Book Review: Watching Jim Crow

In his book, Watching Jim Crow: The struggles over Mississippi TV, 1955-1969, Stephen Classen brings us to the Jim Crow south and tells us a story, which was for so long left untold. Classen argues that “television is ‘something people do’: a complicated set of social practices, both forming and formed through various modes of state and social regulation (6).” Classen retells the story of the cultural struggle that occurred in Mississippi between 1955 and 1969. By taking a radical approach to history, Classen manages to enlighten us by piecing together Mississippi history with the first hand accounts of African American residents and civil rights activists whose voices were excluded from the original account. Along with the use of these well placed interviews, Classen integrates photographs and newspaper clippings, running in conjunction with an extensive evaluation of particular legal battles and policies surrounding broadcasting stations WLBT-TV and WJTV to compile this narrative.

In addition, Classen has an overarching argument that what happened in Jim Crow Mississippi should not be confined to history, forcing us to question our current state of affairs. He highlights this point stating: “Basic representational issues, such as portrayals of difference and different cultural groups, as well as authority within the powerful state and corporate institutions of broadcasting, were not neatly resolved in a civil rights past but brought to the fore as issues of continuing concern and debate (6).” In other words, Classen is claiming that, just as in Jim Crow Mississippi, there remains a very strong link between media and politics.

Strong evidence for this link emerges in the third chapter, Trouble around the Ponderosa. In Ponderosa, Classen describes the ways in which activists attacked Jackson’s segregationist entertainment in attempts to contest their lack of exposure and negative representations on television by entering other white-dominated cultural spaces. For example, activists created their own newspaper, which finally gave a voice to the African American community. Activists also held community meetings and voter education drives, continually keeping people informed. The height of these efforts came when a group of Tougaloo College students campaigned against segregation through writing letters to popular performers and production companies making them aware of the situation in the South. This act in turn lead Hollywood stars from Bonanza and The Beverley Hillbillies to cancel live appearances in Jackson, in support of the efforts of civil rights activists.

Classen takes on a massive task with some success. However, to strengthen his argument he could use more concise evidence. Although informative, the power of his argument can be easily lost in the abyss of countless details and thorough first hand accounts. Nevertheless, Classen is trying to prove the intrinsic links between politics, history and culture, while making it clear that his own research is inherently political. The politics of history is a fascinating entity- it’s a battle of stories, and the first story to be widely told, stays. All the first stories seem to have one thing in common - access to resources. So these stories with the best resources are told and re-told and enforced as truth, leaving all the others to fade away. Thanks to mass media, with television in particular, we can watch history as it happens right before our eyes. Yet we are still left with a dilemma: what stories do we choose, and why do we value some stories over others? This is the exact reason why a discussion about media representation can turn into such a heated debate. Classen’s analysis of the struggles over Mississippi TV through the lens of a cultural theorist provides us with the tools to make critical connections to the present day, therefore empowering us with more democratic agency.