with some of the sentiments shared in Bouie’s letter. Carter saw no room for caution and sought to capitalize on the growing student movement by staging a large rally on the grounds of the South Carolina State House. Clearly unnerved by the prospect, Governor Hollings conducted a televised press conference where he delivered a blistering attack against the sit-ins and their organizers. He warned students at Benedict College and Allen University that they would be arrested if they participated in a planned “pilgrimage” to the State House on March 11. “We will not tolerate any such pilgrimage, assemblage, or demonstration at the state capital building or anywhere else in South Carolina,” Hollings declared. The governor ridiculed “hot-headed student leaders and confused lawyers” who were wrongly influenced by “outside, selfish, antagonist groups.” He added:

  This we will not tolerate. We have sufficient evidence, in my judgment, from incidents in Montgomery, Nashville, Chattanooga, and other cities that show that regardless of the purpose, groupings together, parades, pilgrimages, sit-downs, silent marches, or whatever they may be characterized, are explosive in nature. We shall not allow such explosive situations to develop in South Carolina.⁴²

  As student activists and the governor clashed, South Carolina’s attorney general, Daniel R. McLeod, made his views of NAACP quite clear. He said the organization “thrives on dissension, turmoil and strife” and had “fallen in step with communistic aims.” In an address before the Fellowship Society in Charleston on March 9, McLeod said NAACP “was conceived in a spirit of hatred and vengeance. . . . We are a great people, and we must remain a great people. Unfortunately, every dog has its fleas and we have our share.”⁴³

  Ultimately, SCSMA called off the protest demonstration at the State House. Carter observed, “Our own governor of South Carolina is the victim of an acute tension attack, simply because students planned a peaceful freedom pilgrimage to the State House on Saturday morning.” He indicated that the march was suspended “because we are law abiding citizens and not hoodlums or gangsters who will have to be met with brass and guns. . . . We will be back.”⁴⁴

  Within days, Carter, Bouie, and their colleagues were back downtown. Bouie recalls the open letter to the mayor and police chief as a strategic move so the city officials would not be prepared with police already on the scene for their sit-ins. On the morning of March 14, 1960, Carter, Javis, Bouie, Talmadge Neal, and others (as seen in the footage) entered Eckerd’s drugstore, located at 1530 Main Street. Bouie and Neal, childhood best friends, took seats in a booth in the lunch counter area and waited to be served. After refusing to leave their seats when instructed by local police, they were arrested, charged with criminal trespass, and convicted. 

  Bouie and Neal entered the store at 11:02 a.m. on March 14, 1960, and took their seats at 11:04, according to Bouie’s court testimony. They had books in their hands and sat for about fifteen minutes. Dr. Guy E. Malone, the store manager, later testified, “We didn’t want to serve them.” When the police attempted to move Bouie from his seat, he is accused of saying, “Take your hands off me.” According to arresting officers, Bouie started clapping and asked, “I wonder how many they’re going to arrest tomorrow.”⁴⁵

  The March 15, 1960, issue of the Charlotte Observer carried the headline “Two Negro Students Put Under Arrest” and reported:

  Two 20-year-old Negro college students were arrested Monday when they and two others sought to obtain service at an all-white lunch counter in a Columbia drug store. . . . Simon Bouie of Allen University was charged with breach of peace and resisting arrest; and Talmadge Neal of Benedict College with breach of the peace. David Carter, a Benedict theology student and president of the South Carolina Student Movement Association, and an unidentified fourth Negro, were not arrested.⁴⁶

  The archival television footage clears up the missing identification of Javis, who is seen exiting the store’s front entrance with Carter. Identified by a print journalist as the chairman of SCSMA, Carter told journalists that he and his peers would seek service “until we get an arrest. That’s what we’re here for.”⁴⁷ According to the Charlotte Observer, “two newsmen were forcibly ejected from the store for taking pictures of the incident.” Portions of what transpired inside of Eckerd’s are clearly shown in the film footage. It is likely that one of the reporters is Joseph Barnett of the State.⁴⁸

  Years later, Bouie recalled the march from Allen University to Eckerd’s. He was surprised when his classmates remained outside on Main Street as he and Neal entered and sat in a lunch counter booth. “Once Talmadge and I walked in, they stood at the door. I don’t know why they did that. I thought they were behind us.”

  Here were all these white people looking at us strangely, like they were going to really kill us, you know what I mean, or shoot us, I think that we got a little frightened, we got a little frightened, and he [Talmadge] said, “What are you going to do?” And I said, “I can’t run. I guess we’re just going to have to stay here until somebody comes.” We had the courage to sit there. And when the sheriff came in and asked us to move, we said, “We’re not going to move. We have a right to be here.” I was about a hundred and twenty-five pounds at that time, and he kind of grabbed me, and I kind of resisted.

  In Bouie’s trial testimony, he reminded the court of the media who were on the premises documenting the incident:

  I couldn’t have run. People were there looking at me. There were reporters at the time at the front door. I couldn’t do anything but go with the gentleman, and the only remark I said to the gentleman, after he pulled me by my belt, I said to him: “That’s all right, Sheriff, I’ll come on” because I didn’t want to make any scene because I knew the reporters were there and I didn’t want anything to even look violent. Those were the only remarks I made to him after he pulled me by my belt.⁴⁹

  According to the arresting officer, Shep Griffith, Bouie remarked, “Don’t hold me, I’m not going anywhere.” As they moved closer to the front entrance, Griffith said Bouie pushed back and remarked, “Take your hands off me, you don’t have to hold me.” As he did so, a woman in the store screamed, “Get him out, get him out.”⁵⁰

  Within hours of Bouie’s arrest and release on bail, he reported to his shoe-shining job at the barbershop of Joshua Martin, an African American who catered to wealthy white clients. As Bouie polished shoes, the evening news played on the television. And as fate would have it, an episode appeared about the Eckerd sit-in with footage of a student being escorted to a police car. Bouie remembered, “A white man looked down and said: ‘That boy looks like that boy up on that television. Look up there, Josh, can’t you see?’” Martin was quick to respond: “Best not be. Best not be. No, he wouldn’t be in here. I wouldn’t have those kind of troublemakers in my place.”

  After the arrest, Bouie rightly worried about the reaction of his family and the Allen University leadership. “You know we had a lot of people at that time who really felt we had no business opening lunch counters. One of the things my grandmother said to me, ‘You’re going to bring the wrath of God down on me and my family.’” Mrs. Bouie certainly had reasons to be concerned. Her home address and that of the Neals appeared in local newspapers. Later, her teaching position in the small town of Mullins was threatened when local school leaders discovered her grandson’s civil rights activism. 

  The arrests of Bouie and Neal, captured on camera on March 14, 1960, set the stage for an important United States Supreme Court case, Bouie v. Columbia. On March 15, 1960, colleagues of Bouie and Neal were arrested at another drugstore only blocks from Eckerd’s. The resulting case, Barr v. Columbia, also made its way to the Supreme Court.

  On June 22, 1964, the United States Supreme Court ruled on a set of selected sit-in cases—just three days after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Barr and Bouie were two of five sit-in cases decided on that day. These decisions provided a legal foundation for undermining segregation in public space and upholding the rights of protestors. In Justice William O. Douglas’s concurring opinion in the case of Bell v. Maryland, he wrote:

  Segregation of Negroes in the restaurants and lunch counters of parts of America is a relic of slavery. It is a badge of second-class citizenship. It is a denial of the privilege and immunity of national citizenship and of the equal protection guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment against abridgment by the States. When the state police, the state prosecutor, and the state courts unite to convict Negroes for renouncing that relic of slavery, the “State” violates the Fourteenth Amendment.

  Bouie Newsfilm Annotations

  WIS-TV News Story 60-5011

  Filmed on March 14, 1960

  Silent

  0:00–0:11     Simon Bouie (front). Man opens door as Griffith escorts Bouie out, book in hand. On the far left, a white woman is yelling. In published records, a woman is reported to yell: “Get him out! Get him out!” Bouie is directed to an unmarked car. Belk’s store is in the background. As Griffin is standing at the door, Neal is taken to the car. Bouie can be seen in the car waving his hands. 

   

  0:11–0:15     Talmadge Neal (back).

   

  0:19–0:24    Bouie, wider shot (front).

   

  0:24–0:28     Neal, wider shot (front). Man with a moving camera at 0:27.

   

  0:28–0:36     Neal (back), same footage as 0:11 but longer.

   

  0:37–0:45     Bouie, Neal, officer in back, tall officer in plainclothes driving to city jail. 

   

  0:48–1:05     Inside store, removal of white man with two cameras, man in suit blocks camera from front, chain has been extended. Sign reads “No trespassing.” A man can be seen with two cameras. 

   

  1:06–1:17     Outside store, scan from door to Javis with Carter observing; storefront with man in suit inside looking out, smiling.

   

  1:18–1:28     Two older men (forties or fifties) in suit coats, hats, with glasses outside store, unidentified white man looking in, unidentified Black man looking toward street, white man allowed in as door unlocked. Camera operator visible in the window at 1:27.

   

  1:29–1:42     White woman inside store holding handwritten sign up to camera, pan to “Closed” sign, camera operator and others reflected in the glass door.

   

  1:43–1:57     Inside store with police (city, state, detectives) interviewing Carter and Carter walking away after conclusion of interview, police and store staff looking toward camera. Court testimony identified Carter and another man, presumably Javis, as entering the store with Bouie and Neal; at 1:42, store is closed. Bouie’s memory of a large crowd of students marching behind them might be conflated with that of a march of students a week earlier. 

   

  When Bouie reflected upon his experiences decades later, he recalled meetings with colleagues around the state, the challenges of coordinating events, and the intense opposition he felt from African American and white citizens alike. Despite his grandmother’s misgivings and his own cautious actions, he later regarded his protests as critical steps that “sharpened the movement.” He recalled, “We sort of kept the fire going.” Writing in November 2020, Bouie observed: “As a college junior at Allen University all I wanted was equality; never did I imagine my actions would end up in the United States Supreme Court in Bouie vs. City of Columbia. But we were tired of asking for freedom. We were tired of the injustices and inequity.”⁵¹

  Following the arrests of Bouie and Neal at Eckerd’s and Benedict students at the Taylor Street Pharmacy the following day, the South Carolina Protest Movement Commission circulated a flyer.⁵² Addressed to teachers, the headline read, “DON’T GO IN THERE!”

  BEWARE of Eckerd Drug Stores and of TAYLOR STREET PHARMACY near COLUMBIA TOWNSHIP AUDITORIUM. Students jerked out of TAYLOR STREET PHARMACY and ECKERD’S and JAILED are now being tried for TRESPASSING and DISTURBING THE PEACE. Their most courteous service always extended in other departments turned into demands for arrests at lunch counters.

   

  If BLACK AMERICANS are to have TOMORROW and the Next Day what WHITE AMERICANS have had YESTERDAY, DAY BEFORE YESTERDAY, AND THE DAY BEFORE THAT, WE MUST LET OUR DOLLARS AND OUR VOTES DO OUR TALKING.

  March 2, 1961, Columbia, South Carolina: Edwards

  For much of the fall of 1960, sit-ins and demonstrations in Columbia waned, but student leaders were anxious to reignite earlier protest campaigns. On February 5, 1961, SCCHR held a series of workshops at Allen University called “The Role of the Student in Achieving Human Rights.” A featured speaker was Ella Baker, a leading organizer with NAACP, SCLC, and the newly formed Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. Within days of Baker’s event, student demonstrations resumed in Columbia. 

  At the time, Bouie was the president of the Student Committee on Human Rights at Allen. As demonstrations unfolded, he noted that Allen did not participate in the latest marches and firmly believed that demonstrations should be “conceived, planned and led by students in the immediate community.” He noted that he and his Allen peers

  deplore the lack of leadership our students have received thus far from Columbia Negro adults, none of whom has yet had the courage to fight this battle they urge us young people to fight. . . . We know that further sit-ins can only mean enrichment for lawyers and city and county treasuries. However, there are other more effective approaches, and we’re presently working on these.⁵³

  Despite Bouie’s reservations, other college and high school students were preparing for a frontal assault on segregated facilities across the South. In Greenville a regional NAACP meeting was held at the Springfield Baptist Church. More than one hundred high school and college members attended workshops conducted by Herbert L. Wright and Julie Wright, the southeastern youth field secretary. In keynote remarks, A. Leon Lowry, president of the Florida chapter of NAACP, described the growing demonstrations as “a dramatic way of bringing into focus the deep and profound sense of dissatisfaction the Negro has in America.”⁵⁴ Days later, on February 21, 1961, students in Columbia faced arrests as they staged sit-ins at Eckerd’s and Woolworth’s.⁵⁵

  With students forging strong protests in Columbia, Orangeburg, Rock Hill, and other cities, plans evolved to stage what Newman penned in his calendar as the “March on State Capitol.”⁵⁶ On the morning of March 2, 1961, Irving McNayr, Columbia’s city manager, received a phone call at 10:30 from Columbia police chief L. L. Campbell informing him of a meeting at Zion Baptist Church, located at 801 Washington Street, at the intersection with Gadsden. Upon arriving at the church at 10:45 a.m., he saw people entering the basement. According to McNayr, he spoke with a guarded David Carter about what was transpiring. 

  Transported by buses and cars from across the state, hundreds of high school and college students gathered in Zion. After praying, singing, and hearing words of advice about nonviolent action, the students dispersed from the historic church in clusters of fifteen and marched to the South Carolina capitol six blocks away. Some carried signs, such as “You may jail our bodies, but not our souls,” “I am proud to be a Negro,” and “Down with segregation.” After reaching the capitol grounds, the students began to march and sing protest songs. 

  Dorris D. Wright, a student from Sterling High School in Greenville, president of the Youth Council of the NAACP Greenville Branch, and secretary of the State Youth Council, joined her friends for the journey. She recalled, “When we met at the church, we were told that we were going to march to the capitol and that we would be nonviolent. We should march straight ahead. We would not be distracted by the crowds that may be standing on the side of the street. We walked from Zion Church to the capitol.” Before departing the church, Wright and her colleagues made a series of posterboard signs, which are clearly seen in photographs. Her sign read “Give us our God given rights.” In the archival television newsfilm footage, the signs are not visible. However, Wright and her poster appear in a photo of a student group starting the march from Zion.⁵⁷

  As Wright and peers encountered jeers and taunts in their walk from Zion, McNayr moved to the State House grounds and communicated with Harry C. Walker, the legal aide to Governor Hollings. The students walked around the State House for upward of forty-five minutes. More than three hundred students and adult advisors wanted

  to submit a protest to the citizens of South Carolina, along with the Legislative Bodies of South Carolina, our feelings and our dissatisfaction with the present condition of discriminatory actions against Negroes, in general, and to let them know that we were dissatisfied and that we would like for the laws which prohibited Negro privileges in this State to be removed.

  “So we quietly march to the capitol,” Wright remembers. “And then we were asked to leave. We didn’t leave. And we continued to sing and go around the circle in front of the capitol. And one of the songs that we were singing, I remember was ‘We Shall Not be Moved.’” With her photograph prominently featured in the newspaper, Wright was deeply concerned about her family’s well-being.⁵⁸

  When the first group arrived on the grounds around 12:35 p.m., Walker informed McDew that the grounds could not be used for demonstrations. McDew, the leader of the first group of fifteen students, listened and then asked, “May I pass?” Permitted to pass, the group then entered the grounds at the Main Street entrance, directly in front of the State House central staircase. They then headed west on Gervais Street along the front of the State House, where they again attempted to enter the State House grounds. After taking ten steps, they were placed under arrest. 

  Upon reaching the grounds of the State House, Wright recalled Carter preaching: “We are protesting the indignity and inhumanity of segregation. . . . Do you want to be free? . . . Do you want to go to jail for your rights?” When asked to disperse, Carter told the students. “I don’t think that’s right. . . . But let your conscience be your guide.” And with that, the students broke out in song. They began clapping, dancing, and singing “We Shall Not Be Moved” and “The Star-Spangled Banner.” After McNayr asked Carter to dismiss the groups, officials alleged that Carter “harangued each group with a religious chanting type of voice.” Clearly encouraged by Carter, as seen in the archival footage, the original planned silent protest gave rise to clapping, dancing, and singing of religious and patriotic songs. 

  After reading reports of the State House arrests and hearing directly from Newman and other colleagues on the ground, Roy Wilkins, the head of NAACP, sent a telegram to Hollings.

  We feel these arrests unjustified. The rights of free speech, peaceful assembly and petition of redress of grievances are all guaranteed by the constitution. All over the nation various groups are protesting to state legislatures, some demonstrating in front of their capitals in support of or against some issue. Democracy is compromised and our nation’s image blurred all over the world by this unwarranted abuse of police power and depriving citizens of their constitutional right to assemble and protest against discrimination.⁵⁹

  In Newman’s annual report on December 7, 1961, he observed:

  News releases on NAACP activities, and Press Conferences are other methods that have been employed to bring about a public awareness and appreciation of the NAACP progress. The State Conference President, Church Committee chairman, and Legal Redress Committee chairman have been prolific writers and speakers discriminating the program and points of view of the Association. Press, radio and television facilities in South Carolina have been utilized as media of expression.⁶⁰

  Many details of the State House demonstration were captured by print reporters, photographers, and television news crews who were alerted, with little lead time, by NAACP officials. In a March 1, 1961, message to Gloster Current, Herbert J. Wright, NAACP’s youth leader, acknowledged that he received a call from Newman for assistance with a “mass student rally” scheduled for the following day on the “steps of the Capitol at Columbia.” Wright reported, “Rev. Newman stated that he is expecting several thousand students from the NAACP Youth and College units throughout South Carolina to converge on Columbia and participate in this rally.”⁶¹

  On the day of the State House demonstration, Julie Wright, a graduate of Claflin University, relayed a press release by telephone as the march unfolded. “Two hundred students from Greenville, Spartanburg, Charleston, Florence, Camden, Orangeburg, South Carolina, march in single file down the street in front of the Capital of South Carolina. They were given 15 minutes to disperse and leave. A carload of students have already been arrested. The students are still continuing to march.”⁶²

  On the day following the State House demonstration, Herbert Wright and Ruby Hurley called a press conference at Zion Baptist Church after the final students were released from jail. They contended that the students faced a “double standard of justice,” and they called for an economic boycott during the Easter holiday. In a prepared statement designed for the press, NAACP officials noted that the demonstrators were “protesting the antiquated and unjust pattern of segregation as it is supported by the constitution and laws of South Carolina.”⁶³

  Barnett observed, “The entire move had an out-of-state flavor to it; a New York City newspaper had information about the planned demonstration hours before the March actually took place.”⁶⁴ In fact, James Edwards, Carter, Newman, and countless others were natives of South Carolina.

  The resulting case, Edwards v. South Carolina, reached the United States Supreme Court for oral arguments in December 1962. The arguments were crafted, in part, by Columbia attorneys Perry and Jenkins. Then, on February 25, 1963, in an 8–1 decision, the court affirmed the peaceful student demonstrations and concluded that the 1961 arrests of participants violated “constitutionally protected rights of free speech, free assembly and freedom to petition for redress of their grievances.” Opening the door to continued demonstrations nationwide, the court’s landmark decision ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment forbids a state “to make criminal the peaceful expression of unpopular views.” The Edwards v. South Carolina ruling provided an important legal precedent for future civil rights demonstrations around the country. Perry later described the case as “one of the pearls in First Amendment jurisprudence.” 

  Among the 187 arrested were NAACP leader and future South Carolina state senator Reverend I. DeQuincey Newman; Dr. B. J. Glover, the pastor of Charleston’s Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church; future United States Congressman James E. Clyburn; future South Carolina state representative Leola Robinson-Simpson; Charles Barr; and Charles McDew, a founder of SNCC. “We felt that our state capitol building belongs to the people and that any time individuals desired to march on that building, they should have the right to do so,” Robinson-Simpson recalled.⁶⁵

  The first named defendant, James Edwards Jr., had arrived at Benedict College fresh from a short stint in New York City. A native of Ninety-Six, South Carolina, Edwards met Newman during an address in Antisdel Chapel. “I came to Benedict College not knowing that I was going to be in a movement,” the career educator remarked decades later. “We wanted to let the leaders of South Carolina know that we were determined to fight for justice and equal opportunity. . . . We wanted to send that message directly to the people in the Statehouse.”⁶⁶

  Frederick Hart, a student at the University of South Carolina and the only white participant arrested in the protest, is seen in the footage sitting in jail with African American students. Within hours of his arrest, his photograph appeared in newspapers across the region. Roundly ridiculed and harassed, Hart was branded a “highly emotional campus liberal who sets out to rearrange the thinking of an entire region.” Seemingly undaunted by the threats, he penned a letter in the University of South Carolina student newspaper, the Daily Gamecock, and wrote a column that was carried by UPI. He noted that he had no premeditated plan to join the demonstration.

  I felt like I had to shake hands with the arrested demonstrators because I was in sympathy with them. I really had no part in the demonstration, but one of the police officers forced me to answer whether or not I was in sympathy with it. . . . Though many of the students at the university don’t care one way or another, I would prefer to go to jail to carry out my protest rather than have anyone post bond for me. When the officer brought me to jail, I asked one of the Negro students to loan me this NAACP button. If I wasn’t a member of the NAACP before, I am now.⁶⁷

  Hart’s commitment to the civil rights struggle sparked protracted debate on the campus. Some white students encouraged their peers to “fight hard to preserve segregation of the races.” A fellow student retorted: “This boy was stepping over the bounds that a stranger to a place should observe. He should have kept his nose and the chip on his shoulder out of our local problems.”⁶⁸

  Convinced that he had no future on the Carolina campus in the face of such vehement opposition, Hart departed from the university within a week of his arrest and went on to a distinguished career in art. In the Daily Gamecock, he wrote: “Sympathizing is not enough. I beg you to stand up for what you believe is right. The situation is appallingly unjust. To let it go on would be defeating the whole purpose of democracy. If you are ever going to stand up, stand up now.”⁶⁹

  Within two weeks of the Supreme Court’s February 25, 1963, decision, about half of the original Freedom Marchers, their parents, and their attorneys returned to Zion Baptist for a Sunday afternoon celebration program, where participants were given certificates saluting their “courageous and unselfish service in the area of human rights and the determination to secure equality of opportunity in behalf of the underprivileged.”⁷⁰

  With members of the press positioned in one of the church’s choir lofts, clearly visible in Cecil Williams’s photographs of the event, Newman spoke of the significance of the ruling and recounted what had transpired two years earlier. “We were arrested, herded like cattle, forced to walk to the Richland jail where we were locked up, not because we had done any violence nor broken any laws, but being black, the judgment of South Carolina law officers was that we had no rights of free speech, free assembly, and freedom to petition for the redress of grievances.” Referring to the Supreme Court’s ruling as “an epochal decision,” Newman asserted, “We intend to march again and again and again, until the officials of South Carolina, from the governor down and from the lowliest magistrate up, recognizes the equality of men under the law, regardless of race, creed, color or previous condition of servitude.”⁷¹

  The legal significance and historical interpretation of the Edwards ruling are enhanced by the remaining archival footage that shows what transpired on March 1, 1961. The WIS-TV collection contains a one-minute silent clip labeled Integration Demonstrations at Statehouse. Similar footage—with significant variations—is part of the NBC national archives. The original MIRC content description read:

  Exterior; day: long shot rear crowd watching marchers on Gervais Street. Closeup two African-American men with white men around. Low medium shot marchers. Medium shot pan African-American man leading chant. Long shot marchers pass camera. Long shot pan Richland County jail. Interior: medium shot pan African-American and white men. Long shot crowd in courtroom.

  After the research of Columbia SC 63 and the Center for Civil Rights History and Research, the MIRC archival entry was expanded. 

  Integration demonstrations at State House—outtakes

  WIS-TV News Story 61-81

  Filmed on March 2, 1961.

  Silent

  00:55

  African-American students from Benedict College, Allen University and other schools march on State House grounds. This demonstration led to the U. S. Supreme Court case, Edwards v. South Carolina. David Carter speaks to reporters prior to the march. Marchers lined up on Gervais Street begin the walk around the State House. Flanked by police officers, the march progresses around the State House. Among those shown on film is Reverend I. DeQuincey Newman. Final sequences show some of the protesters in the County jail.

  
  In the first moments of the film, students assemble near Gervais and Main Streets; the Wade Hampton Hotel is in the background. As a wave of students come from the west and ascend a slight incline up Gervais Street in front of the State House, they are greeted by Carter and Reverend Saul Williams, students at the Starks School of Theology at Benedict College. As the students marched, lawmakers and staff stood on the steps of the State House and observed. Covington was present as a freelance journalist for WBTV in Charlotte. Alerted about the approaching march, he rushed to the scene. He appears in a UPI newswire photograph in front of the State House with his camera pointed toward Harry Walker and McDew.⁷²

  Meanwhile, Williams, the young African American photographer from Orangeburg, arrived at the capitol grounds. In advance of the demonstration, he received a message from Newman. “I walked around the entire state capitol and took pictures on each corner,” he recalled. “There were an enormous number of students. I shot the front part [of the capitol] on Main Street, the rear side, the side of the capitol. I was unaware of those others taking photographs.” Williams was fully mindful that NAACP leaders wanted to be sure that these efforts were being recorded and documented. 

  Edwards Newsfilm Annotations

  0:01–0:07     View from behind of a crowd of white people looking at something not visible. In this scene Harry C. Walker is speaking with David Carter, who is hidden by the crowd, and Saul Williams, who is partially obscured.

   

  0:08–0:15     MIRC Description: “David Carter speaks to reporters prior to the march.” 

  Benedict College theology student David Carter speaks to news reporters in front of the State House as Saul Williams listens in. Carter and Williams were student leaders of the march. Carter and Williams have small NAACP buttons on their lapels. Two reporters visible, both smoking. Three visible law enforcement officers, one in uniform, stand behind the pair and listen in. Someone in front of Carter and Williams, to the side of a reporter, draws their attention as Carter speaks. 

   

  0:15–0:22     “Marchers lined up on Gervais Street begin the walk around the State House.” 

  Saul Williams motions by swinging his arm to direct students walking in columns along Gervais Street. Students are dressed formally in dresses, skirts, or suits and ties. Sunglasses on several of the students. Marmac Hotel visible in background across the street. Clifford Rice, a student at Benedict College, Harold Bardonille, a founder of SNCC, and George Anderson, later a civil rights attorney in Aiken, South Carolina, are seen; at the end of this segment, Reverend Lennie Glover is briefly seen on the right. It appears that Glover is responsible for collecting protest placards from the participants. 

   

  0:22–0:28     David Carter waves his arm like a conductor to direct student singing of hymns and patriotic songs. The camera pans left to show Saul Williams also waving his arm to direct the singing. Looking on about fifteen feet away in a line to the right side of Carter are four young white men in shirtsleeves. Carter is joined by Glover, a divinity student at Benedict College. To Glover’s right about ten feet away is a uniformed male city police officer.

   

  0:28–0:33     “Flanked by police officers, the march progresses around the State House. Among those shown on film is Reverend I. DeQuincey Newman.” 

  Uniformed male city police officers walk to either side at the head of a column of student marchers led by three young women. About ten rows back on the left side of the column is NAACP State Conference Field Director Isaiah DeQuincey Newman, a Methodist minister. He is joined by Reverend Benjamin J. Glover, pastor of Emanuel AME Church, who is smiling as he marches. A female student holds her head down as she walks next to the police officer. Another young woman smiles and raises a clenched fist as she walks. One young man covers his face as he sees a television camera. Another young man waves his hand.

   

  0:34–0:48     “Final sequences show some of the protesters in the County jail.” 

   

  0:34–0:37     Exterior of Richland County Jail, a concrete building, man walking in front of building, tree budding in early spring. Camera pans left along exterior side of building, showing heavily barred, large windows. 

   

  0:38–0:46     Interior of jail with students seated on a long bench; camera pans right to show eight young men on the bench, six in suits and ties and two in sunglasses; the seventh student is white University of South Carolina student Frederick Hart. The person speaking with Hart is Thomas Hornsby. Neither student joined the court appeal. 

   

  0:47–0:54     Interior of courtroom, pretrial, with students mostly filling the seats. Three white uniformed law enforcement officers stand at rear door, two in city police uniforms. At the foreground of the frame, Carter, Glover, and a third student speak with a white man, likely the reporter from 0:08–0:15, distinguished by his beard and moustache. 

   

  0:49–0:55     “Final sequences show some of the protesters in the County jail.”

  Camera pans right to show two other white men, possibly other reporters. Students John Land and Harold Bardonille can be seen. Woman wearing a beanie and Henry Harris are standing in the courtroom aisle. Carter, Newman, Williams shown. The last frame shows Duke Missouri and James E. Clyburn.

  Conclusion: Stories Matter

  Speaking to a large room full of civil rights movement veterans in 2013, Congressman Clyburn said, “There’s so much, so much that this community—Columbia, Orangeburg, Rock Hill, Sumter—so much that we gave to this effort that you can’t find anywhere. To those who are here, we have north of seventy [movement veterans], and we need to take a little time and make sure that we fill in the gaps. There are a lot of gaps that we need to make sure that we fill in.”⁷³

  Ten years after the first message to my graduate assistant and many hours of exploration of the newsfilm archive with MIRC archivists Dr. Gregory Wilsbacher and Amy Meaney, we have worked to “fill in the gaps” as we document the civil rights activities of hundreds of South Carolinians. The “faceless force” of the movement displayed on television reports in the 1960s have become individuals with important memories to reconstruct and share. We have recovered their identities by sharing the newsfilm clips at public events and exhibitions and in conversations. We have interviewed several of the surviving participants and filmed interviews to expand the historical record beyond the time of the events. Some of the student demonstrators, including Clyburn, have gone on to write memoirs about their movement experiences. 

  In a 2022 interview, Charles Barr—one of those civil rights veterans—said the work in the intervening years to identify the people and acknowledge their work publicly and visibly “means that my children, grandchildren, and everyone else will see that they came from two people who had a thought of trying to do something and being strong and making it work.”⁷⁴
  
  A list of external links featured in this essay can be found here.⁷⁵
  
  A native of Augusta, Georgia, Dr. Bobby Donaldson serves as Associate Professor of History and the Executive Director of the Center for Civil Rights History and Research at the University of South Carolina-Columbia. He holds the James E. and Emily E. Clyburn Endowed Chair of Public Service and Civic Engagement. He received his undergraduate degree in History and African American Studies from Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT, and his Ph.D. in American History from Emory University. Professor Donaldson’s teaching and scholarship examine southern history and African American life and culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He also serves as the lead scholar for and director of Columbia SC 63, a documentary project that examines the struggle for civil rights and social justice in Columbia and around the state of South Carolina.
  
  Title Image: Orangeburg March, South Carolina Moving Image Research Collection (MIRC)
  
  “The Most Frightening Thing I Have Ever Seen”: Moving Images and the South Carolina Civil Rights Movement © 2025 by Bobby Donaldson is licensed under CC BY 4.0.
  
  The Journal of e-Media Studies is published by the Dartmouth Library.

• 1 2024-09-17T06:02:16+00:00 Remembering the Little Rock Central High Crisis: The Pryor Center’s Distinctive Insights 3 image_header 2025-01-07T19:44:35+00:00

  by Jay Barth

  Hendrix College
  
  Abstract

  The Little Rock Crisis and Its Legacy
  Political Memory and the Commemoration of the Little Rock Crisis
  The David and Barbara Pryor Center’s Collection
  Changing Memory of the Little Rock Crisis across Time
  The First Three Decades: The Success of Integration
  The Later Decades: The Voices of the Little Rock Nine and Less Optimism
  The Civil Rights Era, Political Memory, and Local Media

  One of the most well-known events of the civil rights movement involves the showdown between Arkansas state officials, particularly Governor Orval Faubus, and the federal government, led by President Dwight Eisenhower, over whether nine high school students should be allowed admission into Little Rock’s Central High School. The Central High Crisis—which played out across two full school years—resulted in the famous entry of the Little Rock Nine into Central High under protection of federal troops in September 1957, followed by a year-long closure of Little Rock schools by Governor Faubus in the ensuing academic year.

  The way these extraordinary events at Little Rock have been remembered has shifted across the six and a half decades since they occurred. This change in the “political memory” regarding the Central High Crisis has been evidenced in the regular moments of commemoration of its anniversary. The distinctive and multifaceted media collection held by the David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History at the University of Arkansas provides documentary evidence of these alterations in the telling of the Central High story. That shift in political memory has played out in three acts and involved a refocusing of the events away from the legal and political battles over the establishment of Little Rock Central High as a model of successful integration and toward the ramifications of the crisis on the lives of the nine students whose lives were forever impacted by it.

  The Little Rock Crisis and Its Legacy

  While Arkansas had a strong legacy in institutionalized racism tracing back to its origins, the middle of the twentieth century had exhibited some signs of moderation in state-backed racial discrimination as Governor Sid McMath (1949–1953) set a tolerant tone in race relations. In one of his first acts as governor, Orval Faubus—a McMath protégé—enlarged the State Committee of the state Democratic Party to add six Black members. Moreover, the immediate response to the 1954 and 1955 Brown decisions in Arkansas was hopeful, with two northwest Arkansas school districts (Charleston and Fayetteville) quickly desegregating voluntarily. The northeast community of Hoxie, which was much more racially diverse, also desegregated by vote of the school board, and the majority on that board held firm in its decision even in the face of active resistance from inside and outside the state.¹

  Then came the events at Little Rock Central High starting in 1957. Feeling pressure from segregationists, Governor Faubus opposed the Little Rock school board’s desegregation plan and appeared in chancery court to support a request for an injunction to halt desegregation, which was granted. When this injunction was overturned in federal court, Faubus ordered the Arkansas National Guard to seize the school and prevent the first nine Black students to enroll at Central—the “Little Rock Nine”—from entering. After a second federal court ordered the National Guard to withdraw and allow integration to proceed, hundreds of angry white agitators gathered on September 23, 1957, and hurled racist vulgarities at and threatened physical violence against the African American students. In the aftermath of the riotous behavior, President Eisenhower ordered in the 101st Airborne Infantry Division, under whose protection Central High was ultimately integrated. Though Governor Faubus always maintained that his actions were necessitated by his obligation to preclude violence, most analysts of the event suggest that Faubus was even more strongly motivated by his desire for reelection to an extraordinary third gubernatorial term to protect himself from attacks by ardent segregationists. While this political goal was achieved (followed by three additional successful reelections), Arkansas acquired an instant global identity as a state characterized by racism, violence, and demagoguery.²

  The Central High Crisis did not end with the headline-grabbing events of the fall of 1957, however. Across three legislative sessions, Governor Faubus lobbied the General Assembly to pass a flurry of laws to “protect” white Arkansans against the threat of integration. These included creation of a state Sovereignty Commission given broad authority to investigate groups and individuals seen as a threat to the sovereignty of the state because of their support for “encroachment by the federal government” in the aftermath of the Brown decision, the passage of legislation invading the private records of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Arkansas and prohibiting members from teaching or gaining political office, and a mandate that any blood donated be marked with the race of the donor and any person receiving a transfusion be notified of that race. Most important, the governor was given the power to close any school in which integration was being forced by the federal government (Act 4 of 1958). When the Supreme Court affirmed Arkansas’s duty to abide by the Brown decision in the landmark Cooper v. Aaron case in fall 1958, requiring the Little Rock school board to respect federal court decisions on desegregation, Faubus immediately closed the public high schools in Little Rock, creating the “lost year” in public education in the city. A spring 1959 purge by the conservative members of the school district’s board of directors of Little Rock teachers and staff thought to be supportive of integration led to recall votes of both militant segregationists and moderates on the board. The close vote in which moderates were retained and militants were removed ended the most intense period of the Central High Crisis.³

  However, the legacy of the Central High Crisis persisted for decades. The long legal odyssey of the desegregation of the Little Rock School District in the federal courts continued into the twenty-first century. Again and again, the district returned to federal district court to make the case that it had achieved “unitary” status and should be released from federal court oversight as a fully desegregated district. During the 2002 case in which the district ultimately was deemed unitary in a number of aspects, one witness for those opposing a unitary declaration—an African American Central High alum about to enroll at Amherst College—described the two institutions that existed simultaneously within the walls of Central High: “Central College,” where mostly white students take challenging courses, and “Central High,” where mostly African American students take distinctly less rigorous courses. The near half century of discord over the desegregation of the schools also affected the Little Rock metropolitan area by causing significant white flight to the surrounding suburban school districts.⁴

  Political Memory and the Commemoration of the Little Rock Crisis

  Major events like those in Little Rock in 1957–59 live on because of their historical importance, which leads to continued analysis by scholars, but also for their lingering power to shape perceptions of related topics today because of their place in the consciousness of rank-and-file citizens. This second role of significant historical events is often termed their “memory.” For instance, our collective memory of 9/11 may shape attitudes about future terrorist events or policies related to fighting terrorism, such as airport security, or our collective memory of the Wall Street crises of 1929 or 2008 may shape our current views on financial regulation. “What happens in daily social life is the reverse of H. G. Wells or Back to the Future: we do not travel in a machine to the past; the past travels (through a variety of cultural machines) to us.”⁵ Separate from a more objective historical account of events, “memory consists of the subjective, selective, and potentially unreliable accounts of the past told by those outside the academy and circulated in the media and popular culture.”⁶ As such, political memory is particularly susceptible to change across time.

  Many academic works examine memory and its relationship to key moments in American history, ranging from the death of Crispus Attucks to the Oklahoma City bombing.⁷ Perhaps the best model for such an analysis is Michael Schudson’s work on the Watergate scandal. Schudson argues that political memory is a mass phenomenon: “Memory is collective . . . it is not the sum of private, individual recollections, located in individual brains.”⁸ That said, the brains of individual humans have limited capability to resist such collective memory, almost as a form of peer pressure. As Schudson argues: “We do not remember the past just as we choose. In some respects . . . the past imposes itself on us.”⁹

  The framing of collective memory of an event such as Watergate or the Little Rock Crisis may change across time either for ideological reasons or to connect the historical events to the reality of today. As Schudson argues, collective memory can be driven by political actors with “devious” ends to reframe past events for their current ideological benefit. As Big Brother’s party in 1984 put it: “Who controls the past controls the present, who controls the present controls the future.”¹⁰ Thus, a group arguing for a policy outcome that benefits them may have an interest in employing past historical events as lessons for their argument. That said, multiple memories may exist simultaneously, creating a competition for the attention of the collective. The winner matters in that it might lead to a particular policy preference among the public.  

  Other reshapings of collective memory are much more innocuous, driven by changes in society that determine which historical events are relevant and how they are perceived. Anniversaries of events, particularly big anniversaries tied to a decade, create openings for the development of a new collective memory about an event as many discuss it and its long-term meaning. 

  For Watergate, Schudson argues that two continua come together to create four different competing memories about the events of the early 1970s. First, was Watergate a “crisis” or a “scandal”? The first perspective sees Watergate as a constitutional crisis “signifying something deep and disturbing about our politics.”¹¹ The second view instead sees the events as more fleeting and tied to unique moments regarding Nixon and his political and media enemies. On the second continuum was a debate over whether the Watergate events should be seen as expressions of a system that had established an “imperial Presidency” or events driven by the distinctive corruption of President Nixon and those around him.¹² As Schudson argues, this creates four possible memories of Watergate and, importantly, different notions of the policy changes, if any, needed to prevent such abuses in the future.

  In any political memory, some components of the story are overemphasized, and others are left out. Innocuous or not, “memory is always memory of some things and not others, and it is always memory for some purposes, and these may be uncivil as well as civil.”¹³ When it comes to the Central High Crisis, no systematic analysis of a collective political memory has been carried out. One work does focus on memories of the Central High Crisis: Beth Roy employs oral histories to evaluate individuals’ memories of the events.¹⁴ However, these were primarily white alumni of Central High, and rather than focus on a singular memory, Roy instead explores the ways that race, class, and gender create significant divergence in those memories.

  While there are various cultural machines (e.g., school textbooks or public memorials) that bring the past to us, the most potent in American life is the news media. Thus, in any examination of the political memory of an event, starting with the news coverage is crucial. Fortunately, a distinctive, multifaceted collection exists in Arkansas that allows a deep dive into a crucial cultural machine in Arkansas.

  The David and Barbara Pryor Center’s Collection

  The David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History was created over two decades ago at the University of Arkansas at the urging—and with the support—of the longtime Arkansas politician and his wife to ensure that key aspects of the state’s history were not lost. The mission of the Pryor Center “is to document the cultural heritage of Arkansans by collecting audio and video resources to share with scholars, students, and the public.”¹⁵ Initially part of the Special Collections Department of the university’s library and then administered by the Chancellor’s Office, the center is now part of the university’s Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, although it maintains a partnership with Special Collections.

  In its early years, the Pryor Center’s work focused on chronicling the “living memories” of Arkansans who had distinctive perspectives on key aspects of the state’s history. In doing so, it employed traditional oral history methodology; the interviews with the subjects were transcribed and then maintained for future generations on the center’s website. Dozens of these transcripts, part of different projects ranging from interviews with key players on the first presidential campaign of Bill Clinton in the Diane D. Blair Project to a collection of interviews with women who have served in the Arkansas General Assembly, are maintained on the website. The center then moved to videotaping the best known of those interviewed in a series called the Arkansas Memories Project. Over 120 videotapes are included in this section of the Pryor Center collection. Because of the centrality of the Central High Crisis in the modern history of the state, perspectives on the events are included in a number of the interviews—either video or transcribed—on the website.

  Most relevant, however, are two collections—from the Arkansas Gazette and the Arkansas Democrat—that include interviews with dozens of journalists who covered the state for the two newspapers, which ultimately merged in 1991 at the end of a protracted war. A number of these journalists covered the initial events of the Central High Crisis or its aftermath. For example, Gazette reporter Jerry Donahue was on the scene at Central High throughout the early days of the crisis and had a unique perspective on some of the most noteworthy and haunting moments.

  While all aspects of the Pryor Center’s collection are highly valuable resources in understanding modern Arkansas history, perhaps the most distinctive component is a collection of news footage from Little Rock news station KATV (Channel 7), which went on the air in 1953. Originally KATV’s news coverage was captured on film, which was surprisingly mostly maintained by the station rather than being copied over, as was the norm at that time. Sadly, however, a 1960 fire destroyed most of the original tape, including the events of the Little Rock Crisis. After the fire, some film was maintained, and the station’s news director, Jim Pitcock, saved the most historically important footage when the station shifted to videotape recording in the late 1970s. Later, some of that film was also shifted to U-matic videotape, although some original tapes were retained. In creating what was called the KATV News Archive, Pitcock also developed an archiving method known as the master cassette reel (MCR) system.

  As the station moved to digital formats, three hundred hours of film and twenty-six thousand videotapes were donated to the Pryor Center in 2009 as one of the largest—and most temporally expansive—local news collections in the country. The first step was to save and digitize the film. Those digital files are maintained on a searchable portal of the Pryor Center website. Included in that collection are some pieces relevant to better understanding the ongoing perceptions of the meaning of the events at Central High.

  When KATV switched to videotape in the late 1970s, Pitcock—committed to the archiving of the collection—preserved edited news stories and other raw footage on what ultimately added up to twenty-six thousand videotapes. The digitization of this mammoth collection is underway but, understandably, will take time and money. In the meantime, the coordinator of the KATV collection project at the Pryor Center—longtime KATV employee Randall Dixon—will work with scholars to digitize select sections of the tapes, as occurred with this project. Pitcock created two sets of dot matrix documents that list key contents of the tapes; one set is a subject matter listing, and the other focuses on personalities. The alphabetized documents are also searchable, although typographical errors can create some miscues in the searching process. Each story can be found on film or videotape based on a distinctive MCR number (see Figure 1). Once MCR numbers are identified, digitized copies of the pertinent stories or footage can be created. It is a somewhat convoluted and time-intensive process, but it gives scholars across all fields who would benefit from using such an extensive local television collection a window into key subjects, such as those related to civil rights history.

  Of course, KATV continues to be an active source of television news in the Little Rock market. More recent coverage from the station is available either on the KATV website (katv.com) or through the station. 

  Changing Memory of the Little Rock Crisis across Time

  Much like Schudson’s analysis of competing memories when it comes to Watergate, different memories of the Little Rock Crisis are shown in the Pryor Center collection. To borrow this analysis, four boxes are created by the answers to two questions: First, is the dominant focus on individual students—either the Little Rock Nine or current students—or on elites—either the original combatants in the crisis or current political leaders? Second, is the narrative frame hopeful or pessimistic about the trajectory of a healthy integration at Little Rock Central or in general?

  What is shown across time is a shift away from a focus on the original elite combatants—such as the governor and NAACP leader Daisy Bates—to students, initially current white and Black students and then the Little Rock Nine themselves in later years. What is also shown is a shift from a quite optimistic take on the ramifications of the crisis to a more mixed—and at times somewhat negative—take on where issues of school integration are at Central High, specifically, and across America, more generally.

  In the sixty-five years since Central High was desegregated, media conversations about the long-term meaning of the crisis have waxed and waned. Most of the conversations have centered around anniversaries of the key events. As longtime KATV journalist Steve Barnes said at the twenty-fifth anniversary in 1982, “Our society seems obsessed with anniversaries . . . we generally note them in years divisible by five.”¹⁶ Such anniversaries often marked not just renewed interest in the events but an opportunity for a recalibration of collective memory.

  The First Three Decades: The Success of Integration

  In the first thirty years following the events of September 1957, anniversaries were more likely to be manifested by the media itself than by coverage of public events commemorating them.  The first postcrisis stories on Central High in the KATV collection were from the 1967–68 school year, including the start of the year and events surrounding the ten-year class reunion for Ernest Green, the first Black graduate of Central High, and his classmates. The footage in the collection includes interviews with Green, marking his professional progress on urban development issues, and Brooks Hays, who lost his seat in Congress through a write-in campaign in 1958 because of his perceived integrationist tendencies. He was invited as the keynote speaker at the class reunion. In the video, an optimistic Hays is saying “the things that I predicted have been fulfilled,” meaning that desegregation has begun to succeed at Central High (see Figures 2 and 3).¹⁷

  Hays’s optimism is reinforced in the KATV story at the start of the 1967–68 school year, just a few months before the reunion, in which interviews with white and Black current students at Central noted the peacefulness now surrounding integration at the school (see Figure 4).¹⁸ Thus, at this earliest point, the KATV coverage reflecting on the crisis highlights current students along with one of the combatants who lost the battle in the form of his reelection campaign in 1958 but saw himself as winning the war over desegregation.

  Around the time of the twentieth anniversary of the crisis, a series of news stories—both national and local—were produced; they are part of the KATV collection. It was noted in the news coverage that though Green was earning $50,000 a year in Washington as President Carter’s assistant labor secretary, Faubus—whose comeback attempts in 1970 and 1974 had failed, as did his 1986 race against Clinton, and who refused to be interviewed at the time—was working as a bank teller in Huntsville, Arkansas, to supplement his state pension. The primary focus of the twentieth-anniversary coverage was that integration was working at Little Rock Central High—its student body now evenly balanced between Black and white—even as it was showing strains in northern cities such as Boston.¹⁹ In a national story for Good Morning, America, a youthful Geraldo Rivera went even further, arguing, “This once troubled and divided school has become something of a national model . . . that integration can succeed.”²⁰

  Two stories on Good Morning, America focused on current students at Central High—both white and Black—who emphasized that they “relate to each other quite well.”²¹ As white student Jeff Ledbetter put it, “We’ve been integrated since 7th grade . . . so, we’ve known each other for awhile” (see Figure 5).²² The youthful Black principal of Central, thirty-six-year-old Morris Holmes, was given special credit for ensuring maintenance of the “peaceful coexistence” by Rivera. In a locally produced piece later that day, KATV reporters captured mostly positive reactions to the Rivera story from the morning.

  Five years later, in 1982, the silver anniversary of the Central High Crisis was commemorated, mostly on television. Partly because one of the key players—Governor Faubus—was now ready to speak, much of the coverage now centered on the original, aging combatants. The Little Rock Nine were included primarily as sepia-toned actors in archival coverage from 1957. A special KATV broadcast hosted by news anchor Steve Barnes included an interview with Bates, but the bulk of the show was dedicated to a fairly remarkable twenty-five-minute interview with Faubus, now trying to defend his behavior. In the initial interview with Barnes, Faubus contended, “All of us were caught in a chain of circumstances” and he had lived up to his duty as chief executive to protect the safety of the community, which was at significant risk of violence (see Figure 6).²³ Faubus was then peppered with specific questions about his “rationales” for his 1957 decisions by two longtime Arkansas newspaper editors—a deeply critical Paul Greenberg and a more sympathetic John Robert Starr. 

  Five years later, at the time of the thirtieth anniversary, the KATV coverage returned to an almost total focus on the peaceful integration of Central High. As one white student said, referring to her Black friend: “Me and Marie have been friends since 7th grade. We started Central together and we’ll finish together” (see Figure 7). While Bates was interviewed in the piece as an homage to 1957, the KATV story focused on the lives of the students in 1987. The reporter closed the story with “The biggest problem seemed to be finding their next class . . . no National Guard necessary.”

  The Later Decades: The Voices of the Little Rock Nine and Less Optimism

  Around the fortieth anniversary of the Little Rock Crisis, the voices of the Little Rock Nine became much more prominent. Events over several days in late September were planned by a City of Little Rock committee in collaboration with the Central High National Historic Site once it was established by Congress in 1998. The stories of the nine alumni emphatically personalized the Little Rock Crisis but also allowed for a much more nuanced, and at times negative, take on the trajectory of American race relations. On September 25, 1997, before a cheering crowd of 7,500 spectators gathered in front of Central High, the president of the United States, the governor of Arkansas, and the mayor of Little Rock saluted the nine individuals who had once been denied entrance to the school but courageously returned to integrate it. President Bill Clinton, who had welcomed them to the governor’s mansion during his tenure, praised the sacrifices of the Little Rock Nine, who had “changed the course of our history here forever.” Governor Mike Huckabee added, “We come here today to say once and for all that what happened here forty years ago was simply wrong. It was evil and we renounce it.” After further speechmaking, the trio of dignitaries escorted the Little Rock Nine through the front doors of the school.²⁴ While the voices of the Little Rock Nine were heard at other events during the week, at this event that gained the bulk of public attention, they were primarily silent actors in a play written by elites—Clinton and Huckabee most prominently. Only Green, who had served as the spokesperson for the nine at all major events over the decades, spoke at Central High to represent the group.

  Attitudes in the Black community, as well as some comments by the speakers at the fortieth-anniversary events, showed growing concerns about the direction that integration politics was taking after decades of thorough optimism about the success of Central High. Tellingly, the state and local chapters of NAACP boycotted the anniversary event, maintaining that little progress had been made during the intervening four decades. Moreover, as President Clinton noted, “Today, children of every race walk through the same door, but then they often walk down different halls.”²⁵

  Ten years later, at the half-century anniversary, another commemoration was held in front of Central High. Now a former president, Clinton once again was a headline speaker. However, this time all nine students who had desegregated Central High in 1957 spoke, taking up the bulk of the program. In these first remarks, most of the nine emphasized positive, hopeful perspectives on their role. As Carlotta Watts Lanier said: “We knew we were doing the right thing. The struggle was really worth it.” Several of the honorees spoke directly to the current Central High students in attendance in referencing the meaning of their lives: “So, students, when you get your education and career, look around you and reach out and use it to offer someone else a better life,” Gloria Ray Karlmark said. Even those who recognized the persistence of racism were decidedly hopeful in their emphasis on the potential for progress. Minnijean Brown Trickey said: “It’s my hope that this 50-year commemorative ceremony will energize and invigorate the social movement that is absolutely called for in 2007. We have to remember that justice is a perpetual struggle and that we’ve got to keep doing it . . . forever.”²⁶

  The sixtieth anniversary event in September 2017 was held inside the auditorium at Central High rather than outside. It was the first event following the death of one of the nine—Jefferson Thomas had died in 2010. The tone of the event, held less than a year after Donald Trump had become president and during an era in which federal courts had increasingly turned a blind eye to resegregation of schools, was different from the past. Again, former president Clinton was present and spoke, but he was more emphatic about the need for persistence on issues of racial justice: “I wanted to say: ‘You did 60 years. Take a victory lap. Put on your dancing shoes. Have a good time.’ But instead, I have to say, ‘You’ve gotta put on your marching boots.’”²⁷

  Along with historian Henry Louis Gates and other public figures, the eight living members all spoke. There was an agitation in many of their words not heard ten years earlier. Dr. Terrence Roberts contended: “We all have to engage in the war against the forces that are determined to shore up and maintain the status quo. How can we do that? You can decide to choose to live a life that’s different from the life you’ve thus far chosen to live.” Even Green, typically one of the more moderate of the nine in public comments, linked the events of Little Rock to various other events in American life showing the persistence of racism, including the shooting of nine congregants at an African Methodist Episcopal church in Charleston, South Carolina, two years earlier: “The Little Rock Nine turns to the Charleston Nine, paying the ultimate sacrifice.” 

  While Trump’s name was not spoken, two of the eight quite clearly referenced the attitudes and expressions of the president in their speeches. Trickey noted his “profound intentional ignorance” in her remarks. Lanier said, “Behind the scenes and through his Twitter account, we become as we were 60 years ago,” but concluded more optimistically: “We know these things, though: As a human race, we are strong people. In the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘We have come too far to turn back now.’”

  Perhaps the most moving comments of the day were more personal and came from one of the nine who had previously been quite reticent in talking about her experience. Karlmark talked not about her first day at Central but about her last, when the Central High yearbooks were handed out. “I had my book, and I knew people signed each others’ books. But here I was, now a 15-year-old little girl, and who was going to sign my book? Who would I dare go up to and ask to sign my book?” She said a girl named Becky, with whom she had developed a secret friendship through exchanging notes, signed her book. Then a second girl approached her to sign. The second girl’s simple, but telling, message: “In a different age, we could have been friends.”

  Somewhat surprisingly, particularly because of the ongoing threat of COVID-19, another commemorative event was held in fall 2022, at the request of several of the Little Rock Nine, not on a decade anniversary but at the sixty-fifth. As in the past, smaller events were held over several days, but the two primary events were on the anniversary of the Little Rock Nine’s entrance, on September 25. One event was held outside Central High, but rather than a formal commemorative event, it was a street renaming as Park Street became Little Rock Nine Way for the block in front of the high school (see Figure 8). Despite the late summer heat, five of the nine were present for that short event, which is available for viewing on the KATV website.²⁸

  The formal event was much smaller than the three prior events and was held at the Clinton Presidential Center, with the former president once again on hand for the festivities. Five of the living members of the Little Rock Nine were on stage at the Great Hall of the Clinton Center, while two others participated virtually from their homes. The remarks of Thelma Mothershed Wair were read aloud; she could not participate because of a conflict. While Roberts continued to express his frustration at the legacy of oppression of people of color in the United States and the “institutions, philosophies, practices and ideologies” that are barriers to necessary progress, others returned to a more hopeful tone at the 2022 event, while recognizing that steadfast dedication to progress would be necessary. Trickey emphasized that “ordinary people can do extraordinary things” and then read the final lines of a song she often uses in explaining the meaning of the Little Rock Crisis to younger children: “Don’t be silent, don’t be afraid. You may be someone’s hope someday.” Finally, the most stoic of the Little Rock Nine over the years, Elizabeth Eckford, provided her most expansive and personal remarks on the meaning of the events—particularly her infamous harassment on the first day of the crisis: “I want young people to understand that they need to know themselves so other people can’t tell them who they think they are” (see Figure 9).²⁹
  
  

  The Civil Rights Era, Political Memory, and Local Media

  Examining political memory is vital to understanding the ongoing import of the civil rights movement in American life. As shown here, the memory of one of the most telling events of the so-called Second Reconstruction—the Little Rock Crisis of 1957—has not been stable across the six and a half decades since it occurred. Instead, attention has wandered back and forth between elite actors (the original combatants and later political leaders) and students (both the Little Rock Nine themselves and current students at a high school that has become a thermometer of integration’s success or failure). The tone of that memory has also meandered between decidedly optimistic about the direction of integration and negative regarding the state of American race relations.

  As a key delivery mechanism for political memory, the news media across time—particularly local news media that is closest to the citizens in their home communities—is vitally important to ascertaining memory at different points across the decades. Rarely, however, are archives of such media readily available. Fortunately, such an archive is available for Arkansas, the home of the Little Rock Crisis, and will continue to grow over time: the KATV collection at the Pryor Center at the University of Arkansas. This collection promises to become a vital source for understanding local news coverage in America, about not just racial politics but a variety of other topics in the years ahead.
  
  A list of external links featured in this essay can be found here.³⁰
  
  Jay Barth is M. E. and Ima Graves Peace Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Politics at Hendrix College. Barth’s academic work includes research on the politics of the South, state government and politics, LGBTQ politics, political communication (particularly radio advertising), and the achievement gap in Arkansas. He is the co-author (with the late Diane D. Blair) of the second edition of Arkansas Politics and Government: Do the People Rule? (University of Nebraska Press, 2005).
  
  Title Image: Central High graduate Ernest Green, 1968.
  
  Remembering the Little Rock Central High Crisis: The Pryor Center’s Distinctive Insights © 2025 by Jay Barth is licensed under CC BY 4.0.
  
  The Journal of e-Media Studies is published by the Dartmouth Library.

• 1 2024-09-17T06:02:22+00:00 Insurgent Leisure, Aquatic Angst: Postwar Newsfilm, Civil Rights, and Coastal Imaginaries 3 image_header 2025-01-07T19:47:39+00:00

  
  by Stephen Charbonneau

  Florida Atlantic University
   
  Abstract

  Introduction
  Fugitive Visions of Florida
  >Newsfilm geographies
  >Archival material and its challenges
  >The scenic and the topical
  >Time and space
  >"Harvest of Shame"
  >Coastal versus urban
  “Trouble” in Delray Beach and WTVJ’s “News at Noon” (1956)
  >Insurgency
  >The wade-ins
  >Camera as witness
  Florida’s Birmingham: WCKT’s “St. Augustine: Fountain of Dissent” (1964)
  >Grassroots resistance
  >A history lesson
  >Florida's Birmingham
  >From exposition to observation
  >Elevating the crisis
  >The weight of screen time
  >Aquatic civil disobedience
  >An insurgent presence
  Conclusion: Kneeling in the Surf

  Introduction

  This study is the result of a close analysis of newsfilms made accessible through Dartmouth College’s Media Ecology Project (MEP). This database of digitized historic newsfilm documenting the daily struggles of the civil rights movement includes a wealth of footage from the Sunshine State, showcasing its prominent position in this history of social change. These archival sights and sounds register a deep history of resistance to racial segregation and inequality as well as local attempts to mediate and mitigate such struggles to maintain the prominent position of white civic elites. Over the last year and a half, MEP’s database made it possible for me to review South Floridian newsfilm from the 1950s to the 1980s. This essay explores four newsfilms from this collection, which features a few of the most prominent “wade-ins” along the coast of South Florida during the fifties and sixties. This work is only beginning, and it has been made possible thanks to the efforts of Mark J. Williams, MEP’s director, and John P. Bell, who provided invaluable support in digital curation. The contours of this essay are, in part, informed by the digital affordances of the annotation system, whereby key moments from these archival newsfilms are highlighted and placed in a broader context. This digital pedagogical approach dovetails with a critical stance that insists on reading such newsfilms against the grain, unpacking their mythologies, and resituating them within local history. 

  Fugitive Visions of Florida

  Colonial visions of Florida consistently offer us a tangled scene. Michael Grunwald’s statement that the Everglades is “not quite land and not quite water, but a soggy confusion of the two” is certainly apt.¹ Floridian imaginaries have been frequently represented as not quite paradise and not quite a swampy nether world, but an unruly blend of both. Elizabeth B. Heuer has highlighted this tension in midnineteenth-century depictions of Florida as “a lush tropical paradise” and “an inhospitable land of death and decay.”² The former image serviced settler colonialism, while the latter was indicative of northern condescension and racist theories of “social evolution.”³ Such tensions continue to inform our collective perception of the Sunshine State and its entanglement with broader histories of racial emancipation, post–World War II modernity, and transatlantic cultures.

  More than most regions of the United States—or as much as any—Florida compels us to consider its place in these histories on its own terms, with its contradictory qualities featured rather than forgotten. Revisiting Floridian histories means first and foremost recognizing stories of racial resistance and the “fugitivity” that surfaces from within a Black Atlantic perspective.⁴ Here I am explicitly following the lead of Jillian Hernandez in her recent article, “Fugitive State: Toward a Cimarrona Approach for Florida Cultural Studies,” in which she observes that the “role of Black Floridians in advancing the project of Black liberation, both in previous eras and the present day . . . has been overshadowed by dominant representations of Florida as a site of racial violence and victimization.”⁵

  While recognizing that this problem is not completely “unwarranted,” she warns that the “ubiquity” of such representations “overshadows radical histories and marginalized figures, often Black women, who have the potential to inform contemporary race struggles.”⁶

  Newsfilm geographies

  Recent developments in film and media studies are encouraging scholars to consider media practices within specific local configurations, offering the potential to counter, complement, or otherwise revise dominant narratives. The enhanced availability of historical moving images from throughout the twentieth century, thanks to the digitization efforts of regional archives, has opened new lines of inquiry for film and media scholars, allowing us to thicken and deepen our appreciation for how local struggles were spoken about and relayed in real time. Close examination of such newsfilm and television news footage necessitates the tracing of peculiar continuities across multiple registers, traversing the local, regional, and hemispheric. 

  Such complex “newsfilm geographies”—following the editors of Rediscovering US Newsfilm—offer us a methodological approach that is suited for the study of South Floridian depictions in a wide array of moving images. Such an undertaking is daunting considering the region’s admixture of racial segregation and deep history of Black, Latinx, and Indigenous resistance, as well as the pan-American visions propagated by “white civic elites.”⁷ Newsfilm and television news producers working during the upheavals of the sixties negotiated these intersecting and conflicting historical forces in ways that often had to acknowledge insurgent acts while cementing the paternalistic legacy of white oversight for some time to come. 

  But we must also admit that the very gaps and oversights in Floridian representations highlighted by Hernandez are mirrored in the digitized archival newsfilms that are the impetus for this study. The simple fact of the matter is that these newsfilms are not the be-all and end-all. They are not accurate indices of the realities they pretend to represent. They bear the weight of the intrinsic biases of midtwentieth-century, postwar America and, as a result, they certainly do not register the voices of the marginalized and the radical histories Hernandez insists need telling. 

  Archival material and its challenges

  Furthermore, one must always bear in mind the contingencies of the research process and the archival practices of cataloging and organizing these digital materials. Very often programs are interrupted or broken up into distinct segments that are not determined by their original broadcast. The visual and aural quality of so many duplications—from kinescope (a filmed record of live television broadcasts) to VHS to digital—often leaves much to be desired, perhaps rendering compositions or narrations abstract, muffled, staticky, and hard to comprehend without multiple viewing sessions and careful transcriptions. Findings are also dependent not only on what is available but on one’s search terms. Different search terms yield different results, and that very fact haunts one’s ability to make any useful generalizations about what one finds or is lucky enough to encounter. 

  And yet by acknowledging the limitations of these archival objects as well as my own vantage point, we set the stage for a more productive conversation about the knowledge and questions generated by this research. These drawbacks undercut our ability to craft a linear historical narrative or even an unperturbed argument concerning such artifacts. As Katherine Groo states: “We do not (or not always) need to recuperate objects and identities to do justice to them. After all, historical recuperation can do its own kind of harm.”⁸ Proceeding with caution, within a specified geohistorical frame, we can offer some attenuated insights that both tease out the problems of studying historical newsfilm and underscore the contradictions and uniquely Floridian tensions that prevail within particular locally produced programs. 

  The scenic and the topical

  Consider, for instance, the legacy of actualities as a precursor to newsreels and later newsfilm. The bifurcation of the scenic and the topical that film historians recognize in actualities is dissolved in the discursive and aesthetic imaginings of Floridian newsfilm. Whereas “scenic” was typically associated with the presentation of spectacular geographies and environments, “topical” offered depictions of current events.⁹ No doubt the boundary between these two tendencies is intrinsically imprecise. But such imprecision is especially prominent in archival newsfilm featuring the region of South Florida and its histories. The transatlantic status of the region and the appeal of our shorelines thoroughly mark the presentation of current events to local audiences. 

  The scenic is often topical, whether the issue at hand is climate, housing, or the economy. Newsfilm coverage of civil rights protests during the sixties equally imbricates the ecological with the informational. Direct actions contest the cruel borders of racial segregation, where seaside vistas and hotel amenities are explicitly marked as white spaces of leisure and recreation. Put simply, the background often intrudes into the foreground. In this manner, the Floridian newsfilms reviewed for this study are truly “capacious,” a label Cooper, Levavy, Melnick, and Williams affix to the newsfilm as a whole, recognizing it as a televisual genre that “is not regimented by the length of a ten-minute reel, but rather by the clock time of the television schedule.”¹⁰ While the latter use of the term refers to the newsfilm’s alignment with a different temporal regime, my extension of it here speaks to the unique constellation of historical, cultural, and archival questions that converge in such moving images.

  Time and space 

  My initial review of MEP’s holdings of South Floridian newsfilm was overwhelmed by their breadth and range, the earliest of which were made in the 1950s and the latest in the 1980s. But upon closer reflection, this body of work yielded a clear set of motifs, patterns, and racial logic around events central to the history of civil rights in Florida and the manner of their representation in televisual news form. Many of the programs featured in this collection were anchored by Wayne Fariss of WCKT-TV (now WSVN-TV) and included programs such as Outlook, which offered special reports on the events of the day. As I will elaborate further in a series of examples and clips, the tense of such specials was not determined by the logic that is often associated with live broadcast television. Rather, there is a distinct documentary conveyance of a proximate past: a feeling of the events’ intrinsic nearness (spatial and temporal) to the life of the anchor and the audience (conveying a strong sense of locality), but with a greater degree of distance and reflection than one normally can achieve from more traditional live broadcasts. 

  “Harvest of Shame”

  In this sense, Edward R. Murrow, Fred Friendly, and David Lowe’s Harvest of Shame (1960) offers us both an example of this type of televisual documentary and a model, moving forward, for productions after 1960, and that famous program’s depiction of migrant life in Florida only helps secure its pertinence to these newsfilms, especially the Outlook report “St. Augustine: Fountain of Dissent.” The broad shape of these programs prefigures or echoes Harvest of Shame—depending on the broadcast date—in their paternalistic advocacy for resolution and a “commonsense” cessation to the conflicts unfolding across streets, schools, fields, and sandy shores. 

  Coastal versus urban

  Nevertheless, in a deviation from Harvest of Shame, there was a clear coalescing in the Miami Dade College Wolfson Archive around the coastal and the urban, shorelines on the one hand and cities on the other. Whereas the former refers to coverage of demonstrations and direct actions in coastal communities such as St. Augustine and Delray Beach, the latter centered the persistent plight of segregation in the urban depths of Miami, where voices of liberation, moderation, and white supremacy all mingled. 

  But the distinctiveness of these two clusters is about more than their geographical character. Rather, their respective rhetorical frames reinscribe the logic of segregation through the varied ways in which Floridian shores and cities are presented to the audience. The shores in these newsfilms represent a natural order and colonial legacy in which African Americans’ presence in the frame is indicative of insurgence. Indeed, the touting of St. Augustine as North America’s “oldest city” in these programs echoes its fixture within the colonial imagination as well as its alliance with persistent racial hierarchies and their territorial entrenchment. The aquatic dimensions of these communities—both oceans and pools—dually signify their proximity to empire, leisure, privilege, and the natural world. Indeed, the question of “access” to shores and the oceanic vistas they afford is wholly tethered to a segregationist logic and affirmed through reference to St. Augustine’s colonial history. The coverage of wade-ins in the newsfilms, even while it affirms the intrinsic necessity of such struggles, is nevertheless unsettled by the resulting disruptions, violations, and acts of civil disobedience. 

  Conversely, the coverage of civil rights struggles in Miami over education, housing, poverty, policing, and social services is less determined by the frame of insurgence and more by melodramatic inevitability. Racial laws of gravity, tinged with performative regret and melancholy, cast a shadow over these broadcasts in which the tropical paradise gives way to an urban “swamp” or land of death and decay. A frustrating acceptance or regretful resignation sets in here that, while centering Black misery, seems all too content to naturalize and rigidify the prevailing landscape of racial inequality and segregated urban space. As one might anticipate, housing comes into focus in this latter cluster as the urban is framed as proximate to the African American “home,” whereas the coastal is expressed as a site of intervention, disturbance, and insurgence, where belonging is a contested notion. 

  “Trouble” in Delray Beach and WTVJ’s “News at Noon” (1956)

  The stakes of the coastal are underscored in one of the earliest Wolfson newsfilms dealing with civil rights. On July 3, 1956, WTVJ broadcast a segment titled “News at Noon,” and it is both representative of other newsfilms covering clashes over segregation as well as unique in its promotion of the news itself as a mitigator and settler of racial conflict.¹¹ The segment focuses specifically on the fight over de facto segregation and racial disparities in the coastal community of Delray Beach and the surrounding area, including Ocean Ridge. While the segment’s title, “News at Noon,” suggests a focus on the immediacy of certain current events, this installment blends a concern with the events of the previous evening with a broader account of developments that have occurred over the past few years. The segment is remarkable for what it includes and excludes as well as for the way in which it narrates these events from the vantage point of mediation, often framing civil rights advocates and African American activists as insurgents and outsiders.
  Following introductory comments from an unseen narrator, the anchor for the segment—Del Frank—greets the audience by sharing news of a “successful settlement” of the stubborn “race problem in Delray Beach,” putting an end to “forty-five days of tension in that resort community.” But more than this, Frank is pleased to share that WTVJ had an active role in the attainment of this resolution. “WTVJ News director Ralph Renick,” notes Frank, “came to play quite a part in the racial settlement.” In fact, as we learn by the conclusion of the segment, Renick is credited with organizing a meeting between the white leadership of the city of Delray Beach and the African American civil rights advocates working for the Delray Beach Civic League. The segment even features footage from the meeting in which Mayor Mike Yargates specifically acknowledges and touts the presence of the film cameras during his meeting with the civic league. He praises the presence of “that recording machine” and the benefits of having such a concrete document or “record of what had transpired.” 

  But the immediacy of the segment’s coverage of the previous night’s meeting is framed within a broader narrative of the struggles of the past year. Over the course of the first six minutes of the segment, Frank runs down the highlights of the racial tensions, leaving out key events as well as acknowledging the violence with which white residents reacted toward the presence of African Americans on beaches that were legally open to anyone. In fact, Frank’s narration barely acknowledges the pain of decades of de facto segregation that kept African American residents off Delray’s shores, especially those that were the most accessible and closely watched by lifeguards. Instead, he praises the community of Delray Beach for “set[ting] aside two-thirds of its beach area for public use.” Frank’s condensation of the region’s struggles over de facto and de jure segregationist practices downplays their severity and violence. In the decades leading up to this broadcast, there had been extensive organizing against lynching, racial wage gaps, and voter suppression or “white primaries” throughout Florida.

  Insurgency 

  The opening narrative offered by Frank, in conjunction with the imagery and footage presented, serves to reinforce the perception that African American efforts to be treated as full and equal citizens in Delray are fundamentally insurgent. Local African American struggles and acts of resistance are largely missing from Frank’s overview, which normalizes the segregationist status quo. The terms he uses are especially striking as he speaks of the “gradual” or inertial drift toward a whites-only municipal beach in Delray, thus naturalizing what is otherwise a political process. He juxtaposes a claim that African American citizens went swimming “almost at will in the ocean,” with the qualifier, “though mostly in isolated spots,” and in doing so, reflects an implicit colonial curation of geography according to racial hierarchies. 

  The illustrative imagery accompanying Frank’s brief historical overview features a map that highlights the proximity of Delay Beach to Miami and its placement along South Florida’s shoreline. The sequence’s establishing shot of Delray’s municipal whites-only beach features an idyllic view of the ocean crisscrossed with palm trees and an American flag perched upon a sturdy flagpole. Illustrative footage of whites swimming in the water, building sandcastles, and sunning themselves on the beach complements Frank’s opening comments.

  The painful absence of any person of color in the segment ends approximately three minutes in when our view of the municipal pool shifts to six African American men standing together on Delray’s shore. At this point, Frank notes that “there was trouble on the southern end of Delray’s municipal beach” a week after US District Judge Emmett C. Choate threw out the lawsuit filed over the city’s de facto segregation. The pivot to “trouble” just as African Americans are depicted on-screen for the first time in this program and on Delray’s whites-only shore underscores the insurgent view of an African American presence, not just on the beach but in the frame itself.

  Considering the extent of Frank’s narrative about the region’s struggles with racial inequality over several years, it is striking that our first few seconds of African American representation are coupled with the conveyance of disturbance, or “trouble.” Up until this moment, the presence of African Americans has been decidedly spectral, lacking voice or physical depiction. In this sense, “trouble” unsettles the recreational tone and reassurances of access for the privileged white audience. The beach set aside for African Americans was earlier shown strewn with seaweed and ocean detritus, whereas the city’s main beach offered cleared shores ready for sunbathing and the building of sandcastles. Coupled with the representation of the city pool, aquatic spaces are carefully crafted white realms whose connotations of comfort are seemingly sidelined by the proximity of African American families. Here the line between swamp and paradise is delicately drawn. The introduction of African American representation on the screen at this exact moment fosters an alignment between the program and the community of Delray Beach: both view any African American presence as insurgent. 

  The wade-ins

  Frank proceeds to elaborate on what he means by “trouble.” In this instance, he’s referring to the famous Sunday wade-in that took place on May 20, 1956, a month and a half prior to this broadcast. He narrates:

  First, a group of Negroes showed up, several jumped into the water, went swimming. Next on the scene, a group of white teenagers. Words exchanged between the two groups indicated violent actions might well develop. With tempers reaching a boiling point, Delray Police Chief R. C. Croft and two policemen arrived on the scene. Croft asked the whites and the Negro groups to clear the beach and they complied.

  To complete the picture offered here by Frank, thirty-five African Americans were involved in this aquatic protest, or wade-in. “Nearly one hundred white citizens [were] standing by” while “tempers” flared, although—as mentioned earlier—there were no laws on the books officially declaring the beach a segregated space.¹² The illustrative footage throughout this part of the program briefly shifts from filmic to photographic. In fact, the shot cited of African American men on the beach is a still rather than a moving image. 

  The following two shots, both of which depict the May 20 confrontation, are also stills. The first features a dramatic composition in which two sides, Black and white, are facing off on Delray’s shore. The camera’s placement in relation to the action is like the prior shot of the African American men facing the ocean: the camera observes the action from a position that is perpendicular, flattening the image and diminishing depth in the shot while highlighting its pictorial qualities.
  The third and final still image from the wade-in is altogether different—equally dramatic in its emphasis on the unfolding racial confrontation but accomplishing this through an over-the-shoulder shot that plunges us into the discord. Here we peer diagonally and at a slightly upward angle at a young African American man standing his ground against a white man who is only visible to us from behind. Despite the individualization of this composition, a community of African American supporters is visible behind the young man.

  The still imagery also registers an epistemological shift in the status of the image. Whereas the moving images shown previously served a largely illustrative purpose centered on the scenic—shores, signs, and pools—the stills nudge the visual landscape of the program toward the topical and the temporal, granting us an admittedly partial and fragmented view of a confrontation that unfolds in the presence of a camera. Instead of a verbal description of past events juxtaposed with what might as well be stock footage of Delray Beach and Ocean Ridge, we experience a sensation of proximity and real-time documentation, even if it is significantly constrained by the static nature of the imagery. 

  Camera as witness

  The conclusion to the segment fosters an even greater awareness of the camera and its ability to capture events as they happen. As noted previously, Frank signals early on where we are headed by celebrating the dramatic role played by Renick in which he offered to moderate a meeting between the city commission of Delray Beach and the Delray Beach Civic League. Frank’s promotion of WTVJ News as a stabilizing and evidentiary force in the standoff over segregationist practices in Delray dovetails with Mayor Yargates’s proclamation that the “recording machine” is a guarantor of transparency and accuracy in the coverage of the meeting. The anticipation is heightened by the awareness that the meeting occurred only the night before:

  Both groups then accepted an invitation to meet last night at 9 pm in the commission room of Delray City Hall. Both sides insisted that the session be held before WTVJ newsfilm cameras so that no misunderstanding could arise and—for the thousands of persons in South Florida—could have the opportunity of witnessing what might be the end to a . . . human relations problem.

  The final result celebrated by Frank is that a “five-member committee will be appointed to investigate ways and means to obtain the Negro ocean beach [and the] Negro swimming pool will be built immediately.” The city will also drop the “controversial ‘Exclusion Resolution,’” which was Delray’s attempt to formalize its municipal beach as whites-only. The recorded footage presented includes the mayor himself specifically thanking Renick and WTVJ for engaging in an act that will “go down in history as a public service.” The news crew, Mayor Yargates exclaims on camera, “came up with their equipment to record a story and they did something that no one was able to do for the last forty-five days.” 

  In Frank’s final commentary for the segment, he insists that “both sides should be congratulated. . . . If the opposing factions will meet face-to-face, it is possible to achieve a solution through compromise and understanding.” While upholding a veneer of even-handedness, WTVJ and “News at Noon” utilize a “both sides” posture to affirm a segregationist logic while appearing to endorse a vague feeling of compromise. What is not compromised, however, is a supposition that the geography of pleasure, recreation, and leisure associated with Floridian shores is one that precludes African American freedom of movement and participation. 

  From the framing of Black presence on-screen and on the beach as “trouble” to the supposed resolution of the conflict in city hall, this installment of “News at Noon” reduces social discord over racial segregation down to a mere “human relations problem.” In doing so, it cements a colonial imaginary in which African American proximity to the coast threatens insurgence. The interior space of the “commission room” where the meeting between the city and the civic league takes place literally and figuratively contains the confrontation, ensuring it does not spill outside and jeopardize the delicate line between scenic and topical. Nevertheless, trouble persists, and the still imagery of the protestors’ wade-in confirms that insurgence cuts both ways as threatening and liberating. Here Floridian fugitivity refuses victimization and claims unruly access in the face of unjust racial borderlines. 

  Florida’s Birmingham: WCKT’s “St. Augustine: Fountain of Dissent” (1964)

  Eight years after the broadcast of the “News at Noon” segment about Delray Beach, a slightly different picture emerges as the civil rights movement focuses on a prominent coastal community 270 miles north. In the early sixties, efforts to desegregate and advance racial equality centered on St. Augustine, the oft-proclaimed “oldest city” in America. It earns this label by virtue of its status as the earliest known European settlement in North America, having been established in 1565. This reputation is more than an empty slogan or mere rhetorical adornment. Rather, this perception of St. Augustine is central to its status as a popular tourist attraction, which fuels the local economy. In fact, the coinciding of the city’s quadricentennial in 1965 with the peak of the civil rights movement was central to local desegregation efforts. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. put it, the goal was to: “remind the nation of the reason the civil rights bill came into existence in the first place. For this task, we chose the nation’s oldest city.”¹³

  WCKT’s news program Outlook broadcast a three-part series on the intensifying struggle in the months of May and June 1964. In this historic moment, the local, national, and global reverberations over what was happening in St. Augustine all converged. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and several of the most recognizable names in the civil rights movement—including King himself—joined local efforts to pressure city leaders to address the persistence of racial inequality and end segregation. The timing of these grassroots efforts coincided with a legislative push as leaders in the United States Senate were primed to debate and vote for the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was passed on June 19 after a fifty-four-day filibuster and later signed into law on July 2. 

  WCKT’s three-part series “St. Augustine: Fountain of Dissent” was broadcast over the course of approximately seven weeks. The first part, “Report 1,” was broadcast on May 9, 1964, the second on May 16, and the hour-long final installment on June 28.¹⁴ Whereas WTVJ’s “News at Noon” affirms a segregationist logic while championing its own role as a facilitator of compromise, this series adopts a more moderate stance as its rhetorical address subtly shifts over the course of its three installments. Specifically, I discerned a clear progression from the first part’s romantic colonialism to the third’s sharper critique of the segregationist status quo and the city’s white leadership. No doubt this evolution is a by-product of the social and political developments unfolding over the course of the pivotal weeks in which the series’ installments were produced and broadcast. 

  Grassroots resistance

  The framing of African Americans as a fundamentally insurgent presence in relation to the coastal realm of nostalgic tourism, aquatic leisure, and colonial vistas is fully evident, perhaps even more so given St. Augustine’s place in a broader Floridian imaginary. And yet the representational gap is significantly lessened in these programs as the producers and camera crews devote a significant amount of screen time to observing the hard work of organizing nonviolent forms of resistance by a wide array of grassroots activists with experience on the ground, in St. Augustine as well as elsewhere around the country. 

  The series eventually invites the audience to spend time with the organizers and see them discuss, debate, and mobilize an entire grassroots apparatus. Phone calls, strategy sessions, and maps are all featured in this series, inevitably presenting an observational record of African American activist agency. What one gets, then, is a disconnect between the welcoming of a Black perspective and presence on-screen and the persistence of a historical hostility toward African Americans whenever they venture into beaches, pools, and other privileged spaces of leisure. 

  A history lesson

  The first installment of “St. Augustine: Fountain of Dissent” opens with a focus on the city’s deep history as a colonial outpost and slave market. The sound of a horse’s hooves trotting on cobblestone streets is heard as we see an African American coachman driving a horse-drawn carriage through St. Augustine. Palm trees and parked cars line the streets. The presence of cars with the carriage on the screen echo the commingling of past and present that pervades this segment. 

  An unseen narrator tells us what we see: “Now here is the oldest square in the US today. It was established in 1598 [and] slaves were traded here in the 1800s.” This introduction, however, quickly pivots away from the slave market and burrows deep into the past by directing our look at the Fountain of Youth: “Here is where Ponce de León landed, 1513, over four hundred years ago. In 1934, twenty-six years ago, they were digging here to plant orange trees.” The historic swivel that results from this opening narration—careening from 1598 to the 1800s, then back to 1513, and finally landing in 1934, all from the vantage point of 1964—laces colonial romanticism and mystique with fleeting but direct acknowledgment of the central place of slavery in the development of St. Augustine. 
  

  As Holly Markovitz Goldstein notes in her article and visual essay, “St. Augustine’s ‘Slave Market’: A Visual History,” the slave market is typically overlooked in St. Augustine, and this helps us see the significance of this opening.¹⁵ The introduction asks us to recognize the material evidence of the slave trade in our midst, even as its focus is unsteady and recoils too soon in favor of colonial nostalgia. As the host stresses at the outset: “For a dollar and a half tourists may view the famous fountain and sip the sulfur water which the sixteenth-century explorers believed would give everlasting life.”

  Florida’s Birmingham

  The host and anchor for the series, Wayne Fariss, draws on St. Augustine’s deep colonial history to frame the crisis of the moment. Early on, he calls attention to the city’s “stability and . . . deep-rooted resistance to change,” especially in light of “its leadership . . . in the hands of the oldest families.” Fariss makes clear that this leadership’s legacy is bound up with slavery when he states that “St. Augustine has been successful in preserving a pattern of race relations that dates back to the days when slaves were bought and sold in the city square.” Race relations, he notes, are: “founded on the notion of superior white and holds as long as the Negro holds his place. Racial segregation is deeply ingrained in the whole fabric of life of St. Augustine.” 

  Observing that civil rights demonstrations have grown commonplace nationwide since 1954, Fariss’s exposition reviews the recent history of protest in the city in a manner reminiscent of WTVJ’s “News at Noon.” Sit-ins, marches, arrests, and meetings, as well as the city’s backlash, are all featured in his discourse. Fariss specifically notes the use of “police dogs to break up the sit-ins [as well as the city council’s passage of] a law prohibiting demonstrations of any kind without a permit.” Violence creeps in as well when Fariss recognizes the brutality of the police, the Ku Klux Klan, and the bloody retaliation of protestors through specific examples: “A Negro minister was injured when he was struck in the face with a cattle prodder . . . Negro homes in St. Augustine were shot at; a Negro leader was badly beaten at a Ku Klux Klan meeting; a white man was fatally shot.” All of which leads Fariss to conclude that “by the end of 1963, St. Augustine was rapidly developing national recognition as Florida’s Birmingham.” 
  

  Racial tensions were rising, and the city was “likely to explode in 1964.” Throughout this exposition, a subtle but significant deviation from the previously discussed news program is the inclusion of footage of protestors in the streets and their encounters with police and police dogs, where the cameras are met with both threatening and welcoming looks. From this vantage point, there is a greater willingness to feature the nonviolent actions of the protestors than the earlier program from WTVJ.

  From exposition to observation

  But it is in the third installment of “St. Augustine: Fountain of Dissent” that we get a better sense of the historical texture of the times. As I noted earlier, this series represents a significant step forward from the earlier example of 1956’s “News at Noon,” but the representations of the civil rights movement ebbs and flows across the three installments considering the fast-moving historical circumstances the producers of Outlook are attempting to follow. 

  The treatment of African Americans in St. Augustine as a fundamentally insurgent presence within a coastal and colonial framework by the city commission, business leaders, and the Klan is critically addressed by the third and final segment. At the same time, the program also thickens its engagement with the civil rights movement by growing beyond Fariss’s white paternalistic exposition and reversing the earlier reduction of a dynamic assemblage down to individual leaders, such as Dr. Robert Hayling, as important as he is.
  Instead, what emerges here—in a critical reading that moves both with and against the grain of the show—is a loosening of the expository grip of the first two programs as evidentiary editing and talking-head shots give way to observational footage of civil rights activists coordinating, strategizing, and envisioning their next steps. In doing so, a consideration of both the specific local reverberations of St. Augustine as well as the national, even global, implications of the turn of events in this coastal community is elevated by the program’s tempering of its previous expository and narrational conventions. Representational problems persist as the production is still anchored by Fariss and weighed down by an insistence on moderation when reckoning with the legacy of Jim Crow. Observational aesthetics supports such distanciation, but it isn’t exactly neutral either, considering the representational power of Black agency and activism put on display. 

  Elevating the crisis

  Whereas the second installment of this program opened with the direct address of segregationist Mayor Joseph Shelley, the introduction of the third features Martin Luther King addressing supporters and cementing the city’s status as a key front in the national fight against segregation. In this opening segment, King states that he has “returned from . . . New England [where he] had a chance to talk with . . . some of the very outstanding leaders and people of our nation.” In these exchanges, King shares that he communicated a profound “truth” that African Americans in St. Augustine and their allies “are determined to march the streets of this city until the walls of segregation come crumbling down.” 
  

  As the program gets underway, footage of protestors in the streets clashing with police accent the narrator’s proclamation that the audience will get an “exclusive behind-the-scenes look at Martin Luther King’s challenge to segregation in the nation’s oldest city.” King’s depiction as a figure who can elevate the crisis into a “national issue” is supplemented by his place at the front lines as the narrator notes that he was recently “arrested during a sit-in attempt” in St. Augustine. The linkage between the national and the local, strategy and tactics, is further highlighted as the relationship—as well as the tension—between King and Hayling are noted at the outset of Fariss’s commentary. Fariss insists on a gap between the quality of the SCLC’s national and local leaderships, reducing this gap to a distinction between the personas of King and Hayling. Buttressed by a juxtaposition of their dueling profiles, Fariss claims that “prior to Reverend King’s arrival, St. Augustine’s pot of racial troubles boil[ed] sporadically under the leadership of Dr. Robert B. Hayling, the local chairman of the [SCLC].” A strict dichotomy emerges in this commentary between Hayling’s supposed “intemperance” on the one hand and King’s innate ability to “[open] the door to a peaceful solution.” 
  Nevertheless, events leading up to this broadcast compel Fariss to pivot rather significantly in his assessment of circumstances on the ground. King’s “presence,” he acknowledges, brought the “racial crisis to a head quickly [but also] dramatically” when on June 9, 1964, nearly three weeks prior to this broadcast, “four hundred hymn-singing marchers . . . were met by a gang of rock-throwing, fist-swinging men.” The failure of city police to “intervene” quickly meant that “demonstrators were beaten to the ground and kicked” by “segregationists” who were also quick to “[attack] newsmen.” Fariss’s characterization of the attacks on June 9 is delivered over footage showing an assault that appears to be from that night. The note on the violence endured by the news crews underscores the stakes of representation while also unsettling the program’s innate tendency to position itself as above the fray.

  The weight of screen time 

  One of the significant elements that makes the third installment of “St. Augustine: Fountain of Dissent” stand out is its length, approximately twice that of each of the first two parts. To a substantial degree, this reflects the program’s partial embrace of an observational approach in which its narrational impulses are restrained as the subjects in front of the camera proceed with their organizational labors on behalf of SCLC. While these scenes are clearly edited and fully integrated into the broader expository contours of the program, they nevertheless contribute durational heft as substantial screen time is dedicated to quiet consideration of the care and deliberation that goes into mobilizing a community to bring about social change. 

  The first such example is a sequence in which the camera crew observes as Reverend Andrew Young leads a meeting of key SCLC personnel in planning a march through St. Augustine’s old slave market. While Fariss punctuates the scene with clusters of exposition to ensure that the audience knows who’s on-screen and what is happening, the sequence is generally free of such narration and observation for nearly six minutes of screen time. 
  

  While heavily reliant on military metaphors such as “chain of command” and “commander-in-chief,” Fariss’s minimal narration nevertheless encourages the audience to register this scene as evidence of “careful planning” and indicative of the intensive labor that goes into developing “strategy” in grassroots movements. Contradicting his earlier, infantilizing comments about the civil rights organizers on the ground in St. Augustine, Fariss reassures the audience that this is “not a group of amateur idealists.” 

  From this perspective, it is remarkable how much time is spent allowing the audience to listen to Reverends Young and C. T. Vivian as they lay out strategies with regard to marches in the streets, fasting in prison, and the filing of affidavits in the courts. It is rare for audiences to be granted even a partial view of the work that goes into organizing, much less within such a pivotal historical context. Undoubtedly, awareness of the camera and the importance of drawing attention to their work inform the conversations we witness on-screen. And yet the subtle use of continuity cuts and intimate sound recordings impart a different epistemological relationship to the organizers, one that grants an impression of access and insight into African American agency, mobilization, and resistance in the face of a segregationist city. 
  

  Aquatic civil disobedience

  The program juxtaposes internal deliberations with external displays of civil disobedience as the confrontations heat up heading into the final days before the Civil Rights Act is officially passed by the Senate and signed into law. Approximately two weeks prior to broadcast, on June 17, Fariss reviews how twenty-nine civil rights activists, Black and white, “staged a wade-in at [the] previously all-white [St. Augustine Beach].” Given the lack of interference from police and the fact that “most white bathers left the water, but otherwise ignored the demonstrators,” Fariss declared the wade-in the “first breakthrough in the long fight to end segregation in St. Augustine.” But Fariss continues and reminds us that this was not the end of the story. Since the initial wade-in on June 17, he laments that the “quiet beach has given way to violence.” It is at this point that footage captured from subsequent wade-ins and clashes is shown in support of Fariss’s narration. Police have begun to regulate the beaches by “ward[ing] off the demonstrators” and establishing a “solid line of patrol cars to make [a] divisional line between the white segregationists and the demonstrators.” Marchers were increasingly met by hostile whites on St. Augustine Beach, leading to further arrests and clashes. 
  

  These coastal transgressions were followed by the famous swim-in at the segregated Monson Motor Lodge in St. Augustine on June 18, 1964. Photographs taken by Horace Cort documented owner James Brock’s dumping of muriatic acid into the pool and onto the swimming protestors. One of the most iconic of his photographs featured Mimi Jones of Georgia, who had traveled to St. Augustine to support the integration efforts led by King.¹⁶ This broadcast, occurring ten days later, features footage of this incident and allows the audience to see Brock’s actions on-screen as well as the brutal police response. Initially, seventy demonstrators, including “fifteen rabbis from New Jersey showed up at the motel to pray.” Their actions led to mass arrests, and footage in this segment shows Brock and police shoving and pushing protestors. Filming is handheld, improvisational, and mobile as the demonstrators are broken up. 
  Next, Fariss narrates the swim-in at the motel, recognizing Brock as “frantic with rage” as he “[dumps] an acid cleaning agent into the water” while also describing the “rough . . . [way] swimmers were dragged . . . from the water to waiting police vans.” He also calls attention to the anger directed at the camera crew, specifically the experience of “WCKT newsman, Roger Burnham, who filmed these scenes, [and] was manhandled . . . by a white observer” while also being “struck twice by law enforcement officers.” On this note, the sequence pivots to an observational approach in which a relatively stable view of these events is portrayed along with synchronous sound from the scene. We see Brock pour acid into the pool and a policeman jump in and tackle a demonstrator—we subsequently learn the officer was off duty and has associations with the Klan. The chaotic scene, what Fariss terms the “wildest [incident] in over a week,” is followed by a quiet interior moment in which King and Ralph Abernathy are shown reflecting on the turn of events at Monson Motor Lodge. Both King and Abernathy praise the demonstrators for their determination and nonviolence while pledging to report the incident to the Justice Department. The observational scene holds for nearly five minutes and is reminiscent of our earlier view of Young and Vivian.
  
   

  The juxtaposition of these two observational scenes links the act of civil disobedience with quiet reflection, thoughtfulness, and resoluteness of leadership. Indeed, the tendency to reduce our perception of the demonstrators to passive victims of racial violence is undercut by King and Abernathy’s reflection on the protestors’ cool heads and insistence on staying the course in the face of segregationist rage. 

  An insurgent presence

  The pair of coastal breaches featured toward the end of “St. Augustine: Fountain of Dissent” document the degree to which African American presence in these aquatic spaces is viewed as fundamentally insurgent and transgressive. In this sense, the prevailing segregationist regime remains the same as what we saw depicted in “News at Noon.” And yet the gradual movement into interior spaces where we witness the labor of mobilization introduces Black agency into the representational field of newsfilm and offers a countervailing perspective—one more open to the urgency of social change, even if this is frustrated by the persistence of white male paternalism in the guise of Fariss.

  Conclusion: Kneeling in the Surf

  From the fountain of youth to coastal insurgencies, the aquatic framing of the series highlights the privilege of who gets to “sip the sulfur water” and who does not.¹⁷ The shifting newsfilm geographies expressed in both WTVJ’s “News at Noon” (1956) and WCKT’s “St. Augustine: Fountain of Dissent” (1964) alternately fortify the segregationist borders of the coast and acknowledge their precarity to varying degrees. The former program reinscribes the insurgent presence of African Americans in recreational spaces through its endorsement of administrative and civic compromise, thanks to the evidentiary and mitigating power of the camera. “News at Noon” specifically held African Americans out of frame until its inclusion of still imagery from the 1956 wade-in and concluding coverage of negotiations at city hall. 

  Interior spaces are much more present throughout WCKT’s later series, where they function less as a form of containment and more as a refuge for civil rights workers, organizers, volunteers, and sympathizers to huddle up, strategize, and coordinate while embracing the presence of the camera crew. The way in which this show is granted access to deliberations on the part of civil rights organizers showcases the movement’s deep awareness of the value of representation, perception, and public pressure, particularly as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 teetered before passage. Discussions and depictions of phone calls, letters, affidavits, and messages directed at the Justice Department and other important players in Washington, D.C., tease national resonances out of the local, as does King’s unwavering commitment to Hayling despite the promotion of a rift between the two in the news coverage. 

  Following Jacques Derrida in Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews, both series, perhaps despite themselves, surrender “to the coming of what comes” and “bear witness” to the inevitable insurgence that contests the boundaries of aquatic privilege and exclusion.¹⁸ The seesaw of televisual artifactuality accounted for by Derrida, in which mediation both constructs and defers, is inscribed here on multiple levels, but most notable are the observational segments of these otherwise expository news programs. “News at Noon” defers in the mildest of terms to the disruption of the Delray Beach wade-ins, offering slight glimpses in the form of still imagery that nevertheless offer us collective visions of African American insurgence. The observational nature of these images, captured in real time and real proximity to the actions, introduces a fleeting sense of the “untimely,” of an insurgence that is coming but does not fully fit into expository news time.¹⁹ The observational scenes from “St. Augustine: Fountain of Dissent” represent a significant amplification of what was a small glimmer in “News at Noon.” 

  No doubt, as I have already stated, these newsfilms offer limited, compromised, and contingent visions of life in South Florida in the fifties and sixties. They are clearly mainstream, local representations of the civil rights movement and, to a significant degree, appear disposable. But the tensions highlighted in this essay also suggest that there is value in these digital revisitations, that looking at such documents from the vantage point of our present conditions has utility so long as we acknowledge our own precarity and that of the artifacts themselves. Such archival interventions tease out the differences and tensions in “mainstream representations,” which—as Hernandez states—otherwise “deny the continued vitality and resistance of Black Floridians that are embodied in organizations such as the Dream Defenders and (F)Empower.”²⁰ As the study of localized newsfilm geographies demonstrates, these stories are not new. Rather, they are part of a deeper history of Black liberation in a state that continues to resist easy categorization.
  
  A list of external links featured in this essay can be found here.²¹
  
  Stephen Charbonneau is an Associate Professor of Film Studies at Florida Atlantic University. His work on media activism, participatory media, and documentary film has been published in several anthologies as well as leading journals in film and media studies. He is the author of Projecting Race: Postwar America, Civil Rights and Documentary Film (Wallflower/Columbia UP, 2016), and co-editor of InsUrgent Media from the Front: A Media Activism Reader (with Chris Robé; Indiana UP, 2020).
  
  Title Image: "Wade-in at St. Augustine Beach on June 17, 1964", Associated Press
  

  Insurgent Leisure, Aquatic Angst: Postwar Newsfilm, Civil Rights, and Coastal Imaginaries © 2025 by Stephen Charbonneau is licensed under CC BY 4.0.

  The Journal of e-Media Studies is published by the Dartmouth Library.
• 1 2024-09-17T06:02:22+00:00 Historical Distance and the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement: Opening Windows into Mississippi’s Civil Rights History 3 image_header 2025-01-07T19:49:21+00:00

  by Jeffery Hirschy

  University of Southern Mississippi
  Abstract

  Introduction
  The Mississippi Civil Rights Movement and Mississippi History
  Historical Distance and Why It Matters
  Four Windows into Mississippi History
  >The Freedom Riders
  >Allen Dulles and the Murdered Civil Rights Workers
  >Patterson and the Attack on Tradition
  >Governor Barnett and the Citizens’ Council
  Conclusion

  Introduction

  Stop a person or a group of people on the street and ask them where the civil rights movement happened, and you might get answers like “Alabama,” “Birmingham,” “the deep South,” or simply “the South.” While all these answers are technically correct, they are leaving out other parts of the broader story that took place from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s across the entire American South. Both African Americans and their white allies wanted change, and they were going to try to make it happen. Groups and individuals from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to local volunteers whose names are lost to history spread out across the region trying to achieve equal rights for all. By the early 1970s, they had achieved some victories, like the Civil Rights Acts, the Voting Rights Act, and other new laws and regulations.¹ A few battles had been won, but there were plenty of others to fight. The struggle for civil rights is a never-ending one.

  Now, nearly fifty years after the end of the first stage of this struggle, archives and museums are endeavoring to remember and preserve the stories of this time for the edification of present and future generations. Enough historical distance has passed to make this possible in a productive and informative way. Mark Salber Phillips describes the subject of his book On Historical Distance as “the ability to talk more about something, more openly, now that more time has passed.”² When it comes to events like the struggle for civil rights, especially in places like Mississippi, the concept of historical distance is an important one and a necessary lens to look at the historical and archival evidence left behind by those engaged in this struggle. This means examining stories of violence, discord, conflict, and hope, in which the major players are left feeling incomplete at the end. This sense of incompletion means that the meanings of the lessons and stories of the era are still being debated. By examining some of the historical and archival evidence surrounding the civil rights movement in Mississippi through the lens of historical distance, one can understand more about the civil rights struggles of the past and the lessons and experiences they left behind.

  The Mississippi Civil Rights Movement and Mississippi History

  From the coming of the first Europeans to the early twentieth century, Mississippi is a case study in abuse, strained human relationships, and tragedy.³ Events like the expulsion of Indigenous Americans, the introduction of African slavery, and the rise of Jim Crow and the populists laid the foundations for the continued propagation of oppression. Mississippi seemed set in stone. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the state was at the back of the line on so many things. Most northern life insurance companies wouldn’t issue policies to Mississippians because of conditions in the state.⁴ It seemed like a place that time and change had forgotten. But later events began to crack the edifice—two world wars and the Great Depression broke Mississippi out of the historical and cultural mud and caused some citizens to reconsider many things. African Americans had gone north and overseas and seen places where they were treated with more respect—even, in some situations, as full members of their communities. They wanted to bring the freedom they had experienced back to their home state. Federal funds brought new roads and expanded electrical service to Mississippi after World War II and led people to think more about embracing the modern world. Those who supported the introduction of new rights and modern infrastructure realized that Mississippi needed to be pulled into the present day. These desires, along with the brutal murder of Emmett Till in 1955, would strike the spark that brought the civil rights movement to life in Mississippi.⁵

  When the movement broke out in the mid-1950s, it was supported by African Americans and some white allies who wanted to change the state for the better.⁶ They followed many of the same protest techniques—sit-ins, voting demonstrations, and marches—that other groups had used across the American South and wider United States. These protests and movements were met with contempt and violence from the government of Mississippi and those who supported Jim Crow and white supremacy. From the riot that would eventually be known as the Battle of Oxford in 1962—fought over the admission of James Meredith to the University of Mississippi—to the murder of civil rights workers near Philadelphia, Mississippi, those supporting the status quo tried to do whatever it took to preserve their system.⁷ This contest, often a violent one, raged for most of the 1950s and 1960s and into the 1970s. From Oxford to Biloxi, the two sides fought for the soul of the state. Only with the historical distance of half a century are we able to examine the historical and archival evidence and unpack some of its lessons for the present and future.

  Historical Distance and Why It Matters

  In 2007 an apology was read out on the steps of the Tallahatchie County Courthouse:

  We the citizens of Tallahatchie County believe that racial reconciliation begins with telling the truth. We call on the state of Mississippi, all its citizens in every county, to begin an honest investigation into our history. While it will be painful, it is necessary to nurture reconciliation and to ensure justice for all. By recognizing the potential for division and violence in our own towns, we pledge to each other, black and white, to move forward together in healing the wounds of the past, and in ensuring equal justice for all its citizens.

  Over fifty-two years ago, on August 28, 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till was kidnapped in the middle of the night from his uncle’s home near Money, Mississippi, by at least two men, one from Leflore County and one from Tallahatchie County, Mississippi. Till, a black youth from Chicago visiting family in Mississippi, was kidnapped, and murdered, and his body thrown into the Tallahatchie River. He had been accused of whistling at a white woman in Money. His badly beaten body was found days later in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi. The Grand Jury meeting in Sumner, Mississippi, indicted Roy Bryant, and J. W. Milan for the crime of murder. These two men were then tried on this charge and were acquitted by an all-white, all-male jury after, a deliberation of just over an hour. Within four months of their acquittal, the two men confessed to the murder.

  Before the trials began, Till’s mother had sought assistance from federal officials, under the terms of the so-called Lindbergh Law which made kidnapping a federal crime but received no aid. Only a renewed request in December 2002 from Till’s mother, supported by Mississippi District Attorney Joyce Chiles and the Emmett Till Justice Campaign, yielded a new investigation.

  We the citizens of Tallahatchie County recognize that the Emmett Till case was a terrible miscarriage of justice. We state candidly and with deep regret the failure to effectively pursue justice. We wish to say to the family of Emmett Till that we are profoundly sorry for what was done in this community to your loved one.

  We the citizens of Tallahatchie County acknowledge the horrific nature of this crime. Its legacy has haunted our community. We need to understand the system that encouraged these events and others like them to occur so that we can ensure that it never happens again. Working together, we have the power now to fulfill the promise of liberty and justice for all.⁸

  This apology, issued by a group of citizens of Tallahatchie County and members of the governments of the town of Sumner and Tallahatchie County, was designed to take the first steps toward embracing and working through the history of the county and city, especially the murder of Emmett Till.⁹ The apology is now preserved on both a monument in the courthouse square and at the local Emmett Till Interpretive Center. Both the apology and the Interpretive Center allow for the stories of visitors to become a part of the story of Till and what it meant for the nation and its people. 

  The example of the apology and the cultural, societal, historical, and political conditions that made it possible are a near perfect example of historical distance. Phillips describes historical distance as the ability of people and groups to have new forms of conversation about historical events and their contexts that could not have happened earlier in history.¹⁰ Examples can range from the Till apology to the words of the president of the Federal Republic of Germany (1984–1994), Richard von Weizsäcker:

  There is no such thing as the guilt or innocence of an entire nation. Guilt is, like innocence, not collective but personal. There is discovered or concealed individual guilt. There is guilt which people acknowledge or deny. . . . All of us, whether guilty or not, whether young or old, must accept the past. We are all affected by the consequences and liable for it. There can be no reconciliation without remembrance.¹¹

  These examples, and others like them, point also to the potential danger that history and its interpretations can cause. Historical interpretation is a tool, and like any tool, it can be used for negative purposes in the wrong hands. Those hands can range from the white supremacists who managed the culture and information systems of the American South in the early and midtwentieth century to uninformed people who share false information on social media today. Take, for example, this quote from The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory by Adam H. Domby:

  The past has been weaponized, and historians must adapt to fight lies and fabricated memories. Technology has allowed a democratization of history but has also furthered the fabrication of the past. While online resources allow anyone to do research more easily, they also circumvent traditional guardians of quality like peer review and editors. Anyone can make up a story or interpretation without any critical consideration and post it online.¹²

  This shows the power of historical distance to do many things for many different types of organizations. For example, the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, and institutions outside the state like the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute all use historical distance to engage their chosen communities with the history, stories, and lessons within their walls. Historical distance allows them to engage with their materials in a more open and honest manner as time passes. This is partially because with time, the events become more history and less things that happened to people. This transformation is extremely important for memory institutions where difficult history is brought up through interactions inside and outside their walls. Phillips describes his realization of this process:

  I came away thinking through the passage of time had provided some of the necessary conditions, the fundamental change of perspective involved impulses that were more complex and wide-ranging that could be included in our customary ideas of historical distance. Paradoxically, too, increased temporal distance has made possible a new, more democratized proximity. The ideas that historical sensibilities change over time was hardly a surprise but was perhaps the first occasion that I saw such changes as entailing a shift of distance or that I began to consider the multiple distances that structure our engagement with the past.
  
  [ . . . ]
  
  For both the historian and the reader, I have come to realize, distance is both historically given and historiographically constructed in ways that move far beyond the standard association of distance with objectivity and the passage of time.¹³

  As time passes, people, groups, governments, religions, and cultures can reevaluate historical events and reinterpret what happened. This reevaluation is not just something that happens in places like the American South that have gone through long periods of well-known historical trauma, generating numerous stories that society, culture, and communities throughout the region are still grappling with. It also happens in less tumultuous places like Indiana. James H. Madison wrote that he needed to update the history of Indiana he wrote in 1986:

  This is a new book, with a new title, because Indiana has changed. So has the knowledge of our past. New scholarship in the last three decades has given us a better understanding of French fur traders, Native Americans, Civil War soldiers, women seeking equality, the Great Depression of the 1930s, and economic development from canals in the 1830s to Japanese auto factories in the 1980s. New scholarship has also helped us understand those individuals and groups whom some Hoosiers struggled to embrace, including Catholics, Jews, and African Americans. African American Hoosiers especially have a larger presence here than in the earlier book. The outpouring of articles and books about race in recent years makes it clear that such stories are not only about African Americans but about all Hoosiers.¹⁴

  This is a form of historical distance. Madison realized that he needed to update his book not just because time has passed and new history had occurred but because the interpretation of previous history needed to be updated to better serve the community. To provide a better and more complete story, analysis, and interpretation, Madison brought in forgotten strands and contexts of Indiana’s history. 

  Mississippi was the second state to have an official archive. Created in 1902, it was designed along the lines of newly created professional archives in Europe.¹⁵ It was a professional archive with professional ideas, but it didn’t manage to collect all the materials generated by its citizens.¹⁶ From 1902 to the aftermath of Mississippi’s struggle for civil rights, the Mississippi Department of Archives and History told only the white version of the state’s history. Proudly on the side of organizations like the Daughters of the Confederacy, it did not want to remember all the stories or have open and honest discussions about Mississippi’s history. Not until the 1980s did the department reform itself and set a new course to remember and preserve all the state’s history, about all of its people. Phillips describes how institutions change their perspective over time: “Strong ideological commitments fueled this democratized interest in questions of gender, memory, or trauma, just as they inspired a whole generation of left-leaning historians to rally to Edward Thompson’s call to rescue forgotten lives from ‘the enormous condescension.’”¹⁷

  The extra historical distance available to the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, and the Mississippi History Museum allows them to do more with the materials they have. Multiple forms of justice and technologies like the internet and social media are integrated into their operations as part of their reforms and updated goals.

  With this distance and a new willingness to tackle uncomfortable topics, these institutions, which are all located in Jackson, Mississippi, are a solid example of how sufficient historical distance can lead to reevaluation and how institutions can and should embrace new ideas to meet the changing needs of their communities. “Objective knowledge [has] to be put in context with other forms of engagement that mediate the now/then of history,” writes Phillips. “Formal structures of engagement that mediate the now/then and rhetoric, affective coloring, the strong summons of ideology, the quest for intelligibility and understanding—the push and pull of these fundamental investments gives distance a new complexity that has been missing from older formulations.”¹⁸

  More history, distance, and time between the present and the events they were designed to analyze allow these institutions to fully engage with new ideas that wouldn’t have been possible, for example, when the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute opened in November 1992. The Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, one of the two museums under the control of the state archive, presented the following goals for what exhibit spaces should embody:

  • Core Values
    • Truth
      • A factual account of the history of the civil rights struggle and an affirmation of the dignity retained by African Americans throughout the period of slavery, emancipation, and attainment of civil rights.
    • Identity
      • The identity of the Museum, and in particular its exhibits, will be forthright in providing human identity for the struggle by placing names and faces on the enslaved and emancipated people who were noteworthy in their persistence and quest to attain full civil rights.
    • Place
      • The prominent role Mississippi played in the struggle for civil rights offered insights into the shaping of people by place and circumstance, and frames through example the opportunity for all to pursue ongoing change for the betterment of the common good.
    • Memory
      • The telling of collective stories of the struggle, both individual and group, to provide a sense of the influence of the past on the present.
    • Exhibits
      • Museum exhibits are like no other medium in that they present the opportunity to immerse visitors in a focused reconstruction of time, place, and event in order to extract the essence of a story that deserves telling. Exhibits are now expected to function as immersive environments, carefully constructed to set a mood, and instill feelings. Drawing upon a carefully orchestrated series of experiences, they can provide visitors with a series of encounters that inform, inspire and delight. The process of discovery in a museum is on opportunity to learn as well as to confirm, and to have the experience of finding out new and unexpected things.¹⁹

  Historical distance is a key part of engagement between historical institutions and their communities. This framing lens allows the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, its two museums, and museums like the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute to engage with history on an institutional, personal, and community level. Without this interaction, neither the institution nor the community would be able to work toward understanding and learning from the lessons of the past and applying them to the present and future. This process is at the heart of a modern professional information institution and a key to understanding video clips like those on hand at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History.²⁰

  Four Windows Into Mississippi History

  The Mississippi Department of Archives and History holds an extensive collection of materials that display many aspects of the complex history of the state. Some of these materials can be accessed online at https://da.mdah.ms.gov, including a collection of television recordings. The videos from the civil rights movement period are especially fascinating because television itself was a battleground in the struggle. From not airing the television show Bonanza because its stars supported civil rights to a long court battle over licensing and equal access around Jackson stations WLBT and WJTV, television was a place where viewers came to find support for their arguments or validation of their beliefs.²¹

  Television’s critical role was not limited to Mississippi. Birmingham’s firehoses and dogs, Jackson’s mass arrests and speechifying segregationist mayor—these were tools used by both sides and appear in clips from the state archive. Applying the lens of historical distance gives viewers new understanding about these clips, the roles they played at the time, and the roles they can play today. In the following sections, I analyze four videos from the archive that epitomize the movement and offer new insights to those who lived through those days and those learning about these events for the first time.

  The Freedom Riders

  This protest started as a response to inaction in the South regarding the Supreme Court decisions Morgan v. Virginia and Boynton v. Virginia, which declared that segregated restaurants, waiting rooms, and buses were unconstitutional. The Freedom Rider plan was to travel from Washington, D.C., to New Orleans to show how the region had failed to implement these decisions and shame it into doing so.²² From May to December 1961, students and other volunteers working with the Congress of Racial Equality and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee traveled across the region to demonstrate the South’s failure to uphold the law. The Freedom Riders were of diverse cultures and races and believed that the United States could and should do better for its people.²³

  After leaving Washington and crossing the Potomac, the Freedom Riders encountered little resistance in Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. Most folks in those states wanted the Freedom Riders to pass so things could go back to normal. Keeping them around would only stir up trouble, in their opinion. But deeper in the South, in Alabama and Mississippi, groups like the Ku Klux Klan and some police were willing to attack the Freedom Riders, whom they considered to be an extreme threat to their way of life.²⁴

  The South’s war against the Freedom Riders began in Anniston, Alabama, and spread to Birmingham, Montgomery, and any city or community where the Riders stopped.²⁵ On May 16, 1961, citizens of Anniston attacked buses, beat passengers, threatened others, and made sure the Freedom Riders found no peace. The attackers thought they were fighting the second coming of William Tecumseh Sherman or Karl Marx, and they were not going to lose. 

  By May 24, 1961, the Freedom Riders were beaten, battered, and bruised but still standing. They were escorted out of Alabama by US Marshals. When they entered Mississippi, they were promised “protection” by the state government, which meant the protection of a jail cell. When the Freedom Riders arrived in Jackson, they were arrested by local and state law enforcement and sent to Parchman Farms, Mississippi’s worst prison. But instead of fleeing, the Freedom Riders decided to make a stand. As many as three hundred Freedom Riders were arrested, multiple times for multiple reasons, in Mississippi. They showed the state they were not afraid and would not be deterred from achieving their goals.²⁶

  The video, showing Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Abernathy, and some of the Freedom Riders who were arrested, demonstrates that the Riders came from different races, cultures, and geographic locations. Seeing this, it’s a bit clearer why the Freedom Riders and their supporters were so alarming to the authorities in Mississippi. This group represented one of the greatest threats to the story constellation and memory structure of the state. The events in Jackson weren’t a local anomaly but part of the larger battle for civil rights nationwide.
  

  Allen Dulles and the Murdered Civil Rights Workers

  The second video covers the arrival of Allen Dulles, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), at Jackson Airport in 1964. Dulles was there at the request of President Lyndon B. Johnson. At the time of his arrival, the state and the country were locked in another crisis over civil rights. Earlier that week, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner had been murdered near the city of Philadelphia, Mississippi, while working to achieve the goals of Freedom Summer.²⁷

  The movement was launched earlier that month when civil rights activists and volunteers tried to register as many African Americans to vote as possible. They also tried to educate African Americans across the state and give them the tools to escape the swamps of white supremacy.²⁸ Because Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were enemies of Mississippi’s tradition, they were harassed, threatened, and bullied across the state. Their assailants included the local police. It was especially dangerous on the backroads, where they were far from allies and often surrounded by enemies. These enemies finally murdered the three men and buried their bodies in a mass grave on June 21, 1964.²⁹

  In the aftermath of the murders, the state and county descended into crisis. It was a shocking and brutal act, much like the Birmingham police attacking children in the streets with dogs and firehoses. People were outraged around the world, and because of this Dulles was deployed by the president to manage the situation and try to keep the peace.³⁰ Dulles had been the CIA director for Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy.³¹ He was known for his service to the CIA and in World War II. Sending him to Mississippi was supposed to show that the president respected the government and people of the state. 

  The video shows Dulles landing at the airport like a diplomat preparing to begin talks with a foreign power. This was by design. President Johnson was making sure that Mississippi was taken care of and pampered. Dulles was there to make sure that Mississippi would cooperate with the federal government in the investigation into the disappearance and murder of the three civil rights workers. 
  These two video clips focus on the side of freedom in the struggle for civil rights in Mississippi. The next two focus on the side of white supremacy. The juxtaposition of these videos can help viewers understand the complexities of this struggle and why each side acted as it did, allowing a more informed analysis of this period.

  Patterson and the Attack on Tradition

  The third video takes the viewer into the minds of Mississippi’s white political leadership during the civil rights movement. Mississippi’s attorney general, Joe Patterson, was at the forefront of white supremacist resistance. Men like him used the power of their political office to fulfill their own social and political desires instead of serving all the people of Mississippi. 

  Like the British in India, the government of Mississippi practiced a “divide and rule” style of leadership. Across its policies, it made sure that different groups and factions fought against each other, hated each other, and never realized that their true enemies were the people in political and economic power.³² The civil rights movement was a threat to men like Patterson because it wanted to break down the walls between groups, stop the fighting, and create a better Mississippi with no room for the old governing clique. 

  Because of this perceived threat, Patterson and his associates did their best to make sure the movement did not achieve its goals in Mississippi. As attorney general, he had authority over the state police and other levers of power that he could use to fight his enemies. He supported the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, the state’s secret police force, and profiled and bullied people from the 1950s to the 1970s to make sure traditional Mississippi survived. 

  In the video, Patterson engages with his audience on a variety of subjects related to the murders of the three civil rights workers. He claims to have a lot of power but is willing to help local authorities. Most of all, he wants to come off as a neutral voice of reason rising above the crisis the state and county find themselves in. He claims that both sides are to blame for what is happening. If the civil rights workers hadn’t been there, the supporters of traditional Mississippi wouldn’t have been scared and forced to do what they did. Patterson, like so many throughout history, wants to seem like an innocent bystander with no control over the situation while making sure that the people who committed the crimes are allowed to continue with their harassment.
  

  Governor Barnett and the Citizens’ Council

  The fourth video is a speech given by Governor Ross Barnett to the Mississippi Citizens’ Council, a government-supported white supremacist front that was organized to fight the civil rights movement and the US government. The speech was a call to arms for the Citizens’ Council and its supporters. The Citizens’ Council was a group dedicated to the preservation of the story constellation of traditional Mississippi. Like Barnett, they were willing to do whatever it took to accomplish their aims. Barnett was there to fire up his supporters and ask them to rally to his side in the ongoing struggle. 

  While George Wallace of Alabama was more famous, Barnett was just as much of a segregationist. As governor from 1960 to 1964, he fought James Meredith’s integration of the University of Mississippi, which resulted in the Battle of Oxford in 1962.³³ He made sure the Freedom Riders were arrested and sent to the worst Mississippi prison in 1961 and helped fund and expand the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission.³⁴ Barnett did not serve the people of Mississippi; he practiced “divide and rule” just as his predecessors had. He was going to support traditional Mississippi no matter what. 

  In his speech, Barnett declarers himself to be a segregationist, a supporter of states’ rights, and a protector of Mississippi’s heritage. He clarifies that this is what he is going to fight and stand for. Instead of being booed or shouted down, he is applauded and hailed as a hero. Like Wallace in Alabama, Barnett imagined himself as the reincarnation of Jefferson Davis fighting the tyranny of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Like them, Barnett and his supporters lost the war. 

  Change is hard, and it is often slow. By using historical distance as a lens of analysis, one can see that the Mississippi of 2023 is still dealing with the issues of its past. But while the state has a history of strained human relationships and abuse, it also has a history of hope against all odds. For example, after the civil rights movement in Mississippi ended in the early 1970s, the battle across the nation continued. Slowly but surely, African Americans entered politics, business, and different class spheres in Mississippi.³⁵

  There was hope, and the lessons of the past were being applied to the present, but this did not mean that the struggle for civil rights was over. The forces of white supremacy rearmed and returned to the battlefield with new ideas and old ideas dressed in new clothes. From Jackson to the Delta, African American communities were drastically underfunded by the state government. This led to mass poverty and a slow but steady collapse of the infrastructure, creating incidents like the 2022 water crisis in Jackson, when the largest city and the capital of the state was without running water for several weeks.³⁶

  The water crisis is just one example of a new form of the environmental racism that has stalked Mississippi for centuries. By recognizing this and connecting this crisis to, for example, the 1927 Great Mississippi Flood, one can discover lessons from history that can apply to the present and future. This realization is the power of historical distance and why it works as an analytical tool for Mississippi’s history and the evidence in the Mississippi Department of Archives and History.³⁷ These stories have power, and they should be available.

  Conclusion

  The process of understanding the historical and cultural value of the audiovisual material at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History is just beginning. Through the lens of historical distance, one can see that these stories are complex and have numerous lessons for the present and future. The words of John Patterson and Ross Barnett could easily be mistaken for those of current politicians, suggesting that the ideas supported by these men were never totally defeated. There are lessons in recognizing and defusing their power in these clips. The availability of this material could also help those living during the civil rights era talk about what happened then and what is happening today, especially in the aftermath of the racial reckoning surrounding the 2020 murder of George Floyd.³⁸ These stories have power, and historical distance helps unlock that power. Knowing this history will empower present and future generations to make decisions that will hopefully lead Mississippi toward becoming a place based less on conflict and more on bonds of community and acceptance.
  
  A list of external links featured in this essay can be found here.³⁹
  
  Jeff Hirschy is an Assistant Professor of Library and Information Science at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. There he manages the Archives and Special Collections Certificate and conducts research related to the public history and memory surrounding natural disasters, general Environmental History, archives, archives and social justice, and community archives. Outside the classroom, he enjoys walking, cats, and Star Trek.
  
  Historical Distance and the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement: Opening Windows into Mississippi’s Civil Rights History © 2025 by Jeffery Hirschy is licensed under CC BY 4.0.
  
  The Journal of e-Media Studies is published by the Dartmouth Library.

• 1 2024-09-17T06:02:22+00:00 Black and White Together?: National Educational Television and Civil Rights in the 1960s 3 image_header 2025-01-07T19:51:32+00:00

  
  by Allison Perlman

  University of California, Irvine
  
  Abstract

  NET and Civil Rights
  NET, Civil Rights, and the Power and Limits of Talk
  The Limits of NET: Racism and the Press
  Conclusion

   

  "Black and White Together?", telecast in 1969 as part of National Educational Television’s (NET) weekly public affairs series NET Journal, examined an educational program in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The school system had received a federal grant to create an experimental, innovative program to address problems within the city’s schools. As the introduction to the documentary made clear, there were many intertwined issues to address: the widespread perception among students of the irrelevance of their curricula, the out-of-touchness of their teachers, the repressiveness of the school system, and the racial tensions that had emerged in interracial high schools—not only from bringing young people into contact who previously had been largely segregated but also from the discriminatory disciplinary practices leveled at Black students. The experiment, named Project WILL, brought an interracial group of students together at an Atlantic City hotel and initially intended to allow the students to determine the contours of the program to address the issues they faced. As the documentary traces, Project WILL was instead dictated by school administrators and inflamed, rather than ameliorated, racial tensions among the students.

  One of the last direct-to-camera interviews in “Black and White Together?” is with Samuel Sanderson, a director in the Office of Evaluation in New Jersey who had been involved with Project WILL throughout its development and execution. Acknowledging its failures, Sanderson asks, “Where do we go from here?” Expressing skepticism that projects like it should receive additional funding, he suggests, “There is also the possibility that, really, the real reason that people don’t get along is not so much that they don’t understand each other, it could well be that they do understand each other.” That is, perhaps the very premise of Project WILL, that racial tensions could be resolved through interracial dialogue, was itself misguided, and the problem was not a lack of clarity about other perspectives but a gulf between people that conversation could not bridge.

  Sanderson’s comment cuts to the heart of not only Project WILL but the televisual context in which the documentary aired. NET long had prioritized public affairs programming about racial discrimination and the struggle for civil rights. It sought to offer audiences a perspective distinct from what viewers could see on the major commercial television networks. While NET embraced a range of strategies to address racism in US society, a recurring trope was the network’s emphasis on talk, discussion, deliberation, and debate not only as a crucial means to define the problem but as a constitutive part of its solution. If Sanderson’s comment directly questioned the utility of experiments like Project WILL, it indirectly interrogated the efficacy of the program on which the documentary aired and the public affairs philosophy that instantiated its creation.

  The dual register of this moment—Sanderson’s specific comment on Project WILL and an unintentional reflection on NET’s approach to civil rights programs—finds an echo in another NET Journal episode. “Welfare Revolt” (1967) offered an incisive critique of the US welfare system and documented coordinated resistance to its indignities and insufficiencies. At one moment, a leader of the welfare rights movement in Cleveland is asked to pose for a photo with the white male head of welfare distribution in her city. Despite the insistent cajoling of journalists and the bureaucrat, the woman refuses to smile for the photo. Within the context of the documentary, the moment at once underlines the seriousness of purpose of the activist and registers her refusal to placate white desires for her cooperation and containment; this moment also inadvertently speaks to the necessary resistance to the dominance of a white-controlled media system like NET, empowered to represent, document, and shape narratives about race, racial discrimination, and racial justice.
  Across the 1960s, through multiple public affairs series and one-off specials, NET programs interrogated US racial discrimination and the fight for civil rights. These programs varied substantially in format, aesthetics, topic, tone, and politics. They profiled prominent Black leaders and interviewed everyday people, homed in on local struggles and addressed national problems, depicted white people both in solidarity with and in strident opposition to racial progress, and illuminated the divisions within and across Black and white communities over how to define and tackle racial discrimination. Struggles over educational institutions was a recurring topic across many episodes, as was the efficacy of government programs. NET programs traveled to all regions in the continental United States and, cumulatively, refused to exculpate any place as free from corrosive, entrenched, systemic racial discrimination. While nearly all the episodes featured white hosts or journalists, many also, by design or by happenstance, centered Black voices as the primary authorities on US racism and its consequences.

  NET’s programs on civil rights were distinct from those offered by commercial networks and stations. One of the key differences was that NET shows avoided images of violence and spectacular Black suffering and instead emphasized talk, deliberation, discussion. Instead of pictures of firehoses, police dogs, and violent mobs, NET cameras entered Black homes, churches, schools, and workplaces and interviewed diverse people to illuminate the harms of segregation. Later in the decade, NET programs not only avoided images of the uprisings in US cities, they offered incisive discussion of the causes, justifications, and logic of these eruptions. Program guests frequently emphasized that the uprisings were rational responses to scarcity and abuse.

  This essay focuses on two consistent elements of NET episodes on civil rights: the primacy of discussion and deliberation and a critique of the white press, both explicit and implied. While NET’s public affairs programming offers a remarkable archive of the struggles for racial justice in the 1960s—as well as the resistance and backlash they activated—many episodes also called into question the role of conversation and debate in ameliorating racial divides and the power of the media itself to structure how racial discrimination is defined and discussed.

  NET and Civil Rights

  The approach taken by NET’s series on civil rights emerged from its programming philosophy and the limitations of the noncommercial television sector in the 1960s. NET was formed initially as the Educational Television and Radio Center in 1952. Created by the Ford Foundation’s Fund for Adult Education, with the guidance of the National Association of Educational Broadcasters, the Educational Television and Radio Center was to procure and distribute programming to noncommercial broadcast stations. During its television licensing freeze from 1948 to 1952, the Federal Communications Commission was persuaded to set aside over two hundred television channels for noncommercial, educational purposes. These TV stations would build on a long-standing, if small and increasingly precarious, educational radio sector that had seen in broadcasting a technology of edification, instruction, and enlightenment. Ford would be the primary benefactor of the educational television sector throughout the 1950s and 1960s, including the Educational Television and Radio Center, which in May 1954 began offering five hours of programming per week to the four noncommercial TV stations on the air. 

  Initially the Educational Television and Radio Center’s philosophy toward its programming followed a few principles. It privileged a continuing weekly programming package with a predictable number of hours; in so doing, it favored stability over selectivity. In that vein, the Educational Television and Radio Center worked to provide its affiliates with series rather than one-off programs, presuming that the cumulative impact of a series would be of greater educational value to viewers than solitary programs. It strove for high-quality programs, both technically and substantively, seeking academic experts and often university or college sponsorship for its programs. While open to a range of programming sources, the Educational Television and Radio Center prioritized the local producing station for three reasons: local stations knew the interests of their audiences best, they benefited from the financial assistance the Educational Television and Radio Center could provide, and supporting local stations improved the quality of their programs.¹

  Stations were pleased to produce these programs, but they were “disappointed with the programming coming back to them on the network.”² The Educational Television and Radio Center’s early programming often featured lectures or panel discussions of low technical quality that critics found “duller than dishwater.”³ Affiliate dissatisfaction with the Educational Television and Radio Center grew, for both the programming it distributed and its location in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which placed it far from the stations, production facilities, and key events in the news. Despite the low regard for this programming from stations and audiences alike, this early philosophy that prioritized edification and expertise would continue to mark NET’s approach, especially to its public affairs programs.

  The leadership of the Educational Television and Radio Center changed in 1958 from Harry Newburn, its first president, to John White, who had been general manager of WQED in Pittsburgh and vice president at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. As president of the center, White renamed it the National Educational Television and Radio Center, and later NET. He moved its headquarters to New York, shifted its programming priorities, and announced its intention to be a “fourth network” that would operate as an alternative to the three major commercial broadcast networks. White amped up the development program—charged with soliciting financial support from individuals, foundations, government agencies, and corporations—and redirected its funds toward the acquisition of high-quality programming. In 1963 he secured a $6 million grant from the Ford Foundation, with the stipulation that NET focus on the production, distribution, funding, and promotion of noncommercial television programming. At the core of the shift inaugurated by this robust Ford grant was NET’s transformation from “an organization that contracted for or purchased almost all of its program units to one that does itself produce much of its programming.”⁴

  White had envisioned NET as a “fourth” network not bound, as the commercial networks were, by an interconnected array of geographically dispersed stations but by a shared philosophy as to the purpose of noncommercial television. Especially with NET’s public affairs programming, White sought to offer an alternative to the commercial networks by covering topics and perspectives they avoided and provoking audiences to think critically, and perhaps differently, about the world they inhabited. NET aimed for noncommercial television to be an “influence” on the national stage by engaging with the issues of the day in a manner that commercial networks would not. Its public affairs programs were to provide alternative perspectives, go into greater depth on important topics, or dedicate airtime to issues ignored by commercial stations.⁵

  By design and necessity, NET approached public affairs programs differently than its commercial counterparts. Perhaps the most salient restriction that NET faced was in its distribution capacity. Unlike the commercial networks, educational television stations were not interconnected. In other words, it would not be until the late 1960s that NET could offer simultaneous broadcasts to its affiliates and, prior to the creation of PBS, this was done on a very infrequent basis. Until 1964 NET used a block system to distribute its programs: it would send ten videotape copies to the stations designated in Block I; those stations would keep the tapes for up to a week, then ship them to Block II. It could take around twenty-one weeks for a program to circulate through the eight blocks of stations. This system not only angered stations in the latter blocks, but it made promotion of NET programming in national publications difficult and, importantly, was a deterrent to producing shows on topical issues.⁶

  Starting in 1964, NET was able to produce more copies of public affairs programs and greatly shorten its distribution window; for its most topical programs, it produced enough copies for all its stations to air them on the same day. It could not, however, air simultaneous live broadcasts. Unlike the commercial networks, NET was unable to provide on-the-spot coverage of events or break important news stories. Its public affairs programs compensated for the absence of live reports and immediacy with the selection, thoroughness, and perspective of the topics they covered.

  While NET often organized its public affairs programs as dedicated series, there was great variety in the provenance, format, and political orientation of individual episodes within a series. And while NET continued to actively court local stations for programming—both full episodes and segments—its public affairs programs often were sources of friction with affiliates. NET’s commitment to exploring topics and perspectives ignored by commercial media frequently conflicted with the mission and mores of local stations. Predictable patterns emerged for the episodes some affiliates refused to air. Of the topics rejected by some affiliates—such as shows that examined, rather than solely condemned, communist and socialist nations or explored new social mores around drugs and sexuality—a recurring topic refused out of hand by many stations was racial discrimination.⁷ Even so, NET continued to prioritize civil rights and myriad facets of racial discrimination in its public affairs programming in the 1960s and strove not to duplicate the coverage offered by commercial news. 

  NET’s episodes on civil rights hewed to the sector’s commitment to edifying programming and aligned with a postwar vision of television as an instrument of civic instruction. As Anna McCarthy shows, television was imagined as a technology of good citizenship, discussion programs a means to produce the proper disposition and knowledge required for democratic self-governance.⁸ Ford had been an advocate of this sort of programming, and it mapped onto the educational origins of NET’s programming. In addition, the role of conversation as a means to address racial tension was ascendant in the postwar decades. Commissions—alternately known as human relations, community relations, civil rights, and intergroup—emerged across the nation to foster discussion as an imagined necessary step to mitigate racial discrimination. The potential power of conversation similarly animated NET’s public affairs programming, especially shows examining US race relations.

  NET, Civil Rights, and the Power and Limits of Talk

  Discussion and deliberation were hallmarks of NET public affairs programs. Hot-button episodes frequently were followed by panel discussions of experts who would dissect the program and offer divergent perspectives on its claims. Interviews not only occupied a privileged place in many documentaries but often provided narration as well. Documentary footage often dwelled on public and private discussions, from school board meetings to kitchen table conversations. Entire episodes were dedicated to conversation; some focused on small panels of experts, others on town hall meetings or social science experiments predicated on bringing diverse participants into dialogue. 

  Many of the episodes dedicated to racial discrimination demonstrated the utility of such a format. NET’s Civil Rights Summer ’66 was an hour-long conversation between Bayard Rustin, Whitney Young, Mary Henry, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, moderated by journalist Paul Niven. The participants had been in Washington, D.C., to attend a conference convened by President Johnson on civil rights. It was a program dedicated to talk following a conference built on dialogue and confrontation. Young praises the conference for its work to bring into conversation captains of industry and Black people—the latter known to the former, as Young suggests, nearly exclusively in service roles as maids, gardeners, or caddies—and allows the latter to describe their desire for the same employment, educational, and residential opportunities as other Americans. The conference’s success, for Young, was in its capacity to generate this form of talk.

  On a set that resembles a living room, the panelists take stock of the state of the civil rights movement and are especially attentive to the increasing generation gap between leaders like themselves and young Black people whose lives have not improved despite the work they have done. The discussion is remarkable for the generosity of the panelists toward their critics and for their recognition that despite their own avowed commitment to nonviolence, the uprisings in US cities were logical and effective responses to material deprivation. The panelists insist on the strength, creativity, and intelligence of people living in poverty and suggest that they are the best diagnosticians of their own problems and architects of their solutions. The conversation upsets reductive ideas about race and racism in the US, puncturing the demonization of Black youth so ascendant in the mainstream press. 

  The power of NET Journal’s telecast of “A Time for Burning” similarly comes from its emphasis on talk. NET Journal, which brought NET’s extant public affairs series under its umbrella in 1966, was a weekly series designated to be aired on Mondays during prime time as a flagship public affairs program. NET relied on an array of production sources for NET Journal: in-house documentarians, affiliated stations, and programs acquired from outside entities, especially international broadcasters. NET Journal was composed largely of documentaries adopting a range of aesthetic approaches to their topics, as well as panel discussion shows and debates. “A Time for Burning,” directed by Bill Jersey, had been commissioned by the Lutheran Church of America.

  The documentary narrates the story of Lutheran minister Bill Youngdahl’s effort to address racial discrimination in Omaha through a program that would allow Black and white parishioners to socialize and talk; it was a proposal that exemplified a belief in dialogue as a remedy to racial strife. The film is composed of a series of conversations about race in Omaha—for example, white church leaders discussing white fears over integration, Black men in a barbershop disputing the racial anxieties that lead to racial covenants, young Black students confronting the racial animus that came from their visit to a white church—and its power comes from the juxtaposition of scenes and the portrait it paints of misunderstanding and misinformation. While Youngdahl lost his job for his efforts—his desire for conversation was seen as a step too far in Omaha—the film suggests that white Omaha’s resistance to talk is only propelling the city’s problems with racism.

  NET Journal’s “Midsummer 1967” addresses the 1967 uprising in Newark through a filmed town hall meeting moderated by journalist Leon Lewis. While the meeting features a representative from the mayor’s office, a city council member, and local civil rights leaders, its voices include people from the community—some of whom participated in the uprising. Much of the conversation focuses on the prevalence of police brutality and the poor education delivered to Black children. Participants speak eloquently about the corrosive racism and insulting paternalism that have governed Black–white relations in the city and the power structure’s unwillingness to hear the legitimate grievances of its residents. The format of “Midsummer 1967,” anchored in the comments of Newark’s residents, punctures the characterization of the uprising as criminal or irrational and renders it as a legible act to resist the myriad violence of racism.

  Yet the limitations of talk become one of the recurring features of NET’s programs on racial discrimination. The weekly public affairs series At Issue dedicated a number of episodes to the topic. At Issue premiered on NET in 1963 and ran until 1966. Produced by Alvin Perlmutter, it covered timely issues and prioritized topics ignored by the commercial networks, such as press coverage of the Jack Ruby murder, automobile safety, and consumer packaging practices.⁹ The episode “Quiet Conflict” focused on a city council race in Brunswick, Georgia, between the head of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and a member of the white Citizens’ Council. This election served as a proxy for race relations in Brunswick a year after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The episode makes clear that the economy of Brunswick, where over 40 percent of the residents are Black, hinges on its reputation for a lack of explicit racial strife. It features interviews with members of the local human relations council to underscore the possibilities of racial harmony and integration via social exchange. 

  However, the city council race forced tensions in the community to the surface. The mayor of Brunswick suggested in an interview that the election caused people to say things out loud that were best left unspoken; in the film, it is unclear if he is speaking of Black residents seeking change or white people affirming white supremacy, but the comment underlines the town’s preference for gradualism and moderation, all of which is undermined by explicit recognition, spoken aloud, of grievance or animus within Brunswick. The artifice of the town’s racial harmony is exposed when the episode brings the viewer into the scene of Reverend Hope’s church, in which he delivers a sermon that, in its emphasis on Black strength and resilience, counters the theme of gradual progress that structures the episode. “Quiet Conflict” at once holds out hope that dialogue and exchange, exemplified through the human relations council, can deliver racial harmony and signals that the suppression of speech, or its confinement to particular spaces, is an oft-unspoken requirement for progress.

  “Where Is Prejudice?” is one of a number of episodes—such as “Midsummer 1967,” “Black and White Together?”, and “Some of Our Best Friends”—that are entirely focused on conversation. “Where Is Prejudice?” documents an experiment in which college students from elite schools and diverse racial backgrounds are brought together in a multiday retreat to engage in dialogue about racial prejudice. Led by Max Birnbaum of Boston University’s Human Relations Lab, the group lives together as a gauge of the level of prejudice among young, educated Americans. What emerges from the conversations is, as a young white woman puts it, that racial prejudice crosses generational lines and is not solely, as she had thought, a malady of her parents’ generation. In this she likely conflates, as do other participants, Black nationalism and bigotry based on race and religion. While the group includes an interracial couple, as well as participants who embrace colorblindness, the episode pays more attention to the participants who see import in recognizing difference. In one of the final moments of the episode, a white Christian fundamentalist tells the group that he fears for the future because people like those in the group will run the world, their lack of proper faith consigning them and the world to eternal damnation. The camera observes the silence that follows this declaration, broken up by a discussion of the dangers of unswerving belief that cannot be countered or changed.

  The final comments of the episode, from journalist Dick McCutcheon via voice-over, answer the question “Where is prejudice?” with the words “Right here.” This form of prejudice results, in McCutcheon’s language, not in riots or lynchings or institutionalized forms of discrimination but in insidious expressions of racism in respectable circles. The narration suggests that if the most educated young people express prejudiced views, there is little hope for the future. Immediately following McCutcheon’s interpretation of the experiment’s lessons, the soundtrack repeats a line by a Jewish participant who states that he does not want to be stereotyped but wants to “be me.” It is this liberal individualism that the episode holds out as the goal of racial progress, unattainable based on the discussion on which the episode is based. “Where Is Prejudice?” was based on the power of conversation to unmask important truths. Yet the experiment, at its center, demonstrates how talk can clarify but cannot reconcile or heal.

  The limits of talk are perhaps best on display in “Civil Rights: What Next?,” an episode filmed immediately after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1968—also known as the Fair Housing Act—and a week after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. There are two sets of panelists: civil rights leaders Floyd McKissick (Congress of Racial Equality), Hosea Williams (Southern Christian Leadership Conference), and James Foreman (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) are in New York; they are in dialogue with John Feild, James Kilpatrick, Charles Mathias Jr., and host Paul Niven in Washington, D.C. Feild is the director of community relations for the US Conference of Mayors, Mathias is a liberal Republican congressman from Maryland, and Kilpatrick is a journalist and newspaper editor perhaps best known for his advocacy—after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision—of interposition, or the right of states to interpose their own authority to protect their citizens from unjust federal actions. The men in each location wear earpieces to hear the panelists in the other city. And fairly quickly, Niven’s desire for deliberation and conversation breaks down.

  Dialogue devolved as the civil rights leaders refuse to be silenced, either literally or figuratively. They have much to say about the failings of the 1968 law—seen as benefiting the Black middle class but not the majority of Black people and, through its antiriot provisions, criminalizing dissent and sanctioning the incarceration of protestors—but also about the thoroughgoing structural racism of US society and the state-sanctioned violence that propels its continuation. They are especially attuned to the insufficiencies of civil rights laws, often passed after the murder of activists and leaders, that do nothing to redress the corrosive racism that afflicts most Black people. 

  They continue to speak even as Niven shifts the conversation over to the D.C. participants, so much so that at one point, Niven asks that the New York panel’s microphones be silenced. At times the viewer can vaguely hear the sounds of the civil rights leaders as they interrupt the white participants, who speak haltingly over the interruptions. By the end of the episode, Kilpatrick and Mathias are accusing the civil rights leaders of racism, suggesting their advocacy for Black nationalism is equivalent to white segregationist rhetoric. Niven ends by stating that the lesson of the program is “to expose racial problems in the United States in 1968 is to exacerbate them, rather than to help solve them.” That there could be no agreement reached among the men who participated, and that the dialogue did not follow the rules that Niven tried to impose, registered to the host as a failure of talk as a means to redress racial problems.

  Some of the NET Journal episodes anchored in group discussion include moments that recognize their artifice. At one moment in “Where Is Prejudice?”, a Black woman who rejects the nationalism of another participant acknowledges that the experiment is being filmed and her parents likely will watch the telecast, which affects how she has participated. While the documentary utilizes a direct-cinema, fly-on-the-wall filming technique, this moment reminds viewers that the participants are aware of the cameras and the authenticity of the exchanges is tempered by their presence. 

  “Some of Our Best Friends,” a NET Journal two-hour program that compressed a ten-hour conversation among Black and Jewish people about tensions across their communities, contains a similar moment. Prior to filming, Richard Cohen of the American Jewish Committee publicly criticized John Hatchett, who had lost his job as a teacher in Harlem for taking his students to a memorial service for Malcolm X. He subsequently was appointed to direct New York University’s Martin Luther King Afro-American Center. Jewish leaders, including Cohen, opposed the appointment over an article by Hatchett that claimed Black children’s minds were “poisoned” by Jewish teachers and administrators.¹⁰ Much of the discussion in “Some of Our Best Friends” hinges on this very tension over Jewish teachers in Black schools. While Jewish participants see racism in the marking as “Jewish” of the teachers and administrators that have failed Black students, the Black participants insist that this is borne out of the actuality that many of the teachers are Jewish and the hostility is about the structural position of these white people to control Black schools, not anti-Semitism. As Hatchett and Cohen discuss their specific incident, journalist Paul Jacobs asks Cohen why it took a TV show filmed in D.C. to push him to speak directly to Hatchett. It is a moment that at once recognizes the clarifying power of direct communication and the artifice of the program itself, which facilitated a dialogue precisely because it was a TV show.

  The Limits of NET: Racism and the Press

  In 1968 NET debuted Black Journal, a public affairs series by and for Black audiences. Alvin Perlmutter was the show’s first executive producer. Fairly quickly, the show’s staff rebelled and insisted on a Black producer, and Perlmutter was replaced by documentarian and filmmaker William Greaves, who would serve as cohost along with Lou House. Black Journal, as Tommy Lee Lott demonstrates, was informed by Black nationalism, from the use of Swahili in the show’s opening to the frequent inclusion of political scientist Charles Hamilton, coauthor of Black Power: The Politics of Liberation. Black Journal not only addressed Black history, art, and culture, it inverted the gaze of televisual journalism by foregrounding Black perspectives of current events and politics. Black Journal developed out of both criticism of the press in the Kerner Report—which identified print and broadcast journalism as among the institutions anchored in white supremacy—and the aftermath of the assassination of King and the hope that increased televisual representation could defuse violent Black protest.¹¹ The series also implicitly redressed NET’s public affairs programming, which—with rare exceptions—centered white journalists as guides and interpreters of its programs on civil rights. This facet of its public affairs programs inadvertently became part of the coverage of the Black freedom struggle in individual episodes.

  The critique came in the form of resistance to white journalists on public affairs programs. The At Issue episode titled “Inside the Ghetto” is an hour-long conversation between writer Claude Brown and intellectual and critic Norman Podhoretz. The interview takes place outside in Harlem and intersperses its tight focus on Brown and Podhoretz with images of the neighborhood’s adult residents watching and nodding or children playing on fire escapes. While Podhoretz calls himself a fan of Brown’s book, throughout the interview Brown pushes against Podhoretz’s questions and the premises on which they are based. He insists on undoing what political leaders and the press, including Podhoretz here, have done, which is to presume a uniformity across the Black community and an allegiance to the same set of leaders, most notably King. Brown affirms the specificity of Harlem, honors the survival strategies of the people who live there, and dismisses the capacity of figures from outside the community—especially middle-class leaders—to represent them or speak to their problems. He especially rejects the pathologization of Harlem and the role of bureaucrats and social scientists, whose efforts to diagnose and solve the problems of communities like it are ineffectual and divorced from a genuine understanding of their inhabitants.

  Toward the end of the interview, Podhoretz asks Brown if he still belongs in Harlem, given his fame as a writer and his advanced degrees, noting that when the two were walking in the neighborhood, people seemed uncomfortable. Brown responds that it was Podhoretz’s presence, not his, that made people uncomfortable. In this, as in the rest of the interview, Brown is telling Podhoretz that his capacity to see and interpret is hindered by his outsiderness, his whiteness. Brown does this repeatedly, perhaps most notably when he has to explain his use of the term “Goldberg,” to which Podhoretz clearly takes offense, as akin to “Mr. Charlie”—a reference to white society speaking to the fact that it is Jewish people, not those of other backgrounds, that people in Harlem most encounter. 

  Brown was not alone in his resistance to the questions that guided his interview. In Civil Rights Summer ’66, the panelists similarly correct Niven’s questions and counter their premises. When Niven suggests that the report to come out of the 1966 conference will be “radical,” a term of criticism from him, Rustin turns the derision attached to the term on its head. He suggests that the program is “radical” because US society has been devised to allow immigrant groups—who, on arrival to the US, are far less capable of thriving than contemporary Black Americans—to succeed within US institutions but block Black participation; if the answer to racial discrimination is “radical” for Rustin, it is because it requires reconceptualizing the very institutions that have kept Black people subordinate. 

  Rustin corrects Niven again when he asks about explicit discrimination against the Irish and Jews. He states that this misses the point and the “helter-skelter” environment during the period of great immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries may have allowed white ethnics to succeed, but direct intervention is required to remedy the impediments placed in front of Black Americans. This exchange, in other words, flags Rustin’s objections to Niven’s framing as he redirects the conversation to what he sees as the vital issues.

  Niven’s exchange with Henry during the program similarly underscores the faulty premises of his questions. Niven asks whether the substantial money from War on Poverty programs has helped Watts. Henry responds that while there were worthwhile programs, the money came recently, whereas the conditions it addressed were long-standing. She also notes that one of the problems is that money, but not care and understanding for the people it helps, is offered. When Niven asks if she supports young radicals seeking power for the people against the traditional paternalistic approach, she again reframes the question by rejecting the label of radical and the critical inflection it carries. She suggests that people in poverty have brilliant answers to the problems they face, and the goals they seek—good jobs, safe homes, quality education—are recognizable and logical.

  When Niven asks whether it is politically feasible to get billions of dollars for civil rights—a question narrowly considering an expansion of federal spending—Rustin undermines this by insisting that citizens are “not as stupid” as the question implies, speaks to budget priorities as moral issues, and insists that Americans can understand that the top priority is dealing with the anger that can tear the nation apart. He also insists that these “civil rights” issues are not specific to the Black community and the commitment should be to get rid of slums for all people or find work for all people. While Black people may face the most intense forms of these problems, he advocates for social transformation that removes these obstacles for everyone.

  One could view the entirety of “Civil Rights: What Next?” as an expression of resistance to the very format and conditions that NET puts in place for the conversation. While Niven strives for a tempered discussion between the two panels over legislation and public policy, McKissick, Foreman, and Williams reject this emphasis as a woeful misunderstanding of both the problem of racism in the US and its solution. Their refusal to obey Niven’s request for restraint, or to restrict their insights to the narrow political questions he raises, is passionately expressed by the leaders, who seek to control a conversation about the future of their community that disrupts the format Niven had mapped for the discussion.

  NET Journal dedicated an entire episode to comedian and activist Dick Gregory. Much of “Dick Gregory Is Alive and Well” shows Gregory at the University of Alabama performing in front of an interracial audience. The episode tacks between images of Gregory, shot in a low-angled, medium close-up, and reaction shots of the students in attendance, some laughing heartily, others sitting uncomfortably. At one point, Gregory enjoins the students to read the Declaration of Independence over silenced TV images of rioting to clarify for their parents what is happening in the streets. His routine focuses on the history of violence and dispossession that mars US history and has amplified the racism that structured who was classified as a patriot, a revolutionary, a victim, or a threat. This call asked the audience—in person and watching on television—to see the uprisings as responses to tyranny, actions borne out of a desire for freedom, equality, and dignity. It also implicitly recognizes that most people’s understanding of the uprisings is through commercial telecasts and that the framing of the events via TV news has neglected to impart the reasons, stakes, and history that underlay their eruption. Gregory’s recitation of the Declaration of Independence becomes the final words of the episode, delivered through a voice-over as he is shown leaving the auditorium, their import and power punctuated by this privileged position in the episode.

  
  The NET Journal episode “Color Us Black” self-consciously acknowledges the limitations of white journalists narrating the struggles within the Black community, even as producer Dick McCutcheon provides the voice-over narration throughout. The episode focuses on a student protest at Howard University in 1969. The first half of the documentary charts the generation gap between Howard’s leadership and its students over what it means to be a Black university—the curriculum it should teach, the definition of leadership it should embrace, and the relationship to white culture it should have. Black journalist and associate producer Lou Potter briefly appears in the episode in an interview with Brown—both of whom are identified in voice-over as Howard alumni—who affirms the goals of the student protestors and the need for Howard to change.

  The second half of the episode shifts the emphasis to a short film produced by Howard student Ben Land at the request of NET. “Color Us Black” shows moments of the filming, airs the film itself, and then offers a discussion with Land and his actors about its contents. The film examines an interracial romance and its end. The protagonist rejects his white lover in favor of his Black girlfriend. The short, which quotes cinematic romantic clichés, suggests that liberation comes not through integration or the ability of Black men to have relationships with white women but through pride and love in the community, exemplified by embracing Black women. Interspersed through the narrative of the short are scenes of activist Ron Karenga speaking at Howard about Black nationalism (see Figure 1). 

  The inclusion of Land’s film reads as a tacit acknowledgment that understanding the views of Black students requires literally putting the camera in their hands. Still, it is McCutcheon that leads the conversation after the film screening and provides the narrative voice of authority throughout the episode. The film within “Color Us Black” thus recognizes the necessity of Black control over Black stories, even when it rubs up against the white production team that oversees the episode and interprets its significance for the NET audience.

  “Black Natchez,” another NET Journal episode, offers a fascinating example of this dynamic at work. The documentary covers tensions in Natchez, Mississippi, after George Metcalfe, a leader in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, is critically injured by a car bomb. A committee is assembled to make demands on the city council in response to the attack. Divides emerge among the Black community, especially between the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Freedom Democratic Party, over how to respond; the frictions between the groups are generational, class based, and tactical. The documentary also follows a group of men—including James Jackson, a local resident whose thoughts constitute much of the film’s voice-over—from a Deacons of Defense chapter who wish to use violence, if necessary, to defend the community. Like many NET programs, though violence is central to the events and debates in Natchez, it happens off-screen; the viewer is brought into spaces of deliberation and discussion, such as the barbershop, the church, the office of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the street corner.

  The viewer learns about the violence in Natchez via news reports from WNET and CBS that alternately play over the soundtrack and are presented on-screen. The CBS report announces the arrival of the National Guard to Natchez and the imposition of a curfew on the city. The governor has ordered both to retain “law and order” in the city, and the newscast relies on white officials to justify the militarized presence and restriction of movement. The documentary rebuts this rationale. Coming on the day that the city council rejects all the commission’s demands, including denouncing the Ku Klux Klan, the film implies that the actions are not logical measures to keep the peace but deliberate acts of intimidation and repression. The media in “Black Natchez” function as a source of information, but one that articulates as fact the perspective of the white power structure.

  The documentary landed in the crosshairs of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which specifically protested the ending of the film: Jackson describing a boycott led and ended by Charles Evers, field secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, followed by a second bombing that killed Wharlest Jackson, treasurer of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Jackson’s narration indicates his cynicism and belief that Natchez has made no progress and is back to where it started. Roy Wilkins, executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, labeled the depiction of his organization “bordering on the libelous” and stated that the suggestion that the actions of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People had not been impactful was untrue. Wilkins requested that NET cease to distribute the documentary. What followed was a heated exchange between Wilkins and Edwin Bayley of NET, in which Wilkins takes umbrage at Bayley’s claim that the film presents “a true picture of the Natchez experience as seen through local eyes” and questions how Bayley can be so confident in this assessment.¹²

  Though Wilkins’s protest took place largely out of the public eye—Variety did report on his complaint—it spoke to a tension that plays out within a number of NET programs, questioning the authority, the confidence, and the interpretation of white media to define the problem of racism and chart effective paths to rectify it.¹³

  Conclusion

  NET’s programming has not, like that of the commercial networks, become integrated into the collective memory of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The television footage that recurs in documentaries about the period and often functions as a synecdoche of the era’s struggle for racial justice often is live coverage of spectacular, significant events—King speaking in front of the Lincoln Memorial, the National Guard beating nonviolent protestors at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, George Wallace announcing “segregation forever” on the steps of the University of Alabama, white mobs attacking Freedom Riders in Anniston and Birmingham. While violence is a recurring topic in many of the programs NET dedicated to civil rights, it is through discussion, narration, and debate that the programs uncover the many forms of violence in American racism and its devastating impact on people’s lives. 

  NET programming provides an alternative audiovisual archive of the fight for racial justice in the 1960s. Its programs profile both national figures and otherwise unknown individuals whose stories clarify the stakes of and obstacles to racial progress, offer in-depth investigations of the dynamics within particular institutions and places, seek big-picture analyses of the national problem of racism, and locate racial discrimination in official processes and everyday interactions. And while there is great diversity across the episodes it aired—aesthetically, topically, generically, politically—what binds them is a shared belief that deliberation, exposition, and discussion could expose and ameliorate racial discrimination. Yet some of the programs, as this essay has demonstrated, flag the limitations of this approach as well as of the white media, including NET, in narrating and framing the issue. 
  
  A list of external links featured in this essay can be found here.¹⁴
  
  Allison Perlman is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies and History at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Public Interests: Media Advocacy and Struggles Over US Television (Rutgers UP, 2016). She is currently working on a history of National Educational Television (NET) as well co-authoring a revised history of US public media for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
  
  Title Image: "Some of Our Best Friends," NET Journal 228 (1969)
  
  Black and White Together?: National Educational Television and Civil Rights in the 1960s © 2025 by Allison Perlman is licensed under CC BY 4.0.
  
  The Journal of e-Media Studies is published by the Dartmouth Library.

• 1 2024-09-17T06:01:42+00:00 “Atlanta’s Image Is a Fraud”: Fragments of Black Protest in Local TV Newsfilm 3 image_header 2025-01-07T19:51:43+00:00

  by Brandy Monk-Payton

  Fordham University
  
  Abstract

  Introduction
  The Wake Work of Civil Rights Newsfilm
  Visually Documenting “An Appeal for Human Rights”
  A Window into Protest
  Looking for (Good) Trouble
  Conclusion

  Introduction

  Newsfilm from local television stations around the United States is a vital record of the civil rights movement. Its “historiographic capacity” allows the ability to encounter images of the Black freedom struggle differently and intervene in established discourse on midtwentieth-century African American activism.¹ Broadcasts of nonviolent protests in what Martin Luther King Jr. famously called the “glaring light of television” were important in cultivating a national consensus on racial discrimination and oppression. Yet seeing the raw footage of marches, rallies, pickets, and sit-ins captured by camera crews that was not transmitted to audiences at home provides an opportunity for viewers to access ephemeral periods of conflict and resistance. Such documentation generates alternative visual modes of apprehending processes of protest in public culture.

  This essay considers the archival collection in the Walter J. Brown Media Archive and Peabody Awards Collection at the University of Georgia. In particular, footage from WSB-TV—the call letters standing for “Welcome South, Brother”—showcases fragments of African American protest in the city of Atlanta and the surrounding region. Founded by James M. Cox, WSB debuted on September 29, 1948, and became the first television station in the entire US South. Radio reporter Jimmy Bridges gave the first televised newscast, and the station entertained audiences with daytime and prime-time variety programs. The Atlanta Constitution created a special TV issue that attested to the excitement about the new technology and the increased demand for sets in the home. By the mid-1950s, “television had captivated the imagination and culture of the state.”² A critical component of that captivation came from coverage of events such as school desegregation. As Caroline Bayne writes, “WSB’s news and local programming broadcasted the city’s navigation of the civil rights movement and integration” and desired to portray “Atlanta as a site of progress in a region generally associated with stagnation and resistance to change.”³ Indeed, Atlanta was seen as an emerging metropolis that distinguished itself from the racial extremism of other southern geographies in and outside the state. Its robust higher education system for African Americans cultivated a slew of leaders in business and politics. The city’s growing cosmopolitanism led Ivan Allen Jr., the mayor during the height of the fight against Jim Crow laws, to proclaim, “In Atlanta, the segregationists have been operating in a shrinking market for years.”⁴

  The WSB archives house a vast array of newsfilm that presents fragments of what can be viewed as the quotidian quality of protest in the city. A brief piece of footage from December 23, 1963, in particular, stands out as emblematic of the way in which the perception of Atlanta’s progressive status was contested by activists on the ground. The forty-second clip shows an interracial group demonstrating in front of a house in a wooded area. The scene is described as college students singing freedom songs and Christmas carols outside the residence of Mayor Allen.⁵ Though the footage has no audio, there are shots of the group chanting, clapping their hands, and stomping their feet in unison. Upon viewing the newsfilm, what strikes me is the large white paper banner held up by two African American men in front of the other demonstrators. It distinctly reads, in dark print using both upper- and lowercase letters, “Black is not a vice, nor is segregation a virtue, but Atlanta’s image is a fraud.” The display is provocative in its visual rhetoric. As a researcher, immediate questions come to mind: What prompted the use of this language? What image of Atlanta was circulating in public, and why did these college demonstrators denounce it as fraudulent?

  In this essay, I analyze select pieces of newsfilm recorded in Atlanta during the 1960s and ruminate on these moments of subjugation and resistance that never made it on air. I speculate on what these artifacts might reveal about urban crisis and its management. I am particularly interested in the mundane visuality of civic activism and the role of the unspectacular in sociopolitical unrest, which cultivates a kind of anticipatory witnessing that reframes archival possibility. Such work in the WSB archives contributes to the larger Accessible Civil Rights Heritage Project and the burgeoning field of Black digital humanities. In this way, I understand the close reading and annotating of such visual texts in an online database as what Kim Gallon terms a “‘technology of recovery,’ characterized by efforts to bring forth the full humanity of marginalized peoples through the use of digital platforms and tools.”⁶ I begin to reanimate particular scenes that could be construed as merely idle in order to glean the dynamic ecologies of protest in the city known for being “too busy to hate.” 

  The Wake Work of Civil Rights Newsfilm

  I see my methodological orientation toward viewing and analyzing this raw footage that was never broadcast as striving to realize a form of “wake work,” as Christina Sharpe defines it. Specifically, I am drawn to her discussion of “Black annotation” as a way of “reading and seeing something in excess of what is caught in the frame.”⁷ An annotation is a note, a kind of metadata that provides an explanation of an original piece of data. A Black annotation of civil rights newsfilm can serve a reparative function that challenges and begins to rewrite the established record of Black social and political life under duress. Such presentational markups can illustrate the visual vernacular of newsfilm as a valuable historical resource to gain new knowledge of African American protest. 

  The descriptions of content within the WSB collection already provide detailed summaries of what transpired in front of the camera, which bolster my own close readings of the material. While the captioning includes ample context of the newsfilm clips, I am also interested in the aesthetic style of the footage that makes use of different camera techniques like pans and tracking shots as well as abrupt transitions and discontinuous takes. My textual analysis of the clips relies on an engagement with that which is performative and affective, emanating not only from the bodies on display but also the environments they inhabit. I gather visual information about the sociohistorical actors in the frame by relying on their stances, gestures, facial expressions, and speech patterns, if applicable. Indeed, much of the newsfilm that I examine in the archive is silent. Though there is a lack of audio, I still listen to the moving images and what they might convey about the sonic frequencies of protest and its management.⁸

  The WSB footage that I gravitate toward focuses on instances of local protest. National news coverage of direct action tactics such as sit-ins tends to emphasize the drama of the scenes of civil disobedience by the college activists. Indeed: “The image beamed across America on nightly news programs was profound: doves were being attacked by wolves. Observers were moved and amazed by the personal sacrifice and dignity displayed by the students.”⁹ For example, Sasha Torres has written extensively about the December 1960 prime-time documentary telecast NBC White Paper: “Sit-In,” which focused on direct action tactics in Nashville, Tennessee. The program packaged a story about the inevitability of integration through its retrospective framework.¹⁰ The newsfilm from the local Atlanta TV station gives a glimpse into what can be in excess of the constructed national narrative. Footage of protestors walking down streets and standing outside of storefronts can be considered “indexical materials that have not yet been in a position to be remembered, let alone forgotten.”¹¹ Such footage reflects a liminal space of preparation for possible confrontation. What can we glean from these slow TV moments of lingering and waiting in the modern urban landscape? What are the temporal and spatial registers of political demand? Similar to how Mark Williams writes of the “fugitive potential” of the KTLA newsfilm of the Eula Love demonstration at Parker Center in June 1979, these moments captured in Atlanta are brimming with opportunity for scholars to harness the visual energy of African American enactment of protest.¹² In addition, looking at b-roll of white local and state leaders convening press conferences and assemblies proves instructive, as such footage is indicative of their preoccupation with the city’s pristine image. All of these local scenes can provide a different record of events and allow for speculation and, perhaps, fabulation about the relationship between the multiple individual and collective agents involved in the Black freedom struggle.  

  Visually Documenting “An Appeal for Human Rights”

  In order to delve into an exploration of the modes of early civil rights protest that WSB captured with its cameras, it is important to situate them within their sociohistorical context. Much of the activism against segregation in Atlanta was spurred by college students and the newly founded Committee on the Appeal for Human Rights (COAHR). Created in February 1960, COAHR consisted of students affiliated with the Atlanta University Center (a cohort of six historically Black colleges and universities that includes Clark, Morehouse, and Spelman). It paid for an advertisement in the Atlanta Constitution and other city newspapers on March 9, 1960, titled “An Appeal for Human Rights.” The published ad argued:

  We want to state clearly and unequivocally that we cannot tolerate in a nation professing democracy and among people professing democracy and among people professing Christianity, the discriminatory conditions under which the Negro is living today in Atlanta, Georgia—supposedly one of the most progressive cities in the South.¹³

  At the outset, the four-page manifesto seeks to highlight inequality and injustice in Atlanta, pointing to the city’s purported reputation as politically distanced from the traditional conservatism of the South. It details grievances associated with education, jobs, housing, voting, hospitals, entertainment, and law enforcement that have all spurred students to nonviolent protest in order to “secure full citizenship rights as members of this great Democracy of ours.”¹⁴ Inspired by the nationally publicized student-led sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina, in February 1960, COAHR telegraphed its plans for direct action in the city.

  The WSB archive contains unaired footage of the government reaction to the student activists’ advertisement. On the same day that it was published, the governor of Georgia, Ernest Vandiver, and the mayor of Atlanta, William B. Hartsfield (who preceded Allen) gave a filmed response to the document.¹⁵ The newsfilm audio cuts out at times, and some of each response seems not to have been recorded. At the beginning of the eight-minute clip, Vandiver is seen directly addressing the camera while reading from a prepared statement. His cadence is measured as he refers to the ad as a “left-wing statement” that is “calculated to breed dissatisfaction, discontent, discord, and evil.” He calls for those “who would cause hatred, strife, and discord” to “cease and desist” in their plans to protest, which he believes is harmful and will be of no benefit to anyone. 

  The film then cuts to a close-up of Hartsfield, who also provides a statement. The mayor rehearses the popular refrain about Atlanta’s distinctive image, commenting that it is “a city which proudly proclaims to the world that it is too busy making progress to tear itself apart in bitter hatreds, recriminations, or any destructive violence.” His voice punctuates every word to emphasize this branding of Atlanta, which will come to be contested in three years, as I examine later in this essay. Nevertheless, Hartsfield applauds the ad, which he says does “perform a constructive service” of letting the city’s white community know what the African American population is thinking. 

  He admits that he was “particularly glad” about something when the film cuts out and returns to Vandiver, who refers to the statement and says without any evidence: “Obviously it was not written by students. Regrettably, it had the same overtones which are usually found in anti-American propaganda pieces.” Asserting the importance of personal responsibility, he argues that “human rights can only come through individual initiative and individual accomplishment.” The governor refutes charges of inequality and injustice in Atlanta by listing the educational opportunities available to African Americans in the city and their increased status as urban professionals. He refers to the demonstrations, sit-ins, and other acts of civil disobedience as “unorthodox and unacceptable methods” of engagement. The clip concludes with additional comments by Mayor Hartsfield. He believes the city has “at least tried to be of goodwill towards all our citizens, to preserve an atmosphere of harmony and when we move, to move in the right direction.” There is a repetition of an earlier portion of the clip in which his earlier cut-off sentence is cleanly transmitted: he was “particularly glad to see the promise of non-violence and of a peaceful approach.”

  It is not clear whether Vandiver and Hartsfield are filmed in the same location at the same time of day. But the juxtaposition of the two authority figures on newsfilm serves to highlight the difference in their physical demeanor and tone of voice. While the Georgia governor is judgmental, the Atlanta mayor seems more affable. There is a stark contrast in their opinions about the advertisement. Hartsfield expresses appreciation for its existence, while Vandiver chastises and condemns its language. Hartsfield is sympathetic to the Black student activists, and Vandiver calls them irresponsible. Though the statements were not broadcast, the two government responses are examples of different rhetorical techniques to manage crisis. 

  Students began organized sit-ins and pickets in several downtown Atlanta locations on March 15, though there does not seem to be a moving image record of these initial demonstrations in the WSB archives. COAHR worked with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to organize direct actions in Atlanta and created a fall campaign that would focus on protesting at specific businesses. On October 19, 1960, a reporter interviews King about his arrest during a sit-in at Rich’s Department Store—Atlanta’s largest retailer.¹⁶ The short clip allows the civil rights leader to explain the necessity for integration to happen in the “hardcore South”: “We feel that if the progress is to be meaningful progress, it must include the deep South, including Atlanta. And I’m sure that with the reasonable climate in Atlanta, it is possible to desegregate lunch counters without any real difficulty and the transition could be a very smooth one.” King affirms the widespread perception of the environment in Atlanta as amenable to change. The entire shot is set against a white wall, and King, in his white button-down shirt and tie, visually dominates the white male journalist that appears at the edge of the frame on the right. He rarely looks at the unidentified reporter when answering questions; instead, his gaze is directed toward the camera in a defiant stare. Here, King exemplifies the figure of the dignified “civil rights subject” who is able to communicate the plight of Black Americans and their efforts to desegregate to a wide audience. Student activists used the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) leader for publicity to gain visibility for their cause.

  Three days after King’s arrest, Mayor Hartsfield arranged a month-long truce to allow for negotiations between student activists and business leaders in the city. When no agreement on the desegregation of public facilities was reached, demonstrations resumed in and outside of various department stores and restaurants.¹⁷ WSB captured a variety of these nonviolent protests in downtown Atlanta in a series of silent newsfilms that are dated November 25, 1960. The recorded moments of collective action and inaction serve up a visual aesthetic of Black calm, cool, and collectedness in the long fight for integration. In one clip, the description states, “African American students from the Atlanta University Center leave the campus of Morris Brown College to picket segregated stores in downtown Atlanta, Georgia.”¹⁸ The students march toward a building at the college. A young Black man in what looks to be a newsboy hat stands outside smoking and briefly glances at the camera. As the marching students turn a corner, they are smiling and seem to be in good spirits. Five Black students—three women huddled together on the left and two men on the right—stand on the steps of a building and stare at the camera. A group of students, including a white man and white woman, are seen vocalizing as they walk past parked cars and across a street. Onlookers take in the sight. In particular, the clip focuses on an African American woman wearing an apron who stands in a storefront with her arms crossed. She grins at the camera as it cuts from a medium shot to a close-up.

  Perhaps the woman is an employee of the store. She could be a cook or a waitress on a break from work. She seems awed by the demonstration. What might the act of witnessing provoke for her? The clip then turns to students organizing and handing out picket signs. Slogans on signs include “Don’t buy here” and “Wear old clothes with new dignity don’t buy here.” The students continue to line up and walk, and at one point, a number of them near a curb begin to wave to someone or something off-camera. A low-angle shot of the Morris Brown clock tower reads 11:55. The camera captures from above demonstrators who march in pairs on a sidewalk alongside a highway that is described as headed downtown. The signs carried by the students read “Rich’s sells segregation” and “Don’t buy at Rich’s.” 

  An additional clip is a clear extension of this busy November day, as it begins with the familiar tree-lined landscape of the Morris Brown College campus, but from another perspective.¹⁹ Students are again shown walking in unison and smiling excitedly at the camera. Multiple intersections in downtown Atlanta are presented to set the stage for the picket lines. Students walk in front of a store, carrying signs with slogans like “Khrushchev can eat here????” that attest to the humor that can also be exhibited in protest. Other picket signs seen throughout the clip include “Stay away—segregation sold here,” “The presence of segregation is the absence of democracy Jim Crow must go!”, and “America! Stand Up for Equality.” An African American man who carries a “Don’t buy segregation” sign while chewing gum briefly glances down at the camera in front of him as he confidently saunters by a store. In contrast, three Black women without posters stand a bit timidly in front of an ornate store display at Butler’s Shoes. One holds a clipboard close to her chest.  

  Finally, a newsfilm reel presents protestors participating in a sit-in and a picket line at McCrory’s and F. W. Woolworth, stores also located in downtown Atlanta.²⁰ The camera documents the hustle and bustle of the shopping and dining district. The recording begins from across a street with a glimpse of two African American men and two African American women. They are communicating, perhaps strategizing, with each other. There are other shots of Black people milling about outside of establishments and occasionally entering them. At least two protestors carry signs outside of McCrory’s. Inside an unidentified store, a sit-in takes place with what appears to be little fanfare. The clip then cuts back to an exterior shot of protestors holding signs and walking single file on the sidewalk. The camera tracks down the line of individuals quickly until it reaches a Black woman holding a sign with the slogan “Don’t pay to be segregated.” The film slows down and fixates on her purposeful gait. She is stoic in her graceful protest.

  This woman never looks at who is filming her, and I am interested in these moments of visible determination where Black folks are not beholden to the camera’s gaze. They are purposeful in their choreography as they become part of the fabric of the urban environment as (extra)ordinary denizens of Atlanta. 

  A Window into Protest

  The WSB newsfilm collection does not contain much footage of protest from 1961 and 1962, and the dearth of moving image content speaks to parts of the archive that are still outside of the grasp of historical visual record. Notably, Hartsfield ended his tenure as mayor, and Allen succeeded him after beating out restaurant owner and staunch segregationist Lester Maddox in 1961. A series of protests in 1963 attempted to integrate different Atlanta restaurants, such as Leb’s, S&W Cafeteria, Toddle House, and Maddox’s own dining establishment, Pickrick. All throughout the newsfilm of direct actions such as pickets and sit-ins, the camera operators visualize the spatiality of protest with wide shots and pans that showcase the daily cityscape. Yet there are also moments that eradicate the distance of protest and bring the viewer closer to encounter and potential confrontation. Over and over in the footage, I notice the glass windowpanes that protect these stores that will be flooded with demonstrators. What kind of indexical evidence do these windows provide? What might they reflect and refract about civil disobedience? 

  On May 20, 1963, both Black and white student activists protest segregation at Leb’s Restaurant and S&W Cafeteria.²¹ This clip is divided into two segments, one that is three minutes long and one that is forty-five seconds. Both segments seem to capture, perhaps at different times, a scuffle at the entrance of an establishment between the crowd of interracial demonstrators wanting to be let in and the white men attempting to keep them out. There is shoving as the activists attempt to make their way through the door. The first clip shows a police officer yelling at the demonstrators. There are shots of them waiting outside near the store. The camera cuts to a broken door window, and it is not clear when it was destroyed or by whom. One prominent white male demonstrator takes a purposeful stance in front of the door. The reflections of the activists are seen in the windows. The camera moves from behind around the activists who strategically guard the entrance and briefly captures their faces through a low-angle shot from the front. A physical altercation occurs in the crowd, and a Black male student seems to get up from the ground; relief is registered on his face as a white male ally grips him on the neck reassuringly. In the second clip, an activist is purposefully hit across the face. The camera records the same Black male student, who has fallen to the ground, and captures him huddled on the pavement attempting to shield his head. Both of these clips, as well as many others, testify to the propensity for direct action situations to escalate at any given moment and highlight the tension in the atmosphere.

  An additional piece of newsfilm seems to be an extension of this protest in May, though it is dated as possibly being recorded on June 9, 1963. It consists of another interracial group that is attempting to integrate S&W Cafeteria.²² They are all walking separately, with the exception of one Black woman in a light-colored floral sleeveless dress who has her arm around the waist of a white man. They approach the establishment and crowd the entrance. A white man in glasses inside the restaurant seems to panic, pushing some of the individuals away and attempting to close the door. The same Black woman is then shown with her arms draped around two other white male demonstrators. This is an astonishing moment of intimacy and trust; though the shot is taken from the back, over their shoulders, it is clear that the trio are demanding to be let into the restaurant. As the standoff continues, older white patrons exit and look on disapprovingly. Bystanders on the sidewalk express interest in what is transpiring in front of them. The camera cuts to a shot of what looks to be another broken door window, or is it the same one from the previous footage? This image is darker, but reflections of legs are visible in the frame as the sunlight bounces off the cracked glass. At another moment, the camera pans down a line of demonstrators from the back. Their faces are not shown, but the camera lingers on their midsections—they all seem to be holding hands in solidarity. Later, there is another angle of this showdown from the front, depicting the visually quiet antagonism between the two contrasting sides. These exterior shots of Black (and white) patience in protest are vital to developing a more complete picture of the fraught impact of activism in the city. 
  An actual sit-in is documented in December at a Toddle House restaurant.²³ The camera captures the establishment’s hanging signage, which reads, “Food You Enjoy.” Inside the restaurant, Black activists, including Stokely Carmichael, sit at one end of the lunch counter while white patrons sit at the other end. The description from the database adds: “While the protesters appear to wait for service, an African American photographer takes pictures, and a white policeman watches the group. A white man, possibly a restaurant manager, speaks to the students sitting at the counter one by one and pushes a microphone away.”²⁴ This resistance to being recorded, ostensibly by a reporter, is the only moment of physical confrontation caught on this newsfilm. A young African American man stands near two white men who are eating at a booth. Though it is not clear whether the demonstrators are being served, they are alert and even jovial in the moment. Outside the restaurant and amid a law enforcement presence, an interracial group of students sing and clap their hands while an Atlanta police vehicle pulls into a parking lot. Multiple cop cars appear throughout this newsfilm. The footage cuts to show the same sequence of events from a different vantage point behind the counter. The clip then records a second Toddle House location, where the camera captures a white male employee seeming to guard the door of the restaurant. He looks around in anticipation of the demonstrators who will soon begin to crowd the entrance and sidewalk. Policemen are once again shown supervising the scene of protest. Though it is not documented, one c]ould infer that the scenes resulted in arrests for violating the city’s trespassing laws.

  To return to the piece of newsfilm that inspired the title of this essay, it becomes clear that what transpires on the day before Christmas Eve in 1963 is a culmination of the prior direct actions that happened over the course of that year, as well as the arrest of twenty-one activists at a Toddle House that occurred over the previous weekend. An article from the Atlanta Constitution notes that the demonstrators’ unannounced visit to the mayor’s home was another attempt at registering their grievances. Though it does not seem to have been recorded, Mayor Allen talked to the crowd for several minutes. Temperatures that day were said to be below freezing, a fact not apparent from the energy of the student activists on newsfilm.²⁵ In good spirits, they are said to have sung carols as well as freedom songs. With the incisive commentary on the large white banner mentioned earlier that “Black is not a vice, nor is segregation a virtue, but Atlanta’s image is a fraud,” the students seem to be keenly aware of the perception of the city legitimated by government officials such as Mayor Allen and use morally charged language to critique racial injustice. As Kevin M. Kruse argues of the entire student political agenda during this time, “instead of helping to promote Atlanta’s positive image, the students shrewdly sought to use that image—and its contrast with reality—to achieve their ends.”²⁶ Their own lived experiences as countermemory push back on the idea that Atlanta could be seen as a utopia for Black Americans.

  Looking for (Good) Trouble

  The new year brought a large-scale incident of violence to the city, and while the WSB archives do not seem to have footage of the trouble in late January 1964, they do have a record of the aftermath presented in the form of an attempted administrative management of a crisis that threatened the peaceful image of the city with respect to race relations. The archival description contextualizes the events of the protest at length:

  A series of demonstrations organized by members of SNCC and COAHR that had elevated in intensity since December of 1963. The most disruptive of these protests took place on Sunday, January 26 at segregated Leb’s Restaurant in downtown Atlanta, where picketers had attracted approximately one thousand white spectators, some of whom were members of the Ku Klux Klan. Clashes between civil rights demonstrators, spectators, and restaurant personnel resulted in the injury of several demonstrators and police officers, property damages to the restaurant, and the blocking of street traffic.²⁷

  On January 27, Fulton County solicitor general William T. Boyd made a statement before cameras about the unrest. He is wearing glasses and a bowtie and seated inside what looks to be a sparsely furnished office that includes a typewriter at the desk and a file cabinet in the background. Boyd slightly flubs his line at the beginning, and someone is heard telling him to start from the beginning. He reads from prepared remarks and looks at the camera frequently: “Tragedy, bloodshed and death were narrowly averted in the streets of Atlanta this past weekend. That some persons of both races, white and Negro, escaped serious and possibly fatal injuries was the merest accident and I thank God for that accident.” The audio cuts out before it starts again with Boyd in midsentence stating that the African American demonstrators,

  mostly students and young people met in open conflict with white people during their efforts to be served in a downtown restaurant. Picture Atlanta nationally as a city of violence. Where the police themselves admit that they almost lost control. It is a distorted picture, a false picture, which does not show the harmony with which our Negro and white citizens have worked to improve the lot of both races here.

  Boyd attempts to warn of an ensuing negative image of Atlanta that he refutes as inaccurate. He is also keenly aware of his own appearance as a city official with power. At one point, Boyd stops speaking and asks the cameraman, “How was it, alright?” He grabs a cigarette and begins to smoke. An off-screen voice responds, “Very good.” 

  Two days later, on January 29, 1964, Mayor Allen addressed an assembly of Black and white community members about the recent, increasingly volatile desegregation demonstrations in Atlanta.²⁸ In an introductory moment, Allen stands at the podium with his prepared remarks. He states, “I have asked you to meet here this afternoon to help evaluate and work out a solution to a situation which threatens not only the good name, but beyond that, even the public safety of this city.” The clip breaks and skips to another section of Allen’s address, where he says:

  Atlanta's tolerance has been almost unlimited. Atlanta’s desire for every citizen to have liberty, freedom, and equal rights is unabated. Atlanta will not slow down or stop in its efforts to work out solutions to all problems of racial relations. That is the course of action to which Atlanta has been and shall continue to be committed.

  Inside City Hall, Mayor Allen speaks to a room full of mostly white men, though Black civil rights workers are present. Various shots of the audience are interspersed throughout the clip as several Atlanta business and community leaders speak to the audience from the standing microphone. Reading from a prepared statement, Mayor Allen says, “This irresponsible element that chooses to assume threatening posture and attack our city destructively will find that they cannot undermine Atlanta’s solid foundation of fairness and freedom built so patiently over many years by men and women of good sense and good will of both races.” The sound drops out at the end of his statement. After shots of the audience, there is a cut to the SNCC executive secretary, James Forman, at the podium in the front. He comments:

  There is no malice in the hearts of anyone who adheres to the principle of nonviolence against a particular individual; in fact, we love our white brothers even though they make it difficult for us to love. We even love the Ku Klux Klan that was demonstrating against us, even though they may not understand that—

  He is interrupted by Mayor Allen. The camera swish pans and zooms out to show that Allen is behind Forman to his right, a few feet away. Allen reminds Forman that because he is extending him the courtesy to speak, he should remain on the topic at hand. Forman defends his speech by replying:

  Well, I am speaking to the subject, because the subject involves the rationale of the demonstrations in the city of Atlanta. Some of us have been called irresponsible, and I think it’s necessary for the city of Atlanta at this moment to understand some of the reservoir which produces the need for demonstrations.

  The sound drops out at the end of Forman’s statement. It is not clear whether he continued to speak. 

  Shots from the newsfilm clip appear to be compiled out of order, and the audio goes in and out frequently. Ultimately, Mayor Allen proposes a thirty-day moratorium on desegregation demonstrations, which is noted as unsuccessful. The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in July required Atlanta restaurants to integrate by federal law, but Maddox refused to comply. He was present in the room with the mayor during the address at City Hall and is seen raising his hand to speak. Maddox continued to be a vocal critic of integration, and in another newsfilm from January 1965, he is seen in violent confrontation with potential Black patrons. A description of the footage reads: “On January 29, 1965, Reverend Charles E. Wells Sr. and three other African American men were denied service at the Lester Maddox Cafeteria, where they were verbally accosted and physically shoved away, in some cases with axe handles, by white patrons of the restaurant.”²⁹ Maddox is extremely combative in the clip and lunges at one of the Black men, aggressively pushing him away from the establishment and almost into the street.

  He also seems to have an ax in his right hand, and the description reads further that “Maddox adopted the axe handle as a symbol of his resistance to desegregation, and sold souvenir axe handles, dubbed ‘Pickrick drumsticks’ to his segregationist supporters, in whose eyes he had become a folk hero.”³⁰ Maddox would become governor of Georgia in 1967 and serve one term. He appears throughout the WSB newsfilm collection, with his distinctive balding head and dark glasses, as a visual antagonist in every frame.

  In contrast, another folk hero’s presence in the archive is an emblematic image of what he would later call “good trouble”—politician and civil rights activist John Lewis, who died on July 17, 2020, in Atlanta. Lewis was chairman of SNCC from 1963 to 1966 and went on to serve in Georgia’s Fifth Congressional District for the US House of Representatives from 1987 until his death. Lewis also has distinctive facial features, and his short stature is hard to miss in newsfilm. To my eye’s delight, he is seen sitting in the restaurant at the lunch counter in one of the pieces of footage I studied. He speaks to a reporter, though his comments are not audible. He also appears caroling outside of the mayor’s home in December 1963. He can be seen in the crowd of students clapping and singing, but his body is not turned toward the camera. Lewis had been arrested a day earlier and was held with other demonstrators on a $100 bond. He is revived in the archive, and locating him in these moving images in transient moments of resistance attests to his spectral star status.

  The final newsfilm clip that I want to analyze is one from May 23, 1966, that also includes Lewis. It shows members of SNCC holding a press conference in which they discuss their interest in moving beyond the promises of integration associated with the civil rights movement and toward an ethos of Black Power.³¹ A three-shot captures Carmichael, Ruby Doris Smith Robinson, and Lewis sitting behind a table answering questions. While Lewis is not shown speaking in the clip, Carmichael states: “When we talk about integration in this country, it’s always been initiated by the black community. After we’ve initiated that action, we were beaten and jailed and we went through a period of suffering and after that period of suffering we were redeemed.” 

  In another shot at another location, Robinson is shown in close-up, bright lights shining on her face. She states that Black people “have to build independent of the white community” and further relays that she has always been against integration because “integration in this country has always been a process in which negroes try to become a part of white society.” Both Carmichael and Robinson argue that the actual goal is for African Americans to define themselves and cultivate their own critical consciousness and power. This press conference is an insightful early account of philosophies associated with the Black Power movement as an outgrowth of the realization for some Black Americans that the championing of integration during the civil rights era was a ruse. 

  Conclusion

  As with many television stations around the country, the topic of race became integral to the coverage of WSB, which called itself the “Eyes of the South.” Fifteen years after the Atlanta channel’s historic opening broadcast, reporters set out to document the Black freedom struggle, though the vast majority of this footage never made it on air. A readily available and functional database of civil rights newsfilm can “shift collective imagination” of the experience of the fight for racial justice.³² The examination of such local television footage creates a wider aperture through which to envision protest beyond the singularity of the nationally transmitted media event that placed a burden of liveness on African American activists. This online recovery project of mostly mundane scenes is especially in line with how “black digital humanities provides a forum for thinking through the ways that black humanity emerges, submerges, and resurfaces in the digital realm.”³³ The Walter J. Brown Media Archive and Peabody Awards Collection is a historiographical treasure trove of quotidian expressions of communal participation and deliberation in civic life. These perspectives from local stations, carefully categorized in the archive, “provide access to a granular degree of visual news gathering practices and historical representations that were likely never before available or even imagined to exist by social and media historians.”³⁴ Crucially, the rich metadata allows scholars to make vital connections across newsfilm material. In doing this kind of wake work, I was able to illuminate visual patterns of performance over the span of multiple pieces of footage. I became invested in exploring how WSB captured direct action tactics in Atlanta during the 1960s and discovered that these forms of protest consisted of an amalgamation of different kinds of urban encounters between various constituencies: Black and white activists, business owners, and bystanders. What’s more, government officials who were preoccupied with the city’s reputation attempted to manage the unrest through their public responses captured on camera. Thus, the newsfilm collection contributes to an understanding of how the image of Atlanta as a progressive southern city was constantly being made and unmade in this visual ecology of activism. 
  
  A list of links relevant to this essay can be found here.³⁵
  
  Brandy Monk-Payton is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Media Studies and affiliated faculty in the Dept. of African & African American Studies at Fordham University. Her research focuses on the theory and history of African American media representation and cultural production across television, film, and digital media. Her work has been published in edited collections such as Unwatchable and Black Cinema & Visual Culture: Art and Politics in the 21st Century, as well as the journals Film Quarterly, Feminist Media Histories, Celebrity Studies, and Communication, Culture and Critique. She has also been featured on NPR's All Things Considered and PBS NewsHour. She is currently writing a book on Black Lives Matter and television.
  
  Title Image: WSB-TV newsfilm clip of students singing freedom songs and Christmas carols in front of the home of Ivan Allen Jr., mayor of Atlanta, Georgia, December 23, 1963. wsbn45946, WSB Newsfilm collection, reel WSBN1128, Walter J. Brown Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection, University of Georgia Libraries, Athens, as presented in the Digital Library of Georgia.
  
  “Atlanta’s Image Is a Fraud”: Fragments of Black Protest in Local TV Newsfilm © 2025 by Brandy Monk-Payton is licensed under CC BY 4.0.
  
  The Journal of e-Media Studies is published by the Dartmouth Library.