Equal Time: Television and the Civil Rights Movement by Aniko Bodroghkozy (review)

Aniko Bodroghkozy’s Equal Time: Television and the Civil Rights Movement chronicles the advent of television and its influence on the civil rights movement. According to Bodroghkozy, it was fortuitous that television developed as a medium for disseminating information when it did, bringing nonviolent direct action right into the living rooms of millions of Americans. Bodroghkozy notes that African Americans saw television as a useful form of propaganda that could either obliterate racist stereotypes of themselves or as one that could have equally deleterious effects by perpetuating the very stereotypes they hoped to destroy. Bodroghkozy goes on to argue in the first section, “Network News in the Civil Rights Era,” that African Americans used the medium to their advantage (within reason) during the civil rights movement, where marches and sit-ins made for good TV. By using nonviolent direct action, African Americans allowed network news programs to frame them as “worthy victims” (p. 46) who were vulnerable to White violence and who, because of their model behavior—being gainfully employed, church-going, neatly dressed (such as Rosa Parks, for example)—deserved the rights afforded to them in the constitution.

The issue of television time and who dominated it is discussed in chapter three, “Fighting for Equal Time: Segregationists vs. Integrationists.” Here, Bodroghkozy explores southern audiences’ distaste with being eclipsed by moderate and integrationist ideas, which they deemed to belong to outsiders, in conjunction with TV networks’ need to follow the Federal Communication Commission’s (FCC) Fairness Doctrine. Southern political leaders like Congressman John Bell Williams of Mississippi and Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, both Democrats, were against the Fairness Doctrine because it required that the news include an integrationist perspective.

The fourth and fifth chapters, “The March on Washington and a Peak Racial Utopia” and “Selma in the ‘Glaring Light of Television,” hone in on the news coverage of these two most well-known events of the civil rights movement. Although the events were different, the media coverage was similar and made the Black protestors at Selma into the silent worthy victims mentioned earlier in the text. The second section of the book, “Civil Rights in Prime-Time Entertainment,” explores post-civil rights network television programs, East Side/West Side, Julia, and Good Times, as well as their successes and pitfalls in attempting to imagine both real and positive African American characters navigating the new social landscape.

Bodroghkozy ends the text with a thoughtful epilogue regarding the reemergence of civil rights television around the election and inauguration of Barack Obama. Noting how his nomination coincided with the 42nd anniversary of the March on Washington and his inauguration fell the day after Martin Luther King Day, Bodroghkozy highlights that, “the news media frame[d] Obama’s victories in connection to King, even as Obama himself appeared more interested in connecting himself to Abraham Lincoln” (p. 225). In doing this, Bodroghkozy connects the historical civil rights movement narrative employed by network news to the current methods by which race is framed on television.

The only inconsistency in the text concerns the Watts Uprising. Though Bodroghkozy only mentions Watts in the transition from the first to the second section, her different characterizations raise questions. In the fifth chapter, she refers to the event as “unorganized” and having “no clear political goal” (p. 149). Though the former may very well be true, the latter is not. In the sixth chapter, however, she characterizes the event as an “uprising,” pointing to the political nature of the explosion, which itself was a clear stand against the dismal living conditions of Blacks in the area. Apart from this, Equal Time is a relevant contribution to the scholarship regarding television’s representation of African Americans, its role in the civil rights movement, and the broader social implications of Blacks on television during the civil rights and Black Power eras. It compares nicely to David J. Leonard and Lisa Guerrero’s African-Americans on Television: Race-ing for...