Racial harmony through clenched teeth: Remembering the Civil Rights Movement in Newsweek and the CBS Evening News, 1990--1999.

Abstract

This interdisciplinary project examines the collective memory of the Southern Civil Rights Movement within <italic>Newsweek</italic> and the CBS <italic>Evening News</italic> from 1990 to 1999. It merges quantitative and qualitative content analysis and utilizes a wide range of theoretical approaches to race, politics, and the media, including sociology, cultural studies, critical race theory, and whiteness studies. Through a comprehensive tracking of the patterns of both association and omission of Civil Rights memory in contemporary news stories about race, this study reveals how mainstream news stories helped to establish, maintain, and solidify a conservative memorialization of the Civil Rights Movement that has been mobilized against the Movement's limited victories. Many contemporary scholars and activists have bemoaned the increasingly common phenomenon of a conservative politician invoking the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in justification of colorblindness and rollbacks on civil rights policy. Yet, few scholars have examined either the frequency of or context in which such conservatives are able to claim themselves King's rightful legacy. This project intervenes on that score, and suggests, instead, that conservatives who make such a discursive attempt are, when they do so, merely joining a well established and narrow centrist/liberal discursive realm in which the Movement is cleansed of its radicalism in exchange for white absolution. In other words, it is the consistent narrowing of Civil Rights memory over the 1990s that lends rhetorical weight to, but does not simply originate from, conservative co-optations of King's image. It is the willful cleansing of moderate and liberal voices that lends Dr. King's legacy so readily and so logically to conservative policy rollbacks and attacks on contemporary civil rights activism. Thus, the undue focus visited upon conservative co-optations of King's image misses a more complex discursive process that, first, strongly implicates the role of white liberals in containing the Movement's challenge to white supremacy and normativity (more true of <italic>Newsweek </italic>); and, second, ignores the degree to which the Movement is still despised by many factions of the political right as an unjust and unwelcome challenge to white supremacy and normativity (more true of the <italic>CBS Evening News</italic>).