Summary: The Civil Rights Movement

The modern Civil Rights movement is often remembered through the power of the images and footage that captured it visually. In a period in which the usefulness of visual media was climbing in unison with the number of household televisions, the media had the ability to shape events and individuals through the portrayals they controlled to affect the perceptions of the mass viewer population. In this way, the media had, and continues to have, a hand in the way things were understood by the broader public, and the notions individuals held regarding certain events. This is particularly true in the case of the efficacy of non-violent protest, championed by individuals like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., as it required the acceptance of the notion

Bodroghkozy opens up her analysis on the subject by painting the portrait of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the black voting rights campaign in Selma, Alabama in March of 1965, when their march was interrupted by “a sheriff’s posse on horseback” who were well armed with weapons used to beat the protestors, only ten days after the events of Bloody Sunday on the Edmund Pettus bridge. The following day, King declared to the protestors and members of the media: “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.” Although this was a blatant acknowledgment of the way in which Civil Rights leaders intended to utilize the media to their advantage, the events in Selma on the way to Montgomery and those following were not exclusive in their intentional nature regarding the news media. In fact, many events through the course of the Civil Rights movement benefitted from the presence of the news media and the portrayals of events they presented to the broader public. In the case of non-violent direct action, the preferred ideology of Dr. King and organizations like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), it was particularly useful in demonstrating the uneven balance of societal

Additionally, the success of Project C, orchestrated by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, was largely predicated upon the involvement of the media to demonstrate conditions in Birmingham to the greater public in the United States as well as internationally. Telling of its own strategy, the “C” in Project C stood for confrontation. Specifically, the confrontation was meant to be with white supremacists in volatile “Bomingham,” especially Commissioner of Public Safety Eugene T. “Bull” Connor and his forces. It consisted of a number of forms of non-violent direct action, including sit-ins, marches, and economic boycotts. The SCLC planned their strategy in Birmingham in a way that they knew would evoke a negative response out of the hotheaded Bull Connor, after learning their lesson from the slightly more mildly tempered Laurie Pritchett who better understood the intentions of the SCLC. This in turn, they hoped, would in turn result in media coverage of the violence peaceful protesters were met with in the segregated South. The events in Birmingham themselves and the intentions behind them are well encapsulated in Dr. King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” written upon his arrest during the protests. His claim that “injustice anywhere is a