Vol. 14 No. 7 (July 2004), pp.530-533

WATCHING JIM CROW: THE STRUGGLES OVER MISSISSIPPI TV, 1955-1969 by Steven D. Classen.  Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.  288pp.  Cloth $74.95.  ISBN 0-8223-3329-5.  Paper. $21.95. ISBN 0-8223-3341-4.

Reviewed by James C. Foster, Oregon State University—Cascades.  Email: James.foster@osucascades.edu

Like law, television is widely understood as a thing passively received.  A “plug-in drug” that, by some accounts, numbs out and endangers minds, television is an example par excellence of a reified social phenomenon.  Communications professor, Steven D. Classen, rejects such conventional, inert conceptions.  In his enlightening book, Classen analyzes struggles over representing race matters on television in Jackson, Mississippi, between 1955 and 1969, in activist terms.  Adopting Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of “habitus,” Classen defines television as “not simply consumed but rather . . . actively made and remade within people’s lives: that is, something that people do” (p.28).  Similarly for law, Classen argues:  “Contemporary liberal discourses extract policy making and law from their historical place and reify processes that have demonstrated marked patterns of interest.  . . . As I demonstrate here, within such discourses, public claims are made regarding law’s apolitical consistency, rationality, and objectivity that  collapse under their own weight” (p.17).

Classen tells a multidimensional story about conflicting discourses that various actors played out on in the realms of culture and law.  At base, his book is about struggles through which humans make history.  It breathes new energy into the tired phrase “contested terrain.”

Chapter 1 is titled “Broadcast Foundations.”  Here Classen sets the stage for his analysis by filling in background details about how struggles between defenders of the segregationist old order in Mississippi and participants in the insurgent civil rights movement came to be played out over TV.  Notably, Classen says that Emmett Till’s murder in 1955 (“the first great media event of the civil rights movement,” he quotes David Halberstam as observing, p.33), more than BROWN v. BOARD OF EDUCATION, was a galvanizing event.  As tensions and violence escalated in the 1950s, two new television stations, WJTV and WLTB, were licensed to broadcast in Jackson, Mississippi.  Owned by local business men ideologically committed to and invested in the status quo, these two media outlets were enlisted in protecting “the southern way of life” (p.36) by the Mississippi Citizens’ Council and the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission.  “Certainly as early as the Till trial, prominent white supremacists recognized such popular coverage as problematic and, in turn, learned the value of informational and representational control” (p.33).  Government censorship or state coercion was not at work in shaping media coverage of the epic battles playing out in Mississippi.  The owners of WJTV and WLTB enthusiastically embraced the “party line” (p.40).  In response, [*531] “Medgar and Myrlie Evers, Aaron Henry, Ruby Hurley, Ruby Stutts Lyells, Reverend R.L.T. Smith, Amzie Moore, Gus Courts, Dr. T.R.M. Howard, and Reverend George Lee, along with other black residents of Mississippi, continued their fight, in alliance with a small number of white Mississippians, for full citizenship and civil rights” (p.40).

Television was deployed as an interactive weapon in the battle over reconstructing Mississippi.  This contest had several fronts.  In his fascinating and sophisticated Chapter 2, “Consuming Civil Rights,” Classen discusses how television was used to shape representations of intersecting consumer and civil rights.  He quotes NBC correspondent, Frank McGee, who hosted the seminal September 2, 1963, three-hour NBC documentary, “The American Revolution of 1963,” depicting the way in which civil rights activists sought to define their goal: “’in the South an immediate goal [of rights activism] is equal entrance to, and service by, places doing business with the public—what might be called consumer rights as easily as civil rights’” (p.52).  Classen scrutinizes the different representations of consuming and being a consumer articulated by the various combatants.  The whole notion of consumer was “mediated” (pp.73-74), encompassing controversies over consuming televised programs, consuming public accommodations, commercial advertising to consumers, and consumers conceptualized as atomized individuals as opposed to aggregated groups of disadvantaged people.

Classen’s focus in Chapter 2 is on conflicting representations of consumerism in legal challenges to licensure renewal of WBLT, challenges that resulted in the landmark 1966 decision in OFFICE OF COMMUNICATION OF THE UNITED CHURCH OF CHRIST v. FCC.  In Chapter 3, “Trouble around the Ponderosa,” his focus is on linking challenges mounted on legal terrain to trench battles over access to public accommodations and cultural battles over program content.  “The fight was,” writes Classen, “in the language of Gramscian critical theory, a ‘war of position’—one that relied on a steady erosion and subversion of supremacist practices on multiple fronts.  It would not bring success quickly or completely, but it would realize important victories” (pp.76-77).

Chapter 4, “Programming/Regulating Whiteness,” amounts to an instructive case study of the ways legal formalism silences protest—an aspect of what used to be called institutionalized racism.  By juxtaposing the complaints black Mississippians lodged against WLBT’s and WJTV’s  programming choices with FCC responses, Classen makes a persuasive case that blacks’ “concrete, specific knowledges and memories were ignored, devalued, disqualified, and/or socially dislocated within the ‘nonracial’ processes of administrative law” (p.139).  Classen’s analysis here, on its own, is worth the price of admission.  Americans have a difficult time getting their minds around the fact that contemporary racism generally does not have a racist face.  Our difficulty is not surprising, because precious few social or cultural institutions exist to facilitate such understanding.  Classen employs Stuart Hall’s concept of “inferential” racism as an antidote to the prevalent [*532] view that a few high-placed bigots are the source of racist public policy.  In so doing, he underpins bell hooks’ poignant question:

Why is it so difficult for many white folks to understand that [white supremacy] is oppressive not because white folks have prejudicial feelings about blacks (they could have such feelings and leave us alone) but because it is a system that promotes domination and subjugation? (hooks, p.154)

LPBR readers probably have seen the bumper sticker: Kill your TV!  This is a catchy slogan—a “bumper snicker” as Paul Harvey likes to say—but it is less effective as an act of resistance than organizing community responses to TV.  In Chapter 5, “Blacking Out,” Classen draws on approximately twenty interviews and oral histories, he collected in 1992 and 1993, to paint a multi-dimensional picture of how black Mississippians “did television” (my phrase).  Classen explicitly acknowledges “the selective, synthetic, and generalizing nature of historical memory” (p.143).  He is appropriately aware that “the dynamics of the interviewer-interviewee relationship must be reflected on and examined” (p.144).  This chapter could just as descriptively been called “race, resistance, and remembrance.”  In it, Classen chronicles the personally risky collective efforts of black Jackson residents—“Doing The Best with What You’ve Got (pp.145-157)—to cope with WLBT and WJTV censoring what little black programming networks aired, as well as with censored news coverage of white-on-black violence and civil rights activism, all the time being constantly surveilled by segregationist spies.  It is a harrowing story, with black community members trying to counteract the sorts of derogatory popular culture images depicted in the film “Ethnic Notions,” while being “watched, guarded, and contained, albeit imperfectly” (p.156).  Classen also discusses the neglected accomplishments of Jackson’s Womanpower Unlimited, “a network of women who offered critical support services and supplies to civil rights workers, beginning with the jailed freedom riders in 1961” (p.162).  Ultimately, Classen’s conversations with the folks one might characterize as the heroes of the battle of Jackson taught him that “[t]he battles and changes targeting local television were . . . ‘of a piece’ with larger civil rights struggles—past and present” (p.165).

Classen explores further the complex connections between past and present in his final chapter, “Not Forgetting.”  Taking his cue from his articulate and passionate Jackson informants, he argues that we must not forget the struggles that converted segregationist TV into black-owned TV in that Mississippi city, lest those gains be lost.  This argument is timely, given the concentration of media ownership—and the decline of black media ownership—in the wake of the Telecommunications Act of 1996.  At a more theoretical level, Classen returns to his basic argument that social struggles define television, which defines our social lives: “[Television] is a practice of our social imaginations that is inextricably bound up with particular, disparate identities, values, memories, and understandings” (p.195).  Ironically, although Gil Scott-Heron didn’t have it quite right when he wrote in 1974, [*533] “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” because television constitutes revolution, and vice versa, he was engaging in the very sort of critical cultural production that changes TV.

The fiftieth anniversary of BROWN has occasioned a flurry of scholarly and popular reassessments.  Much of this literature has addressed a version of the question: What difference did BROWN make?  Answers have ranged from “not much” to “everything;” book-ended by, say, Gerald Rosenberg and Juan Williams, respectively.  Surely, the place of BROWN in Americans’ lives is more textured and rich than any dichotomous reply to such a stark question allows.  As Steven Classen’s study of the struggles over Mississippi TV demonstrates, the place that televised social events have in people’s lives results from what these folks make of such occurrences.  The transition from reified incident to lived experience is largely a matter of construction.

REFERENCES:

Calhoun, Craig, Edward LiPuma, and Moishe Postone (eds.).  1993.  BOURDIEU: CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES.  Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Hall, Stuart.  1990.  “The Whites of their Eyes: Racist Ideologies and the Media.” in M. Alvarado and J. Thompson (eds.).  THE MEDIA READER.  London: British Film Institute.

Healy, Jane M.  1999. ENDANGERED MINDS: WHY CHILDREN DON’T THINK AND WHAT WE CAN DO ABOUT IT.  New York, NY: Simon and Schuster.

hooks, bell.  1995.  KILLING RAGE: ENDING RACISM.  New York, NY: Henry Holt.

Riggs, Marlon.  1987.  “Ethnic Notions.”  San Francisco, CA: California Newsreel.

Rosenberg, Gerald N.  1993.  THE HOLLOW HOPE: CAN COURTS BRING ABOUT SOCIAL CHANGE?  Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Rosenberg, Gerald N.  2004.  “Substituting Symbol for Substance: What Did Brown Really Accomplish?”   37 PS: POLITICAL SCIENCE & POLITICS 205.

Scott-Heron, Gil.  1990.  “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” RCA.

Williams, Juan.  2004.  MY SOUL LOOKS BACK IN WONDER: VOICES OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS EXPERIENCE.  New York, NY: AARP/Sterling.

Winn, Marie.  1985.  THE PLUG-IN DRUG: TELEVISION, CHILDREN AND THE FAMILY (rev. ed.).  New York, NY; Penguin Books

CASE REFERENCES:

BROWN v. BOARD OF EDUCATION, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).

OFFICE OF COMMUNICATION OF THE UNITED CHURCH OF CHRIST v. FCC, 359 F2d 994 (2d Cir. 1966).

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Copyright 2004 by the author, James C. Foster.