If you go by Ava DuVernay’s masterful Hollywood film retelling of the story in Selma, you’d think that people across the country turned on their TVs that Sunday afternoon and saw live, breaking coverage of the beating and gassing of marchers by Alabama state troopers as it was happening.  Of course that couldn’t – and didn’t – happen.  In a pre-satellite era, direct-to-air broadcast from news hot spots typically wasn’t possible.  Americans did not see live coverage from the Edmund Pettus Bridge.  What did happen was actually more significant and helps to explain precisely why the newsfilm, when it was broadcast, had such an impact.

ABC was the third-run network in 1965 but on Sunday nights, it had a ratings hit with its prime-time “Sunday Night at the Movies.”  And on March 7^th it was expecting especially large audiences for the TV premier showing of Stanley Kramer’s 1961 blockbuster, Judgment at Nuremburg.  With an all-star cast, it examined German moral culpability for the Holocaust.  An estimated 48 millions viewers (more than would typically watch the evening news and far more than would watch prime-time news documentaries) were settled in when ABC’s news division abruptly broke in to the movie with a report about the attack on the Pettus Bridge.

This may not have been Raymond Williams’ “planned flow,” but the transfer of meanings from the one text to the other certainly amplified, sharpened, and made more poignant the brutality in the Selma footage.  As I discuss in my book Equal Time: Television and the Civil Rights Movement, many commentators and ordinary people made the logical connections between Nazi storm troopers and Alabama state troopers.  Had the Bloody Sunday report merely been a story in the following Monday’s evening news, it likely would not have had the resonance it achieved by being placed in prime time – especially prime-time Sunday, then and now the most watched night of the week.  That the footage was juxtaposed to a narrative about Nazi brutality to victimized Jews made already frightful footage even more shocking.

The imagery of victimization is also crucial to how and why the Bloody Sunday newsfilm moved audiences the way it did in 1965 and continues to do so 50 years later.  In his examination of civil rights era news photography, Martin A. Berger in his book Seeing Through Race, argues that the images that have come to represent the civil rights movement typically give us activated whites and powerless, subjugated blacks who are meant to serve as objects of white pity.  Look at this iconic photograph from the 1963 Birmingham campaign (pictured above, top): the white firemen are in charge as they brutalize helpless blacks prone on the ground. Likewise, the Bloody Sunday footage (pictured above, bottom) gives us blacks knocked over and sprawled to the ground as the state troopers plow over them. The ultimate message is that whites are always in control and that good white people, seeing these images, need to take control away from bad white people to ameliorate the condition of victimized but powerless black people.  Berger criticizes this impulse in civil rights iconography as it discounts the agency of African Americans; its short term benefits (passage of legislation) undermines attention to more long term structural issues around racism and white supremacy.

Berger’s argument is compelling but it does discount the agency among civil rights activists in orchestrating these confrontations.  During the Selma campaign, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. publicly proclaimed, “We are here to say to the white men that we no longer will let them use clubs on us in the dark corners.  We’re going to make them do it in the glaring light of television.”  Rather than hapless, docile, pathetically suffering objects, civil rights activists knowingly embraced the redemptiveness of  unmerited suffering (as King put it) and the iconography of white violence.  They were active agents in these narratives, whether or not white audiences grasped that fact or not.  Ironically, the white racists were less in charge than they may have thought.  On Bloody Sunday, probably none of the marchers expected they were heading to Montgomery that day.  Marching to Montgomery wasn’t the narrative.  Segregationist oppression and obstruction was the story the marchers expected to tell.  None of those marchers, however, expected to degree of the brutality they encountered.  And that’s why the footage is so shocking: the white violence is so out-of-control, so excessive.

The sheer hyperbolic, disproportionate response of white power at the Edmund Pettus Bridge calls to mind another set of images that galvanized the attention of the nation a lot more recently: Ferguson (pictured left).  This is one of the iconic images of the August 2014 confrontations between the militarized Ferguson police force against the unarmed mostly black Ferguson citizens protesting the police killing of an unarmed young black man.  The now-famous “hands-up, don’t-shoot” stance by the protesters suggests victimization and a docile subjugation.  But, of course, it’s anything but.  The Ferguson protesters empowered themselves and their community, eventually leading to the recent action by the Department of Justice, in part by the dissemination of media imagery that suggested powerlessness.  In the end, the protesters commanded far more power than the police with their 2014 body armour and Humvees or the 1965 troopers with their billy clubs and tear gas.  In both cases, they made the federal government take action.  In both cases, they understood the power of media imagery to tell narratives that at key moments they controlled.

No, they weren’t.  In 1963, Cronkite was not yet “Uncle Walter” and the CBS publicity campaign from whence came “The Most Trusted Man in America” was almost a decade away.[i]  NBC’s The Huntley-Brinkley Report had higher ratings than Cronkite’s evening news show and my research suggests (although it’s impossible to say definitively) that more Americans were watching NBC on the day of the assassination.  But we seldom, if ever, see clips of NBC coverage.

The iconic status of the Cronkite moment, along with images from Kennedy’s state funeral – the rambunctious riderless horse and especially little John-John saluting his father’s casket – tend to obscure how American television actually brought the assassination to the American public.  I want to suggest that the networks did a woeful job in the early hours, but that a local Dallas affiliate of third-rated ABC provided remarkable journalism that not only helped ABC scoop the more established NBC and CBS, but showed what live television news would be doing in a few years.

In those first few hours the networks’ coverage was chaotic at best, characterized by what scholar Philip Rosen terms “technological insufficiency.”[ii]  When the shots rang out in Dealey Plaza at 12:30 PM on Friday, November 22, many network news personnel were literally out to lunch.  Scrambling to get to their studios and on air after the wire service bulletins began coming in, newsmen at all three networks in New York had to wait a good fifteen to twenty minutes for cameras to warm up.  In the mean time, bulletin cards were thrown onto the screen and network television turned into radio: a voice-based medium with no images.  All Cronkite and the other New York newsmen could do anyway was read wire service copy.

When they finally had working cameras and visual transmission, there still was nothing much for viewers to see.  There was no live feed from Dallas.  That would take some time to set up and, in CBS’s case, its mobile unit was at the Dallas Trade Mart where Kennedy had been scheduled to give a noon-time speech.  CBS eventually showed live footage from the aborted luncheon with guests milling about.  But no news was happening there.  NBC grappled with the headaches of trying to communicate with its Dallas correspondent, Robert MacNeil, who had telephoned in from Parkland Memorial hospital where Kennedy and Texas Governor Connally had been taken.  On air, reporters fiddled around with a telephone speaker in an excruciating attempt to allow viewers to hear MacNeil’s report.  The cumbersome technology refused to work properly.  Over at ABC, viewers watched as workmen literally built a newsroom set around the anchor as another reporter beside him stood with a phone glued to his ear trying to get updates. [iii]

Network television news, while certainly maturing as a journalistic medium – both NBC and CBS had inaugurated their nightly half-hour news shows almost three months earlier – was not ready for live, breaking, crisis coverage.  Neither the technology nor the journalistic conventions for doing this kind of television coverage had yet developed.

At WFAA-TV in Dallas, the situation was very different.  Program manager, Jay Watson, was in Dealey Plaza with another staffer to watch the Kennedy motorcade.  The studio was only a few blocks away.  The shots rang out just as they were turning from the Plaza back to work.  Watson somehow managed to zoom in on one family lying on what we now call “the grassy knoll.”  He ran to them, grabbed them, flagged down a car, and raced them all to the studio, having sent his colleague ahead to alert the newsroom.

While NBC, CBS, and ABC were showing bulletin cards and disembodied voices reading wire service copy before going back to scheduled programs and commercials, WFAA commandeered a live camera from the homemaking show that was going out live as Watson dashed into the studio.  Thus, Watson was on camera with eyewitnesses a mere fifteen minutes after the awful event.  Clearly out of breath and somewhat emotionally frazzled, Watson read the same wire service copy the Cronkite had read, but then he did what Cronkite could never do: Watson brought in his colleague and they gave their ear-witness accounts of what had occurred in Dealey Plaza.  Watson then turned to the young family seated by him – a husband and wife with their little sons on their laps.  The Newmans happened to be the best eyewitnesses Watson could possibly have grabbed.  Literally right along side Kennedy’s limousine when the fatal shot blew off the top of Kennedy’s head, they had seen it all.  Watson’s interview with the couple provided riveting television and pretty conclusive evidence within twenty-some minutes of the assassination attempt that the president was unlikely to survive such a head wound.

The scoops kept coming for WFAA.  Not long after the Newmans appeared, Abraham Zapruder happened to walk into the studio hoping the newsroom could develop his film.  Zapruder had been right behind the Newmans on the grassy knoll, balancing on a concrete abutment to capture footage of the Kennedy motorcade.  We all know what he filmed.  While the technical staff looked into developing the film, Watson decided to interview the dapper-looking Zapruder.  It’s an odd interview.  Watson almost doesn’t appear to be listening to Zapruder – he clearly doesn’t know quite who he has sitting next to him.  In fact, Watson was doing two jobs at once: functioning as impromptu anchor and interviewer, but also acting as producer coordinating the show with his director in the control booth.

Watson wasn’t the only WFAA newsman in Dealey Plaza at 12:30.  Tom Alyea, a reporter-cameraman was driving back from Fort Worth, where Kennedy and his entourage had spent the previous evening.  As he and a fellow WFAA reporter came into Dealey Plaza, they heard a report on the police radio band about gunfire at Elm and Houston.  Alyea jumped out of the car and ran to the intersection filming as he went.  Following police, he managed to dash right into the Texas School Book Depository.  Alyea was one of the only reporters to get inside the building and the only one with a camera.  The remarkably accommodating Dallas police allowed Alyea to tag along with them as they explored the building looking for the assassin.  Alyea filmed as they scoured the sixth floor, eventually finding the sniper’s nest and the carefully hidden rifle.  Trapped inside the now quarantined building, Alyea managed to toss his film out the window to another WFAAer who ran the film back to the studio where it was quickly developed and broadcast.  Neither CBS nor NBC had access to footage like this.

Yet another WFAA newsman, Ron Reiland, got inside the Texas Theater as police searched for Lee Harvey Oswald, hiding inside.  Unfortunately, in the excitement, Reiland adjusted his film camera for outside filming rather than interior filming and thus ruined what could have been spectacular footage of Oswald scuffling with police before his arrest.

ABC quickly made a decision to turn over large amounts of its network coverage to WFAA.  And while fewer viewers around the nation were watching the third network, those who were saw the future of television news.  They also got the best and most comprehensive coverage of that day’s awful events.

It’s lamentable that the story of WFAA’s coverage of the day of the assassination isn’t better known, but then again ABC didn’t have the clout of its rivals in the 1960s.  CBS seems to have made a concerted effort over the decades to brand itself and its anchor as the sole bearer of the news of Kennedy assassination to the nation.  In the recent 2013 Emmy Awards, the television industry ballyhooed its importance in 1963 with only CBS material.  In the avalanche of programming commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination, PBS wraps an entire program about TV news coverage, JFK: One PM Central Standard Time, around Cronkite.  A New York Times review of the documentary notes that it “strives mightily to reinforce the perception that Walter Cronkite was the only journalist working that day.”[iv]

The most impressive TV journalists working that day were far away from Cronkite’s New York studio.  They are the largely unheralded and unknown news personnel of WFAA-TV in Dallas.

The series appeared in 1968 amidst a fair amount of controversy considering the show was a light-hearted half-hour comedy about a beautiful widowed nurse and her cute and precocious six-year-old son. What stirred the controversy was the fact that Julia and her son, Corey, were African American.  The series was network television’s first attempt, since the advent of the civil rights movement, to feature black characters as the stars of the show, rather than as sidekicks to white protagonists.

Hal Kanter, it almost goes without saying, was white.  In fact, earlier in his career, he had written for both the radio version of The Beulah Show and the television version of Amos ‘n’ Andy.  By the later 1960s, Kanter, a Hollywood liberal, was feeling guilty about his handy work with those shows.  He attended a talk by Roy Wilkins, the head of the NAACP, who discussed the lack of positive representations of blacks on television and the dearth of black personnel behind the camera.  Wilkins appealed to Kanter because he was “reasoned” in his speech and “not angry.”[i]  By 1968 many blacks were, in fact, angry.  The nonviolent Southern-oriented movement having achieved legislative victories with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 began to find itself increasingly displaced by Northern-oriented and more confrontational “Black Power” politics.  Sympathetic whites, like Kanter, wanted to do the right thing: he wanted to use his talents “to help the black people,” as he put it.  Kanter probably could never see the degree of condescension that went along with those sentiments.  He could respect Roy Wilkins because the NAACP leader didn’t make Kanter uncomfortable.  Kanter would end up creating a black character who, similarly, was designed not to make white TV viewers uncomfortable.  Julia would not be an angry Negro.

The series, despite Kanter’s best intentions, did make a number of people angry, however.  White critics, black viewers, and racists, all found things to dislike about the show.  Some critics objected to Julia’s middle class status and seemingly effortless integration into a white milieu when the experience of the majority of black people was so very different.  Black viewers criticized Julia’s lack of a husband and the perpetuation of a “black matriarchy” image.  Racists were incensed at the mere presence of black people on television, especially on equal terms with whites, which could only lead to miscegenation.[ii]

That Kanter’s attempt to “help the black people” by creating an innocuous sitcom about successfully-achieved integration ended up causing so much controversy must have puzzled the writer greatly.  As a graduate student, I came across his collected papers at the Wisconsin State Historical Society.  In files labeled “fan mail” I found audience letters addressed to Kanter and carbon copied responses.  Kanter could be quite testy about viewer criticism of his show.   To one black woman who argued that the show and Julia as a character were unreal and geared only towards white audiences, Kanter grumbled, “I’m glad you think our work is ‘good for an all white program.’  I’ll pass your praise along to our black writer and black actors.”  Kanter could understand how his work on Amos ‘n’ Andy and Beulah was problematic.  Those shows presented stereotypes – servile or buffoonish imagery.  But Julia did nothing of the kind.  If Julia and Corey were not stereotypes, but rather paragons of intelligence, style, education, and achievement, how could anybody complain?  That they were the creation of a white man who really hadn’t spent much time with black people shouldn’t have mattered either.  Kanter – along with much of white America – couldn’t understand how the politics of race relations had changed by the late 1960s.  White benevolence on white terms wasn’t going to cut it in 1968.  But Hal Kanter was sincere.  He really did want to do the right thing.

In 1997, Kanter reflected back on the impact of his most significant creation, by noting, “We couldn’t get black people on the air until Julia came along to prove that white people will watch black people on television.  I feel some gratification when I see that.”   In the end, Kanter “helped the black people” by helping white people (some at least) accept a white version of blackness on television.