“We Ain’t Doin’ Civil Rights”: The Life and Times of a Genre, as Told in The Help

Abstract

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Midway through 2011 film adaptation of The Help, Charlotte Phelan storms into relaxing room of her plantation home and turns off television set her daughter Skeeter and two members of domestic staff have been watching. Don't them like that! she yells at her daughter, as the help rush from room. The futility of outburst is matched only by its historical improbability. By late spring or early summer of 1963 (when scene takes place), turning off a news clip of Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers urging black residents in Jackson remain steadfast in their boycott of racist merchants would have done little, if anything, discourage most black viewers, whose support of protest had been operating below their employers' racial radar for months. Moreover, offending clip probably never aired in Jackson (at least while Evers was alive). Evers had not been invisible on local TV screens in spring of 1963, however. On May 20, he had delivered a 17-minute televised speech Jackson and much of Mississippi described indignities and injustices experienced every day by black Mississippians, and had assured his audience the years of change are upon us. Granting local airtime a black leader in Mississippi was unprecedented; time had been allocated by local NBC affiliate WLBT--a station since its first broadcast in 1953 had censored, selectively edited, and often simply refused broadcast programs it deemed integrationist--defied white and black belief. The station, however, had little choice in matter. For six years, Evers had petitioned FCC and WLBT provide airtime for opposing arguments segregationist programming and news coverage. Under investigation by FCC in 1963 for its role in instigating violence during James Meredith's desegregation of Ole Miss a year earlier, WLBT finally acceded local and federal pressure and allowed Evers respond on-camera Mayor Allen Thompson's previously televised defense of Jackson's race relations. seems probable, Adam Nossiter has written, that until his final month, Evers was an obscure figure a majority of white Mississippians. Nossiter, who covered retrial of Evers's killer for Atlanta Journal-Constitution during 1990s, believes at moment Evers stepped in front of WLBT camera on May 20, 1963, he entered a new, ultimately fatal zone of notoriety. Nine days later, a Molotov cocktail was thrown at his home; less than two weeks after that, he was murdered in his carport, shot in back by Greenwood, Mississippi Klan member Byron De La Beckwith. The broadcast may or may not have prompted Beckwith track down and silence Evers, but in long-running debate about effects of speech one fact remains undisputed: for first time in Mississippi, a black man had formally and directly addressed a white audience on local television. Some members of intended audience--the silent, responsible citizens of white community, as Evers called them--no doubt found themselves compelled follow logic of speech and, possibly, question moral and legal premises of segregation; others found image of Evers standing behind a podium so provocative they demanded station stop broadcast as soon as it began and even threatened, as one viewer did, to come up there and take [Evers] off. Evers knew well a public appeal sympathy and reason of white Mississippians could inflame die-hard segregationists--that it could, in fact, encourage all manner of white action. It was this encouragement--of white, not black, listeners--that appeared on Jackson television screens in May 1963. (1) Recordings of Evers's historic address have not surfaced (as of this writing), which may explain a reliance by The Help's co-writer and director Tate Taylor on a widely used archival excerpt of a different event. …