Watching Jim Crow: The Struggles Over Mississippi TV, 1955-1969.

Watching Jim Crow: The Struggles Over Mississippi TV, 1955-1969. By Steven D. Classen. (Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 2004. Pp. x, 275. Paper, $21.95, ISBN 0-8223-3341-4; cloth, $74.95, ISBN 0-8223-3329-5.)

Changing Channels: The Civil Rights Case that Transformed Television. By Kay Mills. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, c. 2004. Pp. [vi], 313. $30.00, ISBN 1-57806-519-4.)

On May 20, 1963, Medgar Evers appeared on WLBT-TV in Jackson, Mississippi. Since 1959, under the 1949 Fairness Doctrine of the Federal Communication Commission (FCC), Evers and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) had been challenging the station to better represent African Americans in its political coverage and programming. In the racially charged climate of the time, Evers excoriated segregation, urging racial integration and harmony. Less than a month later he was dead, murdered at his home in Jackson. The visibility he sought for African Americans in the South likely contributed to the powerful animosity against him as a representative of change.

At the same time, this visibility was at the heart of challenges to WLBT and stations like it. It was common practice in Mississippi, and elsewhere in the South, for local stations to avoid covering anything associated with African Americans except local crimes. Those who were interested learned about civil rights activism from national network news. When African Americans appeared in the news, they were not addressed with courtesy titles like "Mr." or "Mrs." Instead, they were referred to as "the Smith woman" or with racially offensive names. If the management of local stations deemed national programming too radical, it would switch midstream to something else. During a national appearance of Thurgood Marshall on network television in 1955, WLBT's station manager, Fred Beard, stopped the broadcast. Home viewers in Jackson saw only a "Sorry, Cable Trouble" notice on their television sets. Beard won a Citizens' Council award for this action, although he later denied that it had taken place.

In very different ways, these two recent books take up the entwined issues of mass media and civil rights during the 1960s and 1970s. Both focus on a key but little-explored episode in the history of the relationship between the public, broadly conceived, and the mass media. In 1964 a coalition of citizens filed a petition with the FCC to deny re-licensing for WLBT and Jackson's other television station, WJTV. Ultimately, the WLBT battle continued for almost sixteen years, during which a federal court of appeals panel, headed by Warren Burger, twice ruled in favor of the challengers. Eventually the station was licensed under majority-black control.

Bringing together a coalition of national and local civil rights groups, this pioneering case was grounds for a profound reinterpretation of the relationship between the public and broadcast television. In Steven D. Classen's words, "Dissatisfied with the ... precedents, the court of appeals established that the listening public was now to be considered as potentially 'aggrieved' by the renewal of broadcast station licenses, and as a potential 'party in interest' would be empowered to challenge license grants and renewals" (p. 64). In the wake of the WLBT case, citizen-activist groups successfully challenged the networks on issues ranging from the representation of minorities and women to the commercialization of programming intended for children. In 1987 the FCC, under Mark S. Fowler, a Reagan appointee, voted that the Fairness Doctrine was no longer necessary or enforceable.

As will be evident from even this brief outline, this is a fascinating and important story that presents rich material for scholarship. The two books approach the subject matter in quite distinct ways, so that reading them together was ideal. Kay Mills's account is the more comprehensive outline of the case, where Classen's book is a more scholarly and focused treatment of the case as a component of an insurgent civil rights politics.

Classen, who teaches in the department of communication studies at California State University, Los Angeles, does a magnificently interdisciplinary job of focusing on the issues of voice and voicelessness so crucial to the case and its historical context. Broadly grounded in a specialist's understanding of the significance of the mass media, Watching Jim Crow: The Struggles over Mississippi TV, 1955-1969 is also very much a bottom-up history in the vein of John Dittmer's Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana, 1994) or George Lipsitz's A Life in the Struggle: Ivory Perry and the Culture of Opposition (Philadelphia, 1988). The book features archival research into both the television stations and their broader context within the civil rights movement of the time. Classen also makes innovative use of oral history, both to place the suit in the context of Jackson in this charged historical time and to understand its significance in a contemporary era often dubbed "post-civil rights."

Because of his focus on the civil rights context surrounding the case, Classen is able to tell fascinating stories about mass-media organizing in Jackson. For example, during the winter of 1963-1964, student activists in Jackson petitioned national media personalities from the shows Original Hootenanny, USA, and Bonanza to refuse to play in segregated facilities in Jackson. The stars complied. In response, white citizens in Jackson engaged in a public boycott, watching the popular Bonanza only behind shuttered windows. Only a historian immersed in archives as well as popular viewing and reception practices could tell a story about race, history, and television so redolent of the time period and of the possibilities of mass media for citizen-activism.

In contrast to Classen's interdisciplinarity, Mills, an author and journalist who has covered the FCC and written extensively on the civil rights movement, focuses on the exceedingly elaborate details of the case. She follows the many personalities involved in WLBT, the FCC, the local and national NAACP, and the United Church of Christ, which, for Mills, was the northern catalyst in assembling and continuing the suit. Changing Channels: The Civil Rights Case that Transformed Television is a far more traditional, top-down account of this landmark case. As such, there is much to recommend it. Mills is dazzlingly thorough in her archival research of multiple biographies and of the highly technical process the case went through at different levels of appeal and retrial. The book carefully tracks the case from the early challenges brought by Evers and the NAACP through the politics of reconstituting the station's ownership and hiring the first black station manager in the country, William Dilday, and the rollback of the Fairness Doctrine during the 1980s. It has abundant pictures and a useful "Cast of Characters" and "Time Line." It is a definitive piece of research.

As it happened, I read Classen first. Reading Mills afterward clarified many of the details I had been somewhat confused by in Classen about the case and the intricate policies of FCC licensing. But the top-down narrative of the book leaves out much that is crucial about the case and the time period. Mills does not address grassroots activism at all. In fact, Medgar Evers and his brother, Charles, operated at the most local level that Mills concerns herself with. No one watches television in Changing Channels; it is the grounds for litigation and social activism. This is, of course, an important aspect of the story. But mass media is important, as the court of appeals decided in the story told by both books, because of its public address. In tracing this particular episode, both books do much to uncover the ongoing significance of mass media in history and politics.

RACHEL IDA BUFF

University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee