Central High School not only serves as a landmark in the Civil Rights Movement, it provides a testament to the power of television.
Television was still in its early stages in 1957, having been introduced as a commercial medium in the late 1940s. As the 1950s dawned, a mere 9 percent of American homes had television sets. This figure has leapt to more than 78 percent in 1957, according to The Media in America: A History, by William David Sloan.
In September 1957, people in many of those homes found themselves gathered around their TV sets watching the news from Little Rock. The Fifties, a 1993 book by Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Halberstam, attests to this.
The most indelible images of America that fall came from Little Rock, scenes captured by still photographers and, far more significantly, by movie cameraman working for network television news shows... The first and most jarring of these images was of angry mobs of white rednecks, pure hatred contorting their faces, as they assaulted the nine young black male students who dares to integrate Little Rock Central High. The second and almost equally chilling image came a few weeks later, showing the same black children entering the same school under the protection of elite U.S. Army paratroopers. The anger and hatred that had been smoldering just beneath the surface in the South since the enactment of Brown v. Board of Education had finally exploded, and now because of television, the whole nation and soon the whole world could watch America at war with itself.
Among those helping to record the events was John Chancellor, a reporter for the National Broadcasting Company (NBC). As Halberstam recounts, Chancellor was outside Central as Elizabeth Eckford first attempted to enter the school. “He had watched Elizabeth Eckford’s perilous journey with growing fear: one child, alone, entrapped by this mob. He was not sure she was going to make it out alive. … He was terribly frightened for her, frightened for himself, and frightened about what this told him about his country. … He watched in agony and captured it all for NBC.”
Examples of the effects of the powerful images from Little Rock can be found in the words of two acclaimed writers, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Doris Kearns Goodwin, who, as young people, observed from afar.
Gates turned seven in September 1957, living in Piedmont, a small town in West Virginia. He is now director of the Hutchins Center for African and African-American Research at Harvard University and is a Peabody Award-winning documentarian. In a book titled Home: American Writers Remember Rooms of Their Own, Gates’ recollection demonstrates television’s ability to connect a mass audience. He was not simply watching the Central events with his immediate family in their living room, but with fellow African-Americans across the country “together, with one set of eyes. We’d watch it in the morning, on the Today show on NBC, before we’d go to school; we’d watch it in the evening, on the news, with Edward R. Morrow on CBS. We’d watch the Special Bulletins at night, interrupting our TV shows.”
Goodwin watched the events unfold with her family, whites living in a New York City suburb. A Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian, Goodwin recalls in a 1997 memoir, Wait Till Next Year: “We saw the mob surging forward to intimidate the young girl, the Guardsmen standing idly by, refusing to help her; the girl enduring the vulgarity with all the dignity she could muster. ‘Why doesn’t Eisenhower send in federal troops to protect that girl? She’s got every right to be there,’ I said, angrily echoing the arguments I had heard at school.”
Goodwin writes that the question of whether the president should send in federal troops served as a class debate topic, after which the students were asked to vote. The students voted overwhelmingly to send in troops. Goodwin even crafted a letter about the vote and sent it to the president. Her reactions to what she witnessed, she states, “was for me an immense expansion of political consciousness. It was a turning point, or, at least, the start of a turning point.”
Halberstam opines: "If print reporters and still photographers had been witnesses to their stories, then television correspondents, armed as they were the cameras and crews, were something more: They were not merely witnesses, but … a part of the story. Television reporters, far more than their print predecessors, contributed to the speeding up of social change in America. Little Rock became the prime example of that, the first all-out confrontation between the force of the law and the force of the mob, played out with television cameras whirring away in black and white for a nation that was by now largely wired.”
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. "The Living Room," in Home: American Writers Remember Rooms of Their Own. New York: Random House, 2011.
Goodwin, Doris Kearns. Wait Till Next Year. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 1997.
Halberstam, David. The Fifties. New York: Random House Publishing Group, 1993.
Sloan, William David. The Media in America: A History. Worthington, Ohio: Publishing Horizons, 1993.
Sonny Rhodes is an associate professor of Journalism at UA Little Rock. He is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists, the Arkansas Historical Association, and the American Journalism Historians Association.