Between the years of 1955-1965 America witnessed the birth of the Civil Rights Movement that changed the world with help from the growing American media.
Newspapers, television and photography each played a critical role in the success of the American Civil Rights Movement.
“Without the media, the civil rights movement would have been like a bird without wings,” John Lewis said in a 2016 commemoration of the Pulitzer Prize.
Lewis played a critical role in the Civil Rights Movement as President of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) – a group that knew they needed to use the press and media to their advantage.
“It is no accident,” wrote SNCC communications secretary Mary King in a 1964 position paper, “that SNCC workers have learned that if our story is to be told, we will have to write it and photograph it and disseminate it ourselves.”
SNCC used photographs (specifically from 1962-1964) to show not only the violence and hatred of the CRM, but also the growth of the movement and the positive side as well.
Newspapers helped with coverage, but photography and televised broadcasts gained more reaction from the public due to the visual aspects provided. The white American citizens could no longer ignore the violence and hatred used against black people.
“Without the news media’s increasingly careful coverage of (Martin Luther) King’s activities — and the powerful responses it drew — it seems unlikely that public opinion could have been mobilized to demand change,” Jack Nelson, a reporter during the 1960s who covered much of the Civil Rights Movement, said. “In more than fifty years as a journalist (and I’ve covered impeachment proceedings against two presidents) I have never covered a story as important as the Civil Rights Movement.”
Nelson watched how Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. used the press to his advantage to help advocate for civil rights.
According to Nelson, King played on the strong emotions that came from the visceral images seen on television and in the papers. King also knew that he and the other peaceful protesters would not be seen as the villains in these images. Alabama “villains” George Wallace, Bull Connors and Jim Clark were good TV antagonists.
King knew how to play the segregationists – he chose spots the media could easily access and get good views of Clark and Conners being outright cruel and violent toward peaceful protesters on camera for the rest of the world to see.
The Edmund Pettus Bridge Selma March broadcast led to national outcry from the clear mistreatment of the nonviolent movement.
While King used the media to his advantage, getting the attention of the press at the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement fared harder.
Black vs White Newspapers
During the Jim Crow era, everything in America was segregated – including the press.
In their book, “The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation”, Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff delve into the role of different news publications during the Civil Rights Movement.
“In America, the First Amendment kept the government in check, but the press, other than black newspapers and a handful of liberal southern editors, simply didn’t recognize racism in America as a story,” Roberts and Kilbanoff said.
Black-run newspapers covered stories of racism and acts of violence against black individuals, but white papers only mentioned African Americans when they did something “wrong”.
White newspapers were written for whites and Negro papers for Negroes.
The Civil Rights Movement saw little positive coverage outside of black newspapers at the beginning of the movement. Biased news reporters poisoned public opinion against Civil Rights in the South for a good while – but the outrage from the violence could not be hidden away and contained to the South.
Eventually, bigger papers like the “New York Times” and other northern publications broke into the stories black papers had been telling for years. But southern white papers still refused to share the truth.
One specific paper, the “Birmingham News” outright worked with the white southerners against the Civil Rights Movement.
“A reporter for the ‘News’, historians reminded the public, helped police spy on civil rights activists and kept secret a plot by Public Safety Commissioner Eugene ‘Bull’ Connor to assassinate the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, a Birmingham activist,” said Lorraine Ahearn and Barbara Friedman in a 2022 article discussing the role of the Birmingham newspaper.
Until the lynching of Emmett Till in 1955, racial violence in the South went mostly unreported.
Emmett Till Changes Everything
1955 began to see the shift in race-related coverage in the press after Brown v Board of Education passed. The “Pittsburgh Press”, the “New York Times”, the “Chicago Defender” and other big papers all jumped on the story.
Only big events saw big coverage though – smaller black papers still suffered from being overlooked in their reporting to the wider audience.
Then, two (or more) white men murdered a 14 year old black boy in Money, Mississippi and the story exploded.
Emmett Till’s mother, Mamie Bradley, refused to let the state of Mississippi bury her son away from her. She had his body sent back home in Chicago. Mamie Till then unknowingly kickstarted the entire Civil Rights Movement by holding an open-casket funeral and letting a reporter from “Jet Magazine” photograph and publish a photo of her son’s mutilated corpse for the rest of America to see.
“Jet Magazine” showing Emmett Till’s beaten corpse really brought public attention to the violence and problems in the South up to the North. A Chicago boy killed down South brought people together.
Another aspect that helped bring attention to the real problems black papers reported about came from ownership of that photo.
Johnson Publications had the exclusive rights to the photograph since one of their staff members took it, thus keeping it out of the hands of white newspapers and television. Only a few other black newspapers reprinted the photo — people had to pay attention to black media to see the photo of Till’s body.
Big name newspapers and media groups saw the potential of the story and wanted to follow the events down south.
“In his death, Emmett Till not only brought Negro reporters into the heart of the white man’s kingdom – the courtroom – but he brought white reporters into the Deep South in unprecedented numbers to cover a racial story,” Roberts and Klibanoff said.
After the Till trial brought attention from black and white reporters down south, stories regarding Civil Rights exploded. Within the year, Rosa Parks refused to move from her seat on a bus in Montgomery – an action that started the year-long Montgomery Bus Boycott and kicked off the Civil Rights Movement and Dr. Martin Luther King’s activism career.
Throughout the next 10 years, King and other activists used the media to their advantage to continue bringing civil rights issues to the spotlight.
One of the biggest events came from the original march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965 and the events that took place on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
Selma’s First March
In 1965, civil rights had been a growing story throughout the last decade. No longer did black papers have to fight for their stories to be seen – the atrocities down south became a national phenomenon.
Everyone wanted to know what Martin Luther King was going to do next in his fight for rights.
“King had reason to be optimistic that the press would cover him intensely. The press, and especially television, had never been readier for a civil rights campaign than in early January 1965,” Roberts and Klibanoff wrote. “Almost every important national news organization had reporters, photographers, or camera crews who were experienced in civil rights coverage – in Birmingham, in Mississippi, in St. Augustine Florida and beyond.”
King and his activism group, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), decided that a march from Selma, Alabama to the capital in Montgomery would be a great demonstration of nonviolent protest while fighting for voting rights in the south.
In the first attempt, marchers crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma before being viciously attacked by the white police force led by Selma sheriff and starch segregationist Jim Clark.
While this attack physically harmed the protesters, the media attention actually helped the cause.
“No one understood the power of vivid images better than King, and he fretted over every lost opportunity. At one point in Selma, Flip Schulke of ‘Life’ magazine saw Clark’s posse shove children to the ground. He stopped shooting photographs and began pushing the men away. King heard about the incident and reminded Schulke about his ‘duty as a photographer,’” author Steve Hallock wrote.
King knew these images would create national outcry against the violence displayed at Selma.
“The world doesn’t know this happened, because you didn’t photograph it,” King told Schulke later. “I’m not being cold-blooded about it, but it is so much more important for you to take a picture of us getting beaten up than for you to be another person joining in the fray.”
Other news stations caught the events of the march on film and the day was later deemed “Bloody Sunday” by the public.
Most Southern papers did not cover Selma, despite it being a big nation-wide story. Northern papers, however, went full-throttle on the tragic events of the day.
Due to the intense backlash from the press and the public, King and the other Civil Rights protesters could march from Selma to Montgomery without further incident which resulted in the Voting Rights Act of 1965 getting passed not much later.
Media and Civil Rights Go Together
Without the media, the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement would have had a much harder time getting any traction nationwide.
“Long before television made its mark as a vehicle for social reform in the 1960s, a handful of newspapers had begun exposing civil rights violations in the South, especially in the justice system,” Jack Nelson said. “And the extensive coverage that national newspapers gave to Selma and Birmingham, combined with the increasingly powerful influence of television news, mobilized public opinion that pressured Congress to pass the landmark Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965.”
After both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 passed, the press pressured the enforcement of the acts and helped to minimize the resistance from segregationist southerners.
Newspapers, photography and eventually television news brought the attention the Civil Rights Movement needed to thrive.
“The television networks had developed their whole approach to fast breaking, on-the-scene news by covering racial confrontation in the South,” Roberts and Klibanoff said. “In a sense, television and the Civil Rights Movement had come of age together.”
