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The Moving Image 5.1 (2005) 153-156


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Black, White, and in Color: Television and Black Civil Rights. Sasha Torres. Princeton University Press, 2003.

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There are many assumptions that surround the images of civil rights protesters. Pictures of innocent black people attacked with dogs, nightsticks, and water hoses are a significant part of the United States' visual memory. The primary supposition is that television news crews were in the right place at the right time and captured these images on tape. One of the most significant interventions into this discourse of happenstance appears in the first half of Sasha Torres's Black, White, and In Color: Television and Black Civil Rights. Torres breaks down the façade of civil rights television coverage from 1955 to 1965 and makes clear the active role taken by civil rights organizations in creating the image of what Herman Gray terms the civil rights "subject." Upon establishing the roots of this image, Torres exposes the evolution of the black character as a "Civil Rights subject undone." By the 1990s the black televised image was primarily tied to notions of criminality.

Black, White, and in Color is an ambiti-ous project, and in the first half of the book, Torres provides excellent research using archival sources, memoirs, and strong secondary sources to discuss television's development and its dual impact on issues of race and industry finance. One of Torres's key arguments is that, during the period from 1955–1965, "both the civil rights movement and the television industry shared the urgent desire to forge a new, and newly national, consensus on the meanings and functions of racial difference"(6). On the one hand, in order to achieve desegregation, the civil rights movement needed to exhibit on a world stage the difference between the U.S. rhetoric of democracy and the reality of the terror in the South. All of the major civil rights organizations therefore understood the importance of television as a tool to deliver their message to the world. On the other hand, the media needed to unify the nation's beliefs on the role of race in U.S. society, as this would avoid racial censorship with Southern affiliates and a loss of revenue. Television's news coverage of civil rights served all purposes and became the first major story of the televised news media.

Researching the archives of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Torres covers the movement's interventions into Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma. The organization led by Martin Luther King Jr. became particularly media savvy. King learned to schedule protests around the media schedule and learned from Andrew Young how to create the sound bite, which could be quickly cut for the news broadcast. The organization also understood that, no matter how painful, a televised, and therefore concrete visual of Southern violence against passive protesters could significantly impact the American public. It is this deliberate [End Page 153] nature of the civil rights organizers that Torres so clearly brings to light.

To exemplify how both the industry's needs and those of the civil rights organizations were fulfilled through television news, Torres provides a close textual analysis of "Sit-In (December 1960)," an episode of NBC's White Paper. Torres argues that, while the network publicly espoused a goal of objectivity, the documentary clearly supports the protesters and is constructed to suggest the inevitability of desegregation. Several pieces of the documentary directly target a black audience and the segregationists are given very little airtime. While NBC had its own industrial reasons for creating the film, the unintentional outcome was the creation of a teaching tool for the movement. The documentary was used to demonstrate strategies of passive resistance and inspired many others to join the movement.

Torres suggests that, because of the civil rights movement, political arguments against racial equality became untenable. However, the conservative turn of the Richard Nixon presidency changed the political climate. Race consciousness was seen as undemocratic, and whites became victims in a world of reverse discrimination...

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