A BIG Difference from a SMALL Box: Television's Role In Expanding the Civil Rights Movement

     (Pictured above is, according to Charles Quinn of NBC, what many southerners nicknamed stations like ABC, CBS, and NBC for their journalists reporting on the Civil rights movement.)

     To round out the topic of Civil Rights for African Americans, a movement that has very well influenced my current education level, my equality amongst other races, & untimately my rights as an African American, I have decided to report on how television impacted the Civil Rights Movement to a great deal. As Mightier Than The Sword by Rodger Streitmatter suggests, northern newspapers like the New York Times covered the movement, but television had such an impact that it took the movement from regional (North and South) to national.

     The text gives a detailed and highly agreeable quote from NBC newsman Bill Monroe on why television had such an impact compared to newspapers. He said "When you see and hear a wildly angry man talking, whether he is a segregationist or integrationist, you can understand the man's anger, you can feel it---the depth of it, the power of it. But if you read a description of what the man said, you find that, by comparison, the words are dried-up little symbols through which only a fraction of the story comes." Television made it possible for the entire nation to see first-hand what the plight of the African Americans in the South was really like. TV cameras documented the police dog attacks, caught the demeaning epithets directed at blacks, and recorded African Americans standing tall, amidst all the negativity, for their guaranteed rights.
    

     One the more vivid and standout moments in how television journalism helped shed light on the cruelties of segregationists was the documentation of the "Little Rock Nine", most specifically Elizabeth Eckford. As the texts describes, at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, where nine students were determined to challenge the school's all-white roster, 15 year old Eckford was berated and harrassed while arriving to the school amongst hundreds of white segregationists. She hadn't got the memo to wait for a police escort and ended up the lone African American in the sea of white racist faces. The cameras caught it all. They caught every slur, every insult, every step Eckford took forward as she finally was helped to a school bus.It didn't stop there either. The cameras documented and televised for the remainder of the month. With the work of amazing televised journalism, America got a visual of what they had read or heard and, as CBS correspondent Robert Schakne put it in the text, "...nationalized a news story that would have remained a local story if it had just been a print story."

     Television news reporting inadvertantly played a vital role in the passing of The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. A person watching police brutality in Birmingham could see the pain and injustice in the world surrounding them, and good broadcast journalism helped bring that to the forefront.