The landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education (1954), along with the brutal murder of 15-year-old Emmet Till in Mississippi and the subsequent acquittal of the two white men accused of his murder, marked the beginning of the modern civil rights movement in the United States. The unprecedented media coverage of the Till case rendered it a cause célèbre that helped to swell the membership ranks of civil rights organizations nationwide. As civil rights workers organized mass boycotts and civil disobedience campaigns to end legal segregation and white supremacist terror in the South, white segregationists mounted a counteroffensive that was swift and too often violent. Medgar Evers and other civil rights activists were assassinated. Black churches, businesses, and residences with ties to the movement were bombed. Although this escalation of terror was intended to thwart the civil rights movement, it had the unanticipated effect of broadening local and global support for civil rights.

These events were unfolding at the same time that the percentage of U.S. homes equipped with television sets jumped from 56 to 92 percent. This was 1955, and television was securing its place at the center of American society. Network news shows were also beginning to expand from the conventional 15-minute format to 30 minutes, splitting the time between local and national issues. From the mid- to late 1950s, these social, political, technological, and cultural events began to converge. The ascendancy of television as the new arbiter of public opinion became increasingly apparent at this time to civil rights leaders and television news directors alike. Thus, television’s coverage of the civil rights movement changed considerably, especially as the “antiestablishment politics” of the 1960s erupted. When television covered the consumer boycotts and the school desegregation battles in the early days of the civil rights movement, it was usually in a detached manner, with a particular focus on the most dramatic and sensational occurrences. Furthermore, the coverage of the movement in the late 1950s was intermittent, typically with a field reporter conducting a stand-up report from a volatile scene. Alternatively, an in-studio anchor man would narrate the unfolding events captured on film. Rarely, if ever, did Black participants speak for themselves or address directly the United States’ newly constituted mass television audience. Nevertheless, civil rights leaders understood how central television exposure was becoming to the success of the movement.

The desire to bring the struggle for civil rights into American living rooms was not limited to civil rights workers, however. The drama and sensationalism of peaceful civil rights protesters in violent confrontation with brutal agents of southern segregation were not lost on news producers. News programmers needed to fill their expanded news programs with live telecasts of newsworthy events, and the public clashes around the civil rights movement were too violent and too important to ignore.

For example, the most enduring images telecast from this period include shots of numerous boycotted buses driving down deserted Alabama streets in 1955; angry white mobs of segregationists squaring off against Black students escorted by a phalanx of federal troops in front of Ole Miss, the University of Mississippi (1957); and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., leading a mass of Black protesters across a bridge in Selma, Alabama (1965). Most memorable, perhaps, of all these dramatic video images is the 1963 attack on young civil rights protesters by the Birmingham, Alabama, police and their dogs, and the fire department’s decision to turn on fire hydrants to disperse the young Black demonstrators, most of whom were children. Television cameras captured the water’s force pushing young Black protesters down flooding streets like rubbish during a street cleaning. In contrast to the typical televisual landscape of formulaic game shows, “vaudeo” (video variety programs), westerns, and situation comedies, this was unquestionably compelling and revolutionary television.

By the early to mid-1960s, television was covering the explosive civil rights movement regularly and forcefully. It was at this time that the young, articulate, and telegenic Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., emerged from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference as the movement’s chief spokesman. Commenting on King’s oratory skills, one reporter noted that his “message and eloquence were met with rapt attention and enthusiastic support.” He was the perfect visual symbol for a new era of American race relations. During this period, television made it possible for civil rights workers to be seen and heard on an international scale. King’s historic “I Have a Dream” speech was delivered on August 28, 1963, at the March on Washington rally. King’s speech not only reached the 300,000 people from civil rights organizations, church groups, and labor unions who gathered at the nation’s capital to demonstrate for unity, racial tolerance, and passage of the civil rights bill—with the aid of television, it reached Americans nationwide as well.

Later that same year, television covered the assassinations of civil rights leader Medgar Evers and President John F. Kennedy. These deaths devastated the civil rights community, and television coverage of both events ensured that the nation mourned these losses as well.

In 1964 Fanny Lou Hamer’s televised speech at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City signaled a pivotal moment in the history of television’s relationship to the civil rights campaign. Hamer’s now famous “Is This America?” speech infuriated President Lyndon Johnson, emboldened the networks, rallied the civil rights troops, and riveted the nation. Even though Johnson directed the networks to kill the live feed carrying her speech on voting rights on behalf of the African-American Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), the networks recognized the speech’s powerful appeal and aired Hamer’s address in its entirety later that night. Thus, Hamer, a Black woman and a sharecropper, became one of the first Black civil rights activists to address the nation directly and on her own terms.

This phase of the movement also saw an influx of white, liberal college students and adults from across the United States into the Deep South, during the so-called Freedom Summer of 1964. Civil rights organizers encouraged the participation of white liberals in the movement because organizers understood that the presence of whites in the struggle would attract the television cameras and, by extension, the nation. No one was prepared for the tragic events that followed. As it turns out, television’s incessant probing into the murders and subsequent monthlong search for the bodies of two white, northern civil rights workers, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, and Black southerner James Chaney did have a chilling effect on the nation. Now, with the deaths of innocent white volunteers, television helped convince its suburban viewers across the United States that the civil rights movement did concern them as well, as it was difficult to turn on the television without news of the Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman search. From late June to August 4, 1964, television regularly and consistently transmitted news of the tragedy to the entire nation. Television ultimately legitimated and lent new urgency to the decade-long struggle for basic human and civil rights that the civil rights movement had difficulty achieving prior to the involvement of television. The incessant gaze of the television cameras on the murders and disappearance of Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman, following on the heels of the Evers and Kennedy assassinations, resulted in mobilizing national support for the civil rights movement. In fact, it was television’s coverage of the movement’s crises and catastrophes that became a prelude to the medium’s subsequent involvement with and handling of the later social and political chaos surrounding the Black Power, antiwar, free speech, and second-wave feminist movements. As veteran civil rights reporters went on to cover the assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert Kennedy, as well as the ghetto uprisings of the late 1960s, a whole new visual and aural lexicon of “crisis television” developed, one that in many ways still defines how television news is communicated.

By 1968 it was clear that television’s powerful and visceral images of the civil rights struggle had permeated many levels of American social and political reality. These images had helped garner support for such liberal legislation as the 1964 Voting Rights Act and President Johnson’s “Great Society” and “War on Poverty” programs, all of which were legatees of the civil rights movement.

However, as volatile pictures of Detroit, Michigan; Washington, D.C.; the Watts neighborhood in Los Angeles; and other U.S. cities going up in smoke hit the television airwaves in the late 1960s, they provoked a strong reaction, marked by the presidential campaign slogans calling for law and order. Consequently, many of the very images that supported the movement simultaneously helped to fuel the national backlash against it. This anti–civil rights backlash contributed to the 1968 presidential election of conservative Republican Richard M. Nixon.

While television news programs strove to cover the historic events of the day, entertainment shows responded to the civil rights movement in their own fashion. With their concern over advertising revenues and corporate sponsorship, the networks’ entertainment divisions decided on a turn to social relevance, although they did not tackle the controversy and social conflict of the civil rights movement directly. Instead, they took the cautious route of slowly integrating (in racial terms) fictional programming by casting Black characters in roles other than the usual domestic and comedic stereotypes. Beloved characterizations of domesticated Blacks in such popular television shows as Beulah, Amos ’n’ Andy, The Jack Benny Show, and The Danny Thomas Show, for example, slowly gave way to integrated-cast programs depicting the network’s accommodationist position on the “New Frontier” ideology of Kennedy liberalism, wherein Black characters were integrated into American society as long as they supported American law and order. Among these shows were East Side/West Side (1963–64), The Defenders (1961–65), Naked City (1958–63), The Nurses (1962–65), I Spy (1965–68), Peyton Place (1964–69), Star Trek (1966–69), Mission: Impossible (1966–73), Daktari (1966–69), NYPD (1967–69), and The Mod Squad (1968–73), to name but a few. Rather than reflect the intense racial conflicts of bombed-out churches, Blacks being beaten by southern cops, and massive demonstrations, these dramatic programs portrayed interracial cooperation and peaceful coexistence between Black and white characters. For the first time on network television, many of the Black characters in these shows were depicted as intelligent and heroic. Although some of these shows were criticized for their lone Black characters who staunchly upheld the status quo, these shows, nevertheless, did mark a significant transformation of the televisual universe. By contrast, CBS’s spate of all-white-cast television shows, mainly set in the rural South—The Andy Griffith Show (1960–68), The Beverly Hillbillies (1962–71), Petticoat Junction (1963–70), and Green Acres (1965–71)—fictionalized lovable and hapless southern “hillbillies” that directly countered the real-life southern racists whose brutal repressions appeared nightly in network news coverage of the civil rights struggle. For mass audiences accustomed to traditional white and Black shows, the civil rights movement brought a little more color to the television spectrum.