Television News of the Civil Rights Era 1950–1970
"Television News of the Civil Rights Era 1950-1970" is a digital history project produced by Dr. William Thomas and the Virginia Center for Digital History at the University of Virginia. The project considers the role of Southern television during Virginia's Massive Resistance campaign in opposition to the Brown v. Board of Education decision. The national coverage of the Civil Rights Movement transformed the United States by showing Americans the violence and segregation of African Americans' journey for their civil rights. Local television news in Virginia in the 1950s was more balanced than the print media. The current archive contains films from two local television stations in Virginia, WDBJ Roanoke and the WSLS Roanoke. About 230 films have been digitized. The work is primarily made up of streaming video of televised news stories, with transcripts of the desegregation debate in Virginia, including contemporary interviews with Governors Thomas B. Stanley and J. Lindsay Almond. Thomas also includes several interpretive essays, primary source documents, Martin Luther King Jr., Richard M. Nixon, original footage of school desegregation, public meetings, interviews with citizens, and suggested classroom applications. Thomas is now a professor of history at the University of Nebraska. Local television news In Roanoke, Virginia, WSLS (NBC) and WDBJ (CBS) most often covered key events in the late 1950s and early 1960s that would set them apart from white-owned newspapers. The WSLS television news station was very considerable of the voice, time, and attention towards the white leadership, but it also presented various numbers of stories covering the affairs of African Americans especially in Virginia. It has been owned by the principals of the [Shenandoah Life Insurance, a company that has a strong tie to federal employee organizations in District Colombia and a few links to conservative Virginia Democratic Party Operatives. The surviving film footage from the stations that covered civil rights approximately covered forty-four percent of the film prominently featured or presented African American spokespeople. WSLS coverage on the school closing crisis in 1958-1959 included both voices of Virginia's massive resistance program. Later federal and state courts ordered integration in Virginia that would put an end to all massive resistance laws. Virginia's Governor Lindsay Almond considered taking some drastic steps to prevent integration in all schools. This led to repealing the provision in Virginia's constitution that required the state to maintain free and public schools. However, later Almond decided to scrap the massive resistance and search for more effective methods of resistance. WSLS saw it important that Almond retreat from massive resistance because it was seen as a turning point for segregation. The white-owned newspapers covered Almond's speech, not as a turning point but as an admission of failure. The Richmond News Leader was a more conservative white paper that emphasized that white leaders were "powerless" in front of federal authority yet still called for massive resistance to shift gears toward minimizing desegregation. Negro Democratic Rally In 1960, WSLS presented the news with a different picture of the Democratic party on October 7 on