Morality And The End Of The Civil Rights Movement

Media, Morality, and the End of the Civil Rights Movement At the peak of the Civil Rights movement, media representation of activism advanced the cause further than ever before. The contrast between the composed peace of the activists and the violent racism of their Southern opposers highlighted the moral superiority that Civil Rights activists played on to gain sympathy from Northern supporters who had not been directly affected by the Jim Crow system. This disparity also helped activists gain backing from the federal government. However, after a series of successes in the South, the Civil Rights movement hit a wall when attempts began to fight segregation in the North. No longer were activists battling against state legal systems, but

Though support of Black Power increased after a lack of success in integrating Northern urban areas, the movement still remained a small minority of black activists. Black Power also remained a relatively ambiguous term, and this ambiguity only increased white fear of the movement. Black Power could have simply implied a solidarity among black Americans, but could also be warped by white media into meaning complete black dominance and terror over white citizens. The language of the Black Power movement had always been more radical than its agenda, and media coverage caused it be perceived as an immense and immediate threat. Even before the Civil Rights movement’s move to the North, media had branded the ideas of Black Power and the Nation of Islam as “the hate that hate produced,” an inherently violent and prejudiced backlash to the racism of the South. Along with the Nation of Islam, white media often presented the Black Panthers, a political party that fought for economic and social freedom for black Americans through housing, education, and jobs, as a violent group that fought against white law and order with weapons. One CBS 60 Minutes report attempted to scare its viewers with a video of a “Black Panther classroom”, with children repeating in unison the teacher’s creed of freedom from whites “with guns”. These radical images of Black Power showed a seemingly violent and racist side of the movement that most white American did not even attempt to understand. Along with the powerfully negative media images of black rioting and Black Power, Civil Rights leaders also struggled to form any positive moral images for the media from their protests, as the medium of nonviolent protest against structures in