Revolution Televised.pdf

28 Was the Revolution Televised?
and magazine editors to keep playing the story year after year when
they might have preferred to give readers something different for a
change. 7
Martin Luther King Jr. and members of the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference became aware of the power of the television
image. King understood the impact that the assaults on peaceful
protesters had on a wider U.S. population. He therefore incorporated
the presence of the cameras within the organization’s protesting
strategy. He was known to call off marches if it became known
that cameras would not show up for the event. 8 Among other tactics,
the SCLC scheduled its protests to take place when television
crews would have time to get the footage to the networks for the
nightly news. 9
Furthermore these televised images and the outrage of segments
of the American public directly impacted the Kennedy White House.
Donovan and Scherer report:
On May 4, 1963, Kennedy said that the brutal televised attacks on
women and children made him “sick.” “I can understand,” he added,
“why the Negroes in Birmingham are tired of being asked to be patient.”
Public reaction against the southern militant segregationists
was so great that Kennedy privately referred to his civil rights legislation
of 1963 as Bull Connor’s bill.” 10
Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy later wrote,
[W]hat Bull Connor did down there—the dogs and the hoses and the
pictures with the Negroes—is what created a feeling in the United
States that more was needed to be done. Until that time, people
were not worked up about it or concerned about it. 11
Another example of television’s impact on the White House
occurred on March 7, 1965. Martin Luther King Jr. had planned
a march from Selma to Birmingham to protest for voting rights
in Alabama. When the protesters arrived at the Edmund Pettus
Bridge, Sheriff Clark and his police force, who were mounted on
horses, attacked them. Television cameras were at the event, and
ABC interrupted its regular broadcast to show images from Selma.
When President Lyndon Johnson made his televised appearance before
the joint session of Congress a week later to propose the Civil
Rights Act of 1964, he referred to the Selma attacks in his speech.
The bill eventually passed.