Book Review: Watching Jim Crow

Federal court decisions of the 1950’s and 1960’s essentially eliminated any form of media commentary on segregation’s corruptions and instead, “a supremacist ventriloquism in and around Jackson spoke of African American contentment with the status quo” (75). African Americans were generally ignored by the media in Jackson, Mississippi and as Sam Bailey, a resident of Jackson during the 1960’s, recalled, the local Jackson newspaper “‘was so prejudiced…at the time, they weren’t going to print nothing unless you were accused of raping a white woman or killing a white. Then they would put you on the front page”’ (76).

In Watching Jim Crow, author Steven D. Classen uses published documents and oral histories to examine agents of social change during the American Civil Rights Movement, focusing on those who actively sought to, and eventually succeeded in, representing race matters on television in Jackson, Mississippi between the years 1955 to 1969. The focal point of Classen’s study is the struggle of the WLBT-TV station in Jackson and he chooses the particular time span, starting in 1955, the year of the first citizen challenges against the television station to 1969, when a federal court first vacated the station’s license, in order to “focus on the integration of civil rights activism with legal and nonlegal interventions impacting local television” (203). Classen emphasizes that “television is not simply consumed but rather is actively made and remade within people’s lives: that is, something that people do” and Watching Jim Crow clearly demonstrates the power of television and its ability to not only reinforce, but to actually change existing power structures (28).

The book provides a detailed historical background of the events surrounding the licensing case of WLBT, but the main strength of Classen’s book is his use of oral history. As the author points out, “Memories rooted in oral history rather than written records acknowledge what writing effaces – their interconnection with time, as well as the dynamics and subjectivity of all memory” (142). Classen’s conducted numerous interviews with Jackson residents who remember the media struggles of the 1960’s and he was thus able to provide an analysis of the role media representations, particularly in the form of television, played in the lives of current and former Jackson citizens. Using oral history, Classen was essentially able to reconstruct the memories of individual African Americans who lived during a tumultuous time of attempted and successful change when speaking or writing about racial intolerance was “subject to surveillance and fraught with risk” (74). These interviews truly bring the history to life and the reader feels an emotional connection to a time, a place, and a group of people they have most likely never directly been exposed to.

Additionally, Classen explores the complex connections between the past and the present and argues that the struggles that converted segregationist TV into black-owned TV in Jackson must not be forgotten or ignored, because, as interviewee Aaron Shirley wisely remarked, “‘We can’t let people forget, else we go back’” (174). The conclusion of Watching Jim Crow reinforces Shirley’s message by advising readers to “remember the gains of the past to enable and empower our visions in the present” (194).