Lesson by Julian Hipkins III

*Medgar Evers speaks about race relations during a rare television broadcast featuring an African American on May 20, 1963. He was murdered less than a month later. © Bettmann/CORBIS*

Throughout U.S. history, corporate media has played a key role in promoting and defending white supremacy. This includes ignoring or misreporting tales of state-sponsored terrorism.

Meanwhile, the African American press, often at great risk, reported on the stories the white press censored or distorted. The archives of the Black newspapers and radio programs provide an invaluable source for studying the history of the Civil Rights Movement. When compared to stories in the white press, students can see how the same story is covered very differently — from the headlines to the sources and narrative. This is a useful critical literacy skill for reading media in history and today.

Simeon Booker seated at a folding table during the Emmett Till murder trial. The others in the photo are, from left, Clotye Murdock (Ebony), David Jackson (partially obscured, Ebony/Jet photographer), L. Alex Wilson of The Tri-State Defender (Memphis), and Steve Duncan of the St. Louis Argus. Alex Wilson was beaten while reporting on Little Rock in 1957. Photo courtesy Carol McCabe Booker.

The objective of this lesson is to introduce students to the fight for fair media representation during the Civil Rights Movement. Students read and discuss texts about media reporting on the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi in the 1950s and 1960s. The texts are from News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media by Joseph Torres and Juan Gonzalez and excerpts from Shocking the Conscience: A Reporter's Account of the Civil Rights Movement by journalist Simeon Booker.

The lesson uses a protocol from the School Reform Initiative to facilitate group discussion of the texts.

Grade Level: High school

Time Required: One class period

Materials

Excerpts from News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media by Joseph Torres and Juan Gonzalez
Excerpts from Shocking the Conscience: A Reporter's Account of the Civil Rights Movement by journalist Simeon Booker

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Reading 1 Excerpt

News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media (pages 292–293) by Juan Gonzalez and Joseph Torres. The reading describes the bias in newspapers throughout Mississippi in the reporting on murders of voting rights activists. For example, the murder of Rev. George Washington Lee was described in the headline as “Negro Leader Dies in Odd Accident.” Lamar Smith’s murder was described in a similar manner. Full reading here.

Immediately following the Brown decision, Robert B. Patterson, a plantation manager and former paratroop major during the war, convened a meeting in a private home in the Mississippi Delta's Sunflower County. The 14 white men who attended Patterson's meeting, all middle-class pillars of their community, founded the first White Citizens' Council. Blacks constituted 68 percent of the population of the county at the time, but only 0.03 percent of them were registered voters.

By 1955 there were more than 160 Citizens' Councils throughout the South; the group had even created its own regular 15-minute program, Citizens' Council Forum, to distribute to TV and radio stations in the region, and an estimated 300 stations were said to broadcast the show: As part of its campaign to maintain segregation, the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission helped finance the television and radio programs of the White Citizens' Councils.

In Jackson, the Hederman family — one of the South's most powerful media families — emerged as a major supporter of the Citizens' Councils. The Hedermans owned both the Jackson Daily News and Clarion-Ledger, and they controlled WJTV, the first TV station in Mississippi, as well as a radio station. In addition, they owned considerable real estate and sat on the boards of banks and the local power company. Both Hederman newspapers joined that effort, often spiking stories on integration that were deemed too controversial by the Sovereignty Commission.

The year 1955 was especially perilous for civil rights leaders in Mississippi. On the night of May 7, Rev. George Washington Lee, one of the few African Americans since Reconstruction to register to vote in Humphreys County, was driving through the small Delta town of Belzoni, a place so infamous for its lynching of Black people that it was nicknamed Bloody Belzoni, when a fatal shotgun blast from a passing motorist blew off most of his face. The Jackson Clarion-Ledger, in an article headlined "Negro Leader Dies in Odd Accident," dutifully reported the sheriff's conclusion that there had been no foul play involved.

Reading 2 Excerpt

News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media (pages 294–295) by Juan Gonzalez and Joseph Torres. The reading describes the media coverage of racist attacks on African Americans who attempted to air campaign ads for political office or enroll in institutions of higher learning. When Robert L. Smith decided to run for Congress, he was initially denied airtime on local television stations. Later that same year James Meredith’s enrollment at the University of Mississippi was met with newspaper headlines such as, “Never, No, Never.” Full reading here.

In early 1962, Robert L. T. Smith, a Black Methodist minister and grocery store owner in Jackson, Mississippi, decided to run for Congress against segregationist John Bell Williams. As the first African American to run for federal office in the state since Reconstruction, Smith repeatedly tried to buy airtime for his campaign commercials on WLBT and on WJDX, but executives at both stations repeatedly refused his requests.

He then filed a formal complaint with the FCC, and when the agency declined to take action, he appealed to sympathetic journalists, labor leaders and politicians around the country for help. Burke Marshall, the head of the civil rights division at the Justice Department, interceded on Smith's behalf, as did former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who personally called FCC chairman Newton Minow to complain. In response to the pressure, the FCC directed WLBT station manager Fred Beard to run a Smith commercial.

The day Smith taped the commercial at WLBT, "station manager Fred Beard walked him out of the station to the edge of the Pearl River (which ran in front of the WLBT property), put his arm around him and said, in Smith's words, that 'my home and my place of business would likely be blown up and my body would likely be found floating in the Pearl River.'"

Reading 3 Excerpt

An excerpt from News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media by Juan Gonzalez and Joseph Torres, (pages 296–297) gives an account of efforts made by Medgar Evers to secure equal air time on WLBT for the NAACP. The text also describes charges brought by Rev. Everett Parker against media outlets for their biased coverage of the voting rights struggle following the riots at the University of Mississippi and murder of Evers. Full reading here.

The FCC later cited eight Mississippi stations for violating the Fairness Doctrine in their coverage of the Oxford events. The agency declined, however, to order strong sanctions against any of them. The following year it notified all broadcasters that the Fairness Doctrine applied to any coverage of integration, and it directed stations to present the viewpoints of African Americans on the issue.

Medgar Evers promptly put the agency's new directive to the test by petitioning for local Jackson stations to provide him with equal time to counter segregationist views expressed by Mayor Allen Thompson on their airwaves. WLBT agreed.to his request, and on May 20, 1963, Evers made a stirring 17–minute appeal for an end to segregation. In that appeal he especially noted the role the news media were playing in advancing civil rights — whether consciously or not:

Tonight the Negro plantation worker in the Delta knows from his radio and television what happened in the world. He knows what Black people are doing and he knows what white people are doing. He can see the six o'clock news screen the three o'clock bite by a police dog. He knows that Willie Mays, a Birmingham Negro, is the highest paid baseball player in the nation. He knows the Leontyne Price, a native of Laurel, Mississippi, is a star of the Metropolitan Opera in New York. He knows about the new free nations in Africa and knows that a Congo native can be a locomotive engineer but in Jackson he cannot even drive a garbage truck.

He sees a city where Negro residents are refused admittance to the City auditorium and the Coliseum; his children refused a ticket to a good movie in a downtown theater; his wife and children refused service at a lunch counter, in a downtown store where they trade . . .

The speech stunned white citizens in the state. Many called the station to protest. It also made Evers a target. "[B]efore this moment, Medgar Evers had just been a name in the newspapers," notes journalist Mary Anne Vollers. "Very few white people could even recognize him. The televised reply put Medgar too out front." Less than a month later, on June 12, 1963, Evers was assassinated in the driveway of his home.

Reading 4 Excerpt

Shocking the Conscience: A Reporter's Account of the Civil Rights Movement (pages 3–6 and 65–66) by Simeon Booker with Carol McCabe Booker. Ebony and Jet reporter Simeon Booker covered events in the South in the 1950s and 1960s, including the funeral and murder trial of Emmett Till. Full reading here.

Nothing in either my upbringing or training prepared me for what I encountered on my first trip to Mississippi in April 1955. I was a thirty-seven-year-old reporter for Ebony and Jet, two nationally circulated, Black-owned magazines based in Chicago, and had worked previously on both Negro and white newspapers, including The Washington Post.

As a Black man, I had experienced the indignities of segregation in the border states of Maryland and Virginia, and even in the nation's capital. "Whites only" water fountains, bathrooms, and lunch counters, job and housing discrimination, and unequal schools were not new to me. But Mississippi in 1955 was like nothing I had ever seen. What I witnessed there was not only raw hatred, but state condoned terror. I quickly learned that you could be whipped or even lynched for failing to get off the sidewalk when approaching a white person, for failing to say "Yes, sir" and "No, sir" to whites no matter how young they were, or for the unpardonable crime of attempting to register to vote.

. . . Outrageously racist sheriffs and judges rode roughshod over Black people, wielding powers that became a brutal and intractable part of the system. Sometimes they left it to vigilantes to do the worst dirty work.

. . . While Sumner's white residents obviously resented the descent of the mainstream press on their little town, they had less use for the dozen or so Black journalists. It was clear that somebody would have to lay down the law as far as any racial mixing was concerned, and Sheriff Strider couldn't wait to do that. He informed us right off the bat, "I ain't having no n--- reporters in my courtroom.”

Strider also spread the rumor that as many as 1,000 carloads of Chicago Negroes were enroute to Mississippi to seek revenge. As proof, he added that one such car with Illinois plates had just forced female members of the Milam family off the highway. No wonder we started to notice more and more sidearms strapped to the hips of white men in and around the courthouse. All the Black people who entered the courtroom were checked for concealed weapons, while some of the white spectators carried guns in full view.

. . . With support from a handful of white journalists, we appealed to Judge Swango, and he overruled the sheriff and allowed us into the courtroom. But the judge was no liberal and, like Strider, he had his limits, although not nearly as narrow. A year after the Supreme Court's Brown decision had struck down school segregation (in theory, at least), separate and unequal was still an okay arrangement in Judge Swango's courtroom. He made space for the Black press along a side wall, behind rows of spectators, where it was at best difficult to hear the testimony. At first, we didn't even have a table to write on, but another protest got us a folding table set up under the window. There wasn't enough room for all of us, even with the photographers standing against the wall, so we had to rotate seating at the table. The one good thing about the arrangement, we all agreed, was that if things went really bad and we had to get out fast, we had a window exit, albeit from the second floor of the building.

Sheriff Strider greeted us every morning at our press table with a cheery, "Good morning, n----r.” It was humiliating, and his way of reminding us that although we might be able to cover the trial over his objections, he was still the boss.

We managed to make room at the Jim Crow table for Mamie Till Bradley, who would be called to testify, and was joined at times by her father, John Carthan, and cousin Rayfield Mooty. Another notable observer at the trial was Congressman Charles Diggs who thought his presence might ensure some integrity in the proceedings. Or at least that's what he said, whether he really believed it or not. The rest of us didn't.

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Teaching About Race and the Media