Radio, Race, and the Re-writing of Civil Rights

Brian Ward. Radio and the Struggle for Civil Rights in the South. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004. xvi + 437. Illustrations, notes, and index. $39.95.

The expansion of civil rights history has been nothing short of phenomenal in recent years. Not so long ago the movement's story was told largely in biographical and organizational terms, with Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference claiming pride of place. Then came a spate of marvelously rendered case studies, from William Chafe's Greensboro to the Mississippi of Charles Payne and John Dittmer. In the 1990s historians pulled the movement back in time—into Franklin Roosevelt's Washington, into the embattled union halls of the New Deal South, into the workplaces and juke joints where infrapolitics was played. Now the scholarship is surging across the Mason-Dixon Line, flooding across national borders, moving back into the 1920s and up to the 1970s, pushing into popular culture, intent, it seems, on shattering all the boundaries that once defined the movement's outer edges.¹

The transformation has pulled the literature in two directions. As its definition of activism has widened, the movement's history has gathered in a stunning array of people, from factory hands to professional people, sharecroppers to celebrities. Even as historians draw more groups into the struggle, though, their evaluation of the movement has grown more critical, their conclusions more pessimistic. Not that the first scholars to study the movement were wildly optimistic. But they tended to stress how much the movement accomplished rather than how much was left undone. Now the balance has tipped the other way. The struggle may have been much wider than we previously imagined, the current literature suggests, but its actions were often limited, and its victories—great as they were—proved tragically incomplete.

Brian Ward's Radio and the Struggle for Civil Rights in the South slips seamlessly into the new history. As in his previous book, the award-winning Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations (1998), Ward painstakingly traces the connections between the entertainment industry and the struggle for civil rights in the post–World War II era. The two projects operate on different levels. Ward's earlier study dealt with some of the most famous names in popular music—Aretha Franklin, James Brown, and Ray Charles among them—whereas the new book focuses on the largely forgotten figures who dominated the Jim Crow South's smattering of black-oriented radio stations. But in both cases Ward uncovers a similar dynamic: the mechanisms of mass entertainment certainly advanced the cause of racial justice, sometimes in surprising ways, but it did so within constraints that the marketplace imposed.

Ward breaks the story of radio's activism into three parts. Almost as soon as radio became a national obsession in the 1920s, he argues, racial progressives decided that the medium could be an invaluable ally, helping to spread the movement's message into millions of homes across the nation. But progress proved painfully slow. The businessmen who ran both southern stations and national networks were more than happy to appeal to African Americans as consumers, but they shied away from the overtly political programs that civil rights activists dreamed of getting on the air. Only with the onset of World War II did racial issues receive a hearing on the major networks, as Barbara Savage shows in her marvelous 1999 book, Broadcasting Freedom: Radio, War and the Politics of Race, 1938–1948. Even then, radio executives tended to carefully circumscribe what might be said; when NBC invited a stellar panel of African Americans to appear on a 1942 installment of Town Meeting, for example, the show's producers instructed the guests to avoid racial topics. "The plain fact is that a virtual 'Iron Curtain' exists against the entire Negro people as far as radio is concerned," actress and activist Canada Lee...