The Televised March

BRIAN: But first, let’s consider how the March on Washington looked to Americans who were not in DC that day, Americans who were watching at home. Since earlier that spring, they had seen images of fierce, sometimes violent resistance to the Civil Rights Movement playing out on their TV screens.

MALE SPEAKER: On Tuesday, the Negroes gave vivid evidence that they would no longer accept the patterns of the last 100 years. This was a day–

BRIAN: This is a CBS News report from May 7, when protests against segregation in Birmingham’s public spaces were reaching their climax.

MALE SPEAKER: The crowds surged into the downtown business district. They gave meaning to Dr. King’s statement that the Negro is shedding himself of fear, and my real worry is how we will keep this fearlessness from rising to violent proportions.

ANIKO BODROGHKOZY: We have the Birmingham campaign in May of ’63, which, of course, everybody remembers the dogs, the fire hoses, confrontations in the streets, particularly with schoolchildren.

ED: This is Aniko Bodroghkozy, a media studies professor at the University of Virginia.

ANIKO BODROGHKOZY: What we don’t remember as much is throughout the rest of the summer of 1963 leading up to the march there were other civil rights kind of flash points, particularly in the northern South. So Cambridge, Maryland, was a major civil rights battleground that got a lot of coverage. And there was a lot of violence, again not by the African-American civil rights protesters.

But the way that campaigns like this tended to get covered was newsmen– and they were all men– tended to often go into the passive voice. So it was never really clear, at least in the way they were narrating news stories, who was perpetuating the violence. So this news frame of, is violence inevitable, gets attached to the coverage leading up to the March on Washington.

ED: Now, TV is still a pretty new thing in 1963. And how did all three networks, if people can imagine such a situation, how did they plan to cover the March on Washington?

ANIKO BODROGHKOZY: Covering something as big as what the March on Washington was presumed to be was a big job. And so the networks actually pooled their resources. One network had a pool of cameras in one place, another at the Lincoln Memorial.

And, of course, what nobody realized in August of 1963 is that three months later they would basically be doing something very, very similar with a lot less lead time because they were going to be covering the funeral of the assassinated President John F. Kennedy. So this is something that the networks had some experience doing, particularly with things like presidential inaugurations. But they had never done anything like this for a protest march.

ED: And so what happens on the actual day?

ANIKO BODROGHKOZY: Well, we know what happens on the actual day. I mean, we’ve all seen the images and the pictures. And they’ve come down to us 50 years later as these inspiring images of non-violent, dignified, purposeful protest.

But what’s interesting when you look at the coverage– and I looked at the coverage of both ABC and CBS. The television cameras seem to be very specifically looking both for crowd shots, but then there’s always this cutting in to what I like to call portraits of dignity. So individual marchers or small groups of marchers, inevitably well-dressed, the men in suits and ties, the women in their Sunday-best dresses, pearls. And then always this search for a few white marchers to insert among the African-American marchers.

You would think from looking at the television news coverage that whites made up about half of the 250,000 people who came to the March on Washington because the news directors seemed to be so insistently looking for white people to center their images on, surrounded by African-American marchers.

But we get this image of peaceful, dignified marching to the point that you get news commentators kind of over and over again suggesting, this is like a picnic. It’s a joyous occasion. Nothing like the concerns about violence being inevitable. Of course, it’s the exact opposite.

ED: That it was never inevitable in the first place. Never pay attention to what we were saying before.

ANIKO BODROGHKOZY: Yeah. Well, of course, if the news personnel had really kind of dug a little bit deeper and looked at the way that Bayard Rustin, who was the main organizer of the march, and the SCLC, which was Martin Luther King’s organization, and the other civil rights organizations that came together to plan the march, had they actually covered the strategies that the civil rights organizations were using to ensure that things remained nonviolent, that news peg just would never have materialized. Because everything about the organizing was to ensure that people who came to the march knew what they were coming for.

And they had been given their marching orders. They were told to dress well. They were quite explicitly told, the eyes of the nation, the eyes of the world, are going to be on you.

ED: So we can’t imagine that the TV reporters just allowed themselves to show hour after hour of this footage without saying something critical about it. What kind of commentary that would sort of add some narrative tension to this did they lay down?

ANIKO BODROGHKOZY: Well, when the journalists start to kind of reassert their position as journalists– because they don’t want to spend too much time celebrating just how wonderful this is, because that’s not being a journalist– the “violence is inevitable” news peg, that, of course, has disappeared.

And what ends up happening is the new news peg tends to be, well, this won’t have any impact on Congress. So you get congressmen being trotted out. Some of the news coverage that I saw, we had Strom Thurmond, who, of course, was the Dixiecrat arch-segregationist. Obviously he would say this will have no impact, but I think it was CBS also trotted out a liberal Democrat who was very supportive of the Civil Rights Movement also saying, no, this won’t have any impact.

So here we have all three networks expending a huge amount of their resources, time, and effort to cover this march. And then they kind of end up coming to the conclusion that the march is not what is going to change any minds or influence Congress because that’s not where politics happens. Politics happens in the voting booth. Politics happens in discussions with your congressman. Politics is not what happens when people are marching in the street.

ED: Aniko Bodroghkozy is a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia. She’s the author of Equal Time, Television and the Civil Rights Movement.

BRIAN: We’re going to take short break. When we get back, why the first March on Washington remained only a dream.

PETER: You’re listening to BackStory, and we’ll be back in a minute.

[MUSIC – JAN KACZMAREK, “LOOKING AT THE LIBERTY STATUE”]