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.    

"Ku Klux Klan Exposed"': Journalism's Impact on Combating the "White Supremacist Fraternity"

(pictured above is an example of The New York World's Sept. 1921 blockbuster, which sought out to "expose" the Ku Klux Klan and destroy them for their racist viewpoints. This is not the real copy, but a mock up of what it probably looked like.)

     The ideology of Ying and Yang is explained as opposing forces of nature which together form a part of a certain whole thing. If we were to interpolate this idea within the fight for equality among the races, the Abolition Movement, which I touched on in the previous post, would be considered as the "certain whole thing". Frederick Douglass for example would be the "Ying" and The Ku Klux Klan would stand for the "Yang". Widely considered as the "face" for racism, with their white robes and pointed hoodies, The Ku Klux Klan went on, among other things, what they believed to be a "holy crusade" to right the wrongs of the racial advancements of African Americans that were going on in the 1920s. However, the Klan was weakened toward the end of the decade by the overall power of good journalism, such as the courage of journalists who sought to expose the Ku Klux Kan for what they really stood for.

     According to Mightier Than the Sword by Rodger Streitmatter, the original Ku Klux Klan was organized in 1866 by Confederate veterans to "prevent former slaves from exercising their recently acquired rights".

Abolition: Journalism's Impact Then and Now on America's Sordid Past

(above is a copy of The Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison's infamous publication that began in 1831 durning the turning point in the Abolition movement. Journalism like this made awareness of the possibility of the end of slavery, or in Garrison's envisionment, the immediate end to slavery.)

     No topic in American history has caused more debate, struck more controversy, or for that matter taken more lives than the discussion of Abolition in America. College courses have dedicated full semesters to cover a mere tens of years in a civil war that spanned for hundreds. This topic is especially sincere to me because it deals with my own race and our fight for survival, equality, and ultimately freedom from enslaved life. In Mightier Than The Sword: How The News Media Have Shaped American History by Rodger Streitmatter the topic is covered from a journalistic point of view. It gives an in dept summary of the ways Abolition and the ending of slavery affected the people who tried to cover it, from William Lloyd Garrision's "The Liberator", his literary crusade to the immediate freedom of all slaves, to African Americans themselves finding a venture into journalism.

     In the text, Streitmatter refers to William Lloyd Garrison as "the most influential abolitionist editor". This is mainly because of The Liberator, his newspaper publication in Boston that, amid ridicule by pro-slavery supporters and a near death experience by lynching, ran for over 30 years. It became one of the biggest pro-abolition voices and made William Lloyd Garrison one of the key players in the birth of the 13th Amendment, which ended slavery nationwide in 1865. Garrison also helped prove the influence of Journalism and how, without its power to reach the masses and change people's way of thinking with words, ideas, and logical and intellectual reasoning, the Abolition movement and the overall ending of slavery would have been that much harder.

       From meek beginnings with the first black newspaper, Freedom's Journal, where intellectually educating the black race as a whole was on the forefront compared to discussing slavery, to the North Star, a publication led by Frederick Douglass that eventually surpassed the success of The Liberator, African American journalists started to stand up and be heard. As Streitmatter states, "In a country that remained largely hostile to people of African descent...For such voices to speak loudly was impossible." However, Frederick Douglass spoke loud. His weekly the North Star was aimed at attacking slavery in all forms and aspects. With its overall academic tone and firm ideals, the North Star spoke to black and whites alike. According to the text, for every one African American subscriber there were five white American subscribers.

 

     Because of the acts of African American journalists like Frederick Douglass and other abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison, who saw the injustices of slavery, the Abolition Movement became a changing point in history that showed African Americans themselves taking matters into their own hands. They didn't conform and leave things to the whites in power to decide on an end to slavery and discrimination, if they even considered ending it at all.