Media 2070 FINAL - Flipbook - Page 44
In 1949, Jesse Blayton became the first Black owner of a
radio station when he bought WERD-AM in Atlanta. In
1950, he hired the head of the NAACP’s state chapter to
produce news digests about the Black community for the
station. As it happened, the headquarters of the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) were located
on the ground floor of the building that housed WERD.
As the story goes, whenever SCLC’s Rev. Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr. wanted to make an on-air announcement,
he would bang the ceiling with a broomstick and a
microphone was lowered out of the window so he could
speak.8
And to build that credibility, the Council moved its
program to Washington, D.C., to attract powerful
congressional members to the show so it could broaden
its audience and build support for its cause, including
“northern sympathy for the southern position.” Rep.
John Bell Williams (D–Mississippi) and Sen. James
Eastland (D–Mississippi) helped the Council secure
use of the congressional studios to record its program.17
Guests included such lawmakers as Sen. Barry Goldwater
(R–Arizona) and devout racist Sen. Strom Thurmond
(R–South Carolina), who was a Democrat until 1964 and
appeared on the show 36 times, the most of any guest.18
Many broadcast stations in other southern cities used
their airwaves to broadly defend segregation following the
1954 U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education
decision.9 Powerful white leaders and citizens were
determined to protect the South’s white-racial hierarchy.
It’s not clear exactly how many stations actually carried
the program. The Council claimed at various points that
the program aired on 80 TV and radio stations, 550 TV
and radio stations and more than 1,000 radio stations.
The Jackson Daily News reported in 1961 that out of
308 stations the Council claimed carried the program,
only seven in five states — Florida, Georgia, Louisiana,
Mississippi and Virginia — claimed that they carried it
regularly.19
In Mississippi, influential white residents created the
White Citizen’s Council, a hate group formed to prevent
integration in their communities. The number of White
Citizens’ Councils quickly spread throughout the South.10
The organization sought to “thwart integration by using
the legitimated institutions of traditional party politics,
law, and journalism,” writes media-studies scholar Steven
D. Classen.11
In 1957, the Council produced a TV program — Citizens’
Council Forum — to help achieve this goal. And later that
year, the Council provided audio of its program for radio
stations to air for free.12 Stephanie R. Rolph, author of a
2018 book on the White Citizens’ Council, writes that
the group created the program to “counterattack ... a
multimedia onslaught from the NAACP.” She noted that
“Council leaders feared that on radio and television, and in
movie theaters, the acclimation to integration was slowly
wearing down the commitment to segregation.”13
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The history of racist policymaking has ensured that
racist owners have held many of the nation’s scarce
broadcast licenses. As a result, Black people have had
to pressure their local white-owned broadcast stations
to integrate news coverage and staffing. Furthermore,
Black people have had to pressure the federal
government to adopt public-interest policies and enforce
them to serve the information needs of the Black
community.
As writer Kay Mills outlines in her book Changing
Channels: The Civil Rights Case that Transformed Television,
Medgar Evers, the iconic civil-rights leader and the first
field director of the NAACP in Mississippi, sought to
challenge racism in the broadcast industry in his state.
The TV program aired on WLBT-TV, an NBC affiliate
in Jackson, Mississippi, and received free airtime since
the station’s general manager was a member of the local
Citizens’ Council.14 The program consisted of interviews
like a typical public-affairs show and received funding
from the Mississippi state government — which meant that
taxpayer dollars from Black residents helped subsidize it.15
In 1955, the NAACP’s Washington office protested to
the FCC that Jackson’s WLBT-TV interrupted a national
program on its station that featured an interview with the
NAACP’s Thurgood Marshall. The station was owned by
the Lamar Life Insurance Company. And WLBT General
Manager Fred Beard — a member of Jackson’s Citizens’
Council — admitted that he had interrupted the program.20
“The program worked to bring high-status defenders
of Mississippi’s ‘state rights’ before the camera and
microphone,” Classen writes. “Clearly, the show’s
agenda was not only focused on the distribution of white
supremacist information but also on the provision of
credibility and respectability to such arguments.”16
Beard responded to the FCC’s inquiry by writing that he
did not permit either the NAACP or the White Citizens’
Council on the air so the station did not have to provide
equal time.21 “I was only one of the many Southern
television stations that complained to the National
Broadcasting Company about certain programs promoting
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