The Civil Rights Movement and the Media
Authors: Goodwin Sage 
Published: June 2019

The media has played a fundamental role in American race relations since the days of slavery. The black press has been a source of protest against racial inequality and a disseminator of news and information for and about the black community from the time of its emergence in the early 19th century. However, for much of this history, black America remained largely invisible in mainstream journalism with only criminal activity ever reported on in the white press. It was not until the 1950s and 1960s that the media spotlight began to shine on America’s black citizens, illuminating the inequities they faced to a national and worldwide audience. The way in which the white press covered the struggle for black freedom defined its nature, chronology, and achievements in popular understanding and memory. For decades, this first draft of history influenced how scholars interpreted the civil rights movement. Despite a long history of individual and organized resistance to oppression, the movement is often conceived of beginning when the Montgomery Bus Boycott prompted reporters to make household names of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the male ministers who led the principal civil rights organizations in the following years. Yet in Montgomery and throughout the next decade, the community organizing of mostly women workers remained unseen. Imagery of police dogs and firehoses being used against peaceful demonstrators sparked outrage at the same time as ensuring that racism became associated with Southern bigotry rather than socioeconomic inequality. In recent years, new scholarship has sought to correct this distorted narrative and shed light on the media’s part in its creation. Scholars have also shown how an appreciation of the value of publicity in gaining support for the struggle for black freedom shaped the organizing of the civil rights movement. At the same time, coverage of the race issue determined the evolution of modern journalism, nowhere more so than in the development of its newest electronic iteration: television news. Furthermore, reporters played a large part in painting the Black Power era as a tragic coda to the civil rights story, where Martin Luther King’s integrationist dream was lost to militancy, madness, and mayhem. Twenty-first-century scholarship has highlighted the continuities and shared roots between the two movements, refuting the line in the sand drawn by the media between two mutually exclusive strategies of resistance. While Black Power activists decried their negative portrayals in the press, at the same time press coverage was fundamental to the creation of their image and the dissemination of their message. As such, any study of the struggle for black freedom and the media would be incomplete without considering how this relationship changed in the Black Power era. Moreover, entertainment is an important facet of any discussion of the media and civil rights. The black image in popular culture, one that was often portrayed by negative stereotypes with long histories, defined African Americans in the minds of many white Americans, intensifying racial disharmony. African Americans had little input toward or control over this imagery, as segregation within the entertainment industry barred them from writing or production roles. Representation in Hollywood and entertainment television, both onscreen and within the industry, formed a core plank of civil rights campaigning. This article’s review of scholarship will consider both entertainment and the news media in its discussion of civil rights and the media.