JACKSON - Thousands of its viewers have grown accustomed to seeing a very visible black presence in on-air news people on Jackson's WLBT-TV.
That's in sharp contrast to what they would have seen 40 years ago when WLBT, then owned by Lamar Broadcasting (a subsidiary of Lamar Life Insurance Company), was the largest TV station in the state. Under its general manager, only white faces were seen on camera; further, its programming was used as an instrument for white supremacy.
In a remarkable chain of events begun by a formal challenge filed in 1964 by black minister R.L.T. Smith, with the help of some church activists, WLBT in 1971 became the only TV station in the nation to ever lose its license for racial discrimination.
Not only was the WLBT case an important chapter in the annals of the civil rights cause, its impact resonated throughout American television broadcasting.
In a landmark move, the Federal Communications Commission took away Lamar's license and turned it over to non-profit black-majority management by Communications Improvement Inc. (CII) for nine years, until the license was awarded to a permanent biracial ownership.
A mountain of documents on FCC hearings and court battles in the WLBT case were produced. The documents provide rich fodder for a studious researcher and writer to convert into a historically necessary book.
And that is what Kay Mills, a California-based author of a half-dozen books, including one on Mississippi's own civil rights pioneer Fannie Lou Hamer, has now done for the University Press of Mississippi.
Titled "Changing Channels, the Civil Rights Case That Transformed Television, " its dust jacket contains several endorsements, including one from legendary broadcast journalist Daniel Schorr.
Mills deserves high marks for weaving the paper trail into a coherent, readable story from exhaustive research of documents supplemented by a few selective interviews of persons either directly or peripherally involved.
However, as someone who closely watched the unfolding of the WLBT case (and played a small part), I find some glaring omissions of important players, a use of several self-serving sources and a failure to interview some persons with first-hand knowledge who could have substantially strengthened the story.
Unquestionably, Fred Beard, from 1954 until 1965 WLBT's general manager, was the chief culprit in causing Lamar Broadcasting to have its license yanked. All the while as manager, it must be mentioned, Beard blatantly promoted close ties with the powerful segregationist white Citizens Council.
The license challenge began two years after Rev. Smith had been denied the purchase of air time on WLBT when he ran for U.S. Congress in 1962, becoming a Mississippi equivalent of Rosa Parks' 1955 refusal to sit in the back of the bus in Montgomery, Ala.
Mills well relates from the records how black ambitions were thwarted. But she misses other nuances: that Beard, through the medium of the state's largest broadcast outlet, also exercised indoctrination of thinking in the white community.
Mills doesn't inform readers that Beard was a prime mover in an inner circle of advisers who pushed the malleable Gov. Ross Barnett in 1962 to wage bitter-end defiance of a federal court decree ordering admission of one Negro student, ex-G.I. James Meredith of Kosciusko, to the University of Mississippi.
Appropriately, Mills in "Changing Channels" quotes from Beard's inflammatory editorial on Sept. 14, 1962, exhorting viewers to support the governor's "Never" declaration that Barnett made in a statewide broadcast invoking the pre-Civil War doctrine of interposition as his strategy to block Meredith's enrollment.
But when the U.S. Army troops had to quell a bloody all-night riot on the university campus that exploded on Sept. 30 (after Meredith arrived guarded by a cordon of federal marshals), Beard found himself finally throttled by his Lamar Broadcasting corporate boss.
The day after the riot (which left two dead and 60 federal marshals wounded), William G. Mounger, the Lamar president, ordered Beard to stop broadcasting any more editorials or opinions on the air. Until then, Mounger had refrained from challenging Beard even though he disagreed with the TV manager's racist leanings.
Mounger then organized a group of leading businessmen and other professionals statewide to draft and publish a declaration denouncing Barnett's course of defiance of court-ordered desegregation and calling for peaceful compliance by the state's citizenry.
The declaration marked a definitive break in the stranglehold of the white Citizens Council on public opinion and also started Beard's downfall from his WLBT job.
But the crafty Beard, before he exited in 1965, stealthy launched a campaign to undercut Mounger with his own board members at Lamar. Soon, Mounger was voted out by the board, and Beard had his revenge.
Unfortunately, there is not a word about the late William G. Mounger's heroic stand in Mills' book, although she does interview oilman and Republican bankroller William D. Mounger, who was only a peripheral player in a group that unsuccessfully later sought the WLBT license.
