Book Review: Equal Time: Television and the Civil Rights Movement, by Aniko Bodroghkozy

Abstract

Equal Time: Television and the Rights Movement. Aniko Bodroghkozy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012. 280 pp. $50 hbk.Part of The History of Communication series, Equal Time: Television and the Rights Movement combines analysis of news coverage with a study of three prime-time programs to address representations of African Americans on network television during a critical era in American history. In the introduction, Aniko Bodroghkozy underscores the importance of her study by citing the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.: We are here to say to the white men that we no longer will let them use clubs on us in the dark corners. We're going to make them do in the glaring light of television.Edited by Robert W. McChesney and John C. Nerone, the series includes books written or compiled by well-known communication and media scholars, including Gerald J. Baldasty, Bonnie Brennen, John M. Coward, Clifford G. Christians, Theodore L. Glasser, Hanno Hardt, Denis McQuail, Peter Simonson, Linda Steiner, Inger Stole, and Doug Underwood. Although Equal Time occasionally drifts into com- mentary, effectively a compelling era and complements other studies pub- lished in the landmark University of Illinois Press series.Divided into two sections, Network News in the Rights Era and Civil Rights in Prime-Time Entertainment, Equal Time is the result of encyclopedia entries and essays Bodroghkozy published in collections such as African American Popular Culture and Private Screenings: Television and the Female Consumer, and in journals such as Screen and Television and New Media. As she notes in the acknowledgments, the book had a rather long gestation, beginning during her graduate work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the 1990s and culminating in 2012.An associate professor of media studies at the University of Virginia, Bodroghkozy focuses on two topics: First, Equal Time explores the crucial role American network television played during the civil rights revolution in reconfiguring a new 'common sense' about race relations and complicate[s] the picture of the relationship among the civil rights movement, television, audiences, and partisans on either side of the black empowerment struggle. Second, she discusses three prime-time television pro- grams that allow black actors to take center stage. Until the mid-1960s, Bodroghkozy writes, it was rare for viewers to see blacks in entertainment programming. This set up a bizarre disjunction between news which focused increasing atten- tion on the Southern black struggle, and fictional shows that presented mostly all- white worlds.Reasons for selecting East Side/West Side, Julia, and Good Times instead of other texts are not clear, especially since other prime-time programming might be more celebrated by the public and/or more critically acclaimed. One explanation might be the availability of viewer responses in the archives and libraries where Bodroghkozy conducted her research. Most television viewers did not record their responses to what they were viewing and thus leave a documentary record for historians. But some did, Bodroghkozy writes. And some of those responses, typically letters written to program producers or networks, have ended up in the collected papers of those pro- ducers . . . [or] published in newspapers.Bodroghkozy is especially effective when she discusses specific topics, including the Little Rock Nine, the contributions of the newsmagazine See It Now, heroic challenges to Mississippi voting practices, James Meredith and Ole Miss, and I Have a Dream. She is persuasive when she holds television networks accountable for their pursuit of the least objectionable programming, explaining how ideologically dan- gerous is for broadcasters to try to offend as few viewers as possible in order to maximize audience share. Additionally, she demonstrates formidable critical sensi- bility when she explains, for example, how photojournalism is often more effective than television images that can be chaotic, rapid paced, often difficult to see-and how the opposite can also be true. …