High-Tech History: TV History

A cadet at the South Carolina military college, The Citadel, serving as an attendant at an academic conference, viewed the pilot for a television series now called "The American South Comes of Age." He provided me with an image that sticks in my mind after four years' work developing the 14-part series. 

An Atlanta native, he told me the program helped him understand for the first time "what things had been like." It is his generation that is the target of "The American South Comes of Age," to help them place in historical perspective the sweeping changes that transformed the region in the past three decades. 

The first episode in the 30-minute pilot the cadet saw portrays the Montgomery bus boycott that began with the refusal of Rosa Parks to surrender her seat to a white passenger, an act that ignited a people. The bus boycott, of course, launched the 26-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr., into a leadership role in what became a mass movement based on nonviolent protest. The boycott also launched a handful of federal judges in the South on a trail-blazing road probing the full meaning of Brown v. Board of Education. 

The pilot also showed the cadet the innocent idealism of the young King, Movietonews footage of him preaching his message of nonviolent resistance and his belief in the power of love to overcome the South's racist past. The film shows Judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr., describing how he and Judge Richard Rives decided the Browder v. Gayle case: when asked by the older Rives what he thought, Johnson says he replied, "I don't think segregation in any public facility is constitutional. Violates the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, Judge." Johnson explains, "That's all I had to say. Didn't take me long to express myself. The law was clear." The reprisals of threats and ostracism suffered by the judges after their decision are also made clear. 

Another section of the pilot mixes historical footage of the campus confrontation at the University of Mississippi when James Meredith enrolled, with narration, cuts from a recent interview with Meredith, and interviews with federal judges who ordered Meredith's admission. 

Judge Elbert P. Tuttle, then chief judge of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, reveals how he admonished the Kennedy administration to determine how many troops would be needed to carry out the court's order, then to double that force and have it on hand. "That wasn't done," Tuttle says, "and instead, they had the riots and the 500 marshals were almost overrun; two men were killed, and they brought in three or four times as many military men later on to bring an end to it." Tuttle's advice to the Kennedys came from his personal experience commanding a company of Georgia National Guards who staved off a lynch mob in the 1930s. 

In almost 500 interviews across the South researching my books Unlikely Heroes and The Transformation of Southern Politics, I met many of the major actors in the South's social and political transformation and gained insight into the interaction between that change and the region's economic development. And I saw the potential of television, despite its limitations, as a teaching tool. As a parent I realized that my children grew up in a South much different from that I had known, and they and their friends lacked the historical perspective to understand a period of exciting change. 

Asked what is least understood by the generation that has grown up since the civil rights movement, Andrew Young argues convincingly that blacks and whites are both deeply affected by their ignorance of history. Blacks, he says, "least understand how they got where they are. . . . Kids today can't imagine that it wasn't always possible to go to a movie or to a lunch counter. They can't conceive of the kind of racial violence and brutality that existed, nor do they understand the suffering that took place in order to make it possible for them to live as well as they do. And so they tend not to feel enough responsibility to the group and to change." 

Whites, he continues, "don't understand that we're still in the process of overcoming almost 400 years of racism and segregation. There's a resentment of affirmative action because they see children who are going to school with them getting special consideration with scholarships and with college entrance. And they don't understand the 400-year history of exclusion that makes that almost necessary and moral." 

"The American South Comes of Age" is designed specifically to address this problem: the historical footage and the presence in the classroom of historic figures can provide a source of stimulation that evokes understanding. A joint project of the University of South Carolina and South Carolina Educational Television, the series is designed for several different uses. One is as a "telecourse" for the "distant learner," in effect a correspondence course with a strong audio/visual component. In South Carolina it will be aired as a telecourse statewide over the ETV network. The series can also be used as a course in a classroom setting, or as an audio/visual aid in a wide variety of existing courses. Finally, it can be adapted for broadcast to a general viewing audience, possibly as a mini-series for public television. 

The series opens with a program called "The Burden of Southern History" in which five historians — Dan Carter, John Hope Franklin, Jacquelyn Hall, Leon Litwack, and George Tindall — sit around a table and discuss the major themes of Southern history since the Civil War. The five alternate as host-narrators for the remaining 13 half-hour programs. 

"The South of V.O. Key" introduces Key's classic study, Southern Politics in State and Nation (1949), and offers an overview of the region's political history. The next five programs essentially cover civil rights, three focusing on the role of the courts in such areas as school desegregation, jury discrimination, voting rights, and the evolution of civil rights law. The other two cover "The Civil Rights Movement" and "Black Political Development." Two programs on political developments follow: "The Rise of the Republican Party," which emphasizes the impact of the Eisenhower campaign and the Goldwater movement in the South, and "Political Transition," which focuses on the Democratic Party's response to the departure of white conservatives for the GOP and a new biracial Democratic coalition that exists in precarious balance in much of the South. 

The next three programs cover economics. "Cotton as King and Curse" offers an historical overview. "Economic Transformation" examines the transition from an agrarian-dominated economy to one based on industry. "Sun Belt — Myth or Reality?" explores the unevenness of economic development, some of the costs of growth, and the impact of foreign investment. The final two programs take a look at "Culture and Identity" and "The Emerging South." 

Along with the video series, companion readings and study guide assignment for students at various levels are in preparation, and the 60-plus interviews I taped in doing the shows will be catalogued, transcribed, indexed, and permanently deposited at the University of South Carolina's Newsfilm Library.