William G. Thomas III, Television News and the Civil Rights Struggle: The Views in Virginia and Mississippi

Segregation stood for many white southerners as "the way things are done" in the South. For many African American southerners segregation meant discrimination. Like slavery, segregation varied across the South and across time and was woven tightly into the daily experience of blacks and whites. Segregation found its places, indeed its affirmation and power, in social customs and everyday life, as well as in political, religious, legal, and economic practices and ideas. Although segregation was variable and inconsistent, always open to some degree of challenge and testing, it was also so pervasive that it was extraordinarily difficult to bring down.

The modern South's history is largely the story of legal segregation's rise and eclipse, how it was created, managed, protested, and eventually dismantled. We can understand segregation's history as one of gradual accretion, ordinance by ordinance, law by law, followed by slow and uneven effacement, protest, legislation, and litigation. Segregation built up over time, becoming more and more complex, contradictory, and variable, layered with restrictive laws and well-preserved customs.

Segregation kept the races apart but also kept them from knowing about and understanding one another. African American southerners had always known more of the white world than their white counterparts knew of theirs. W. E. B. DuBois first explained the "double consciousness" of African Americans—their position seeing the ways whites saw them as well as the ways they saw themselves. DuBois wanted "to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American." But he recognized that "there stand in the South two separate worlds; and separate not simply in the higher realms of social intercourse, but also in church and school, on railway and street-car, in hotels and theatres, in streets and city sections, in books and newspapers, in asylums and jails, in hospitals and graveyards." 62

The African American newspapers that developed in segregation explained the world in ways distinct and separate from their white counterparts. Both black and white papers selected their stories and editorialized in ways that drew on the separation of experience and information. Audiences for both presses read news with visual and rhetorical cues that resonated with their histories, experiences, and knowledge. Even when the African American press's stories paralleled those in the white press, they diverged significantly in presentation, emphasis, and meaning.

Nowhere but on television would DuBois' "double consciousness" become more apparent. Nor would it be more effectively demonstrated that African Americans could be both black and American. While some stations used their broadcast privileges to maintain segregation, others followed and felt pressure to follow an approach based on best practices and fairness in news reporting. Wherever they appeared on television, African American leaders and everyday citizens spoke directly to black and white homes, and the television news format itself encouraged inclusion, a form of intimacy and integration that put African American people in white people's consciousness on a daily basis.

In 1966 several television stations in Virginia carried an interview with James J. Kilpatrick and Roy Wilkins. Kilpatrick was the determined segregationist editor of the Richmond News Leader, the originator of the Interposition strategy for stopping desegregation and the voice of conservative whites. Wilkins, the executive secretary of the NAACP, presented a gradualist, careful voice for integration. After a public address at the Virginia Tech YMCA on March 31st, the two men sat down for a joint interview before the television cameras to discuss among other things the Voting Rights Act. Kilpatrick and Wilkins sat side-by-side and a remarkable sequence of comments burst forth from each. While Kilpatrick denounced what he called "the whole Katzenbach numbers game" as a "travesty" and considered the act a "trespass on the power of the states," Wilkins stated plainly for the audience his view that election officials in the South have not been "honest" and so needed oversight. While Kilpatrick objected to the act's pre-clearance provisions that required "running up to Washington" to change election boundaries and rules, Wilkins said a formula of some sort was necessary given the region's history of voting discrimination.

The interview, like many others conducted by WSLS and WDBJ reporters, brought reasoned African American voices and arguments into Virginia homes, opening up channels of communication that for decades had been closed. Kilpatrick and Wilkins were in the same room and the WSLS news anchor introduced the film by saying so. The film, however, captured only separate images of the two men. Kilpatrick's cigarette smoke drifted across the room and into the film of Wilkins, and Wilkins' presence was audible in the film of Kilpatrick. Despite these separate films, the television station broadcast both men's voices and arguments.

By the 1960s African American commentators, such as Whitney M. Young of the National Urban League, began to criticize television companies for discrimination and segregation. The WLBT case gained attention and widespread African American dissatisfaction with the network's programming and their failure to hire African American actors and news reporters made the electronic media seem as segregated as anyplace in America. Conservatives were glad to have the tables turned on television and to find broadcasters on the defensive. The story shifted in the late sixties from conservatives' crying foul over accusations that television was to blame for exacerbating the South's racial problems to liberals' accusing the television networks of bias and foot-dragging on civil rights.

Sorting out the ways television affected the civil rights struggle will require considerably more study of television broadcasters in a variety of locations. The federal government played a role through the FCC guidelines. The demands of the television news format as narrative and as spectacle played an equally significant role. Ownership, of course, affected the television production—in Jackson, Mississippi, it turned the medium toward segregation yet in Roanoke, Virginia, it directed it toward openness. Both civil rights advocates and those resisting changes understood the television's power as a broadcast medium. They battled to get their messages out to those they had not yet energized and to deflect the powerful images and arguments of one another. Whether the openness that television brought with it had a measurable effect on the minds of Americans remains for debate, but it did change the landscape of segregation at the local level in many places across the South, inaugurating a more direct, more intimate, and more integrated form of communication about the civil rights struggle.