Kay Mills

By the time I came to writing "Changing Channels: The Civil Rights Case That Transformed Television," I was a better storyteller. And a good thing, too, because this story could have been sleep-inducing if I based it strictly on documents from the Federal Communications Commission files. But I had learned through experience that, as a fellow biographer said once, “if you don’t tell the struggle, you rob the story of its triumph.”

This case, which started formally in 1964 and lasted 16 years, fully qualified as a struggle, not in the streets but in law offices and commission hearings and courtrooms. It involved a television station in Jackson, Mississippi, that had been notoriously racist in its news coverage and other programming through the 1950s and early 1960s. Two black leaders in the state, backed by broadcast reformers from the Office of Communication of the United Church of Christ, challenged the license and ultimately won. But not without repeated setbacks at the FCC.

Fortunately, the federal judge who handled the challengers’ appeal was none other than Warren Burger, who went on to become the U.S. Chief Justice. His presence in the story helped add heft to the tale.

The basic grunt work in telling the story involved reading over thousands of pages of FCC records stored at the National Archives building in College Park, Maryland—filings from the challengers, counter-filings from the station, FCC decisions, and on and on and on. But in writing this book I couldn’t just quote documents—no one would keep reading. I also had to find the people involved to give the story flesh and blood. Both the principal challengers—Aaron Henry and Robert Smith—had died but I could read their papers and other background at Tougaloo College and elsewhere. I already knew the force behind the challenge, the Rev. Everett Parker, from covering his efforts when I worked in Washington. And I knew how the FCC worked. So I had that background as well as the back story from Mississippi during the civil rights era.

I interviewed scores of people who had been involved with the station or the case to try to put flesh on the bones the documents revealed. Through one of the lawyers involved, I had a chance to meet Walter Hall, a Texas banker who financed the second part of the case, not long before he died. Obviously, with a case that had started more than 30 years earlier, it was urgent to see him and others. Moral of the story: when in doubt, go, and go now.

But the prize interview, the one I wanted the most, was Fred Beard, who had been the station manager whose practices had led in large part to the challenge. I found him through his son and eventually went to Columbus, Mississippi, in April 2000 to interview him. I couldn’t have done the book fairly without the balance that interview helped give my work.

Because I had already traveled often to Mississippi for both the Fannie Lou Hamer and Head Start books, I knew people who could steer me toward WLBT viewers who had seen the changes in the station. I was fortunate also because by the time I was doing the book, the management at the station had long since changed and opened its doors to me. They had a story of progress to tell.

And I found the way into the book when I discovered through reading some of the documents that Randall Pinkston, later a CBS correspondent, had, as Willy Pinkston from Jackson, Mississippi, gotten his start at WLBT. He became its first black anchorman handling the 6 p.m. newscast as the station started to change, something he never dreamed would have happened when he had watched broadcasts of the all-white “Teen Tempo” dance program or saw signs that the station had encountered “technical difficulties” when programs featuring black performers aired.

In the end, writing non-fiction books perhaps is not that different from daily journalism—only requiring more research, more time, even more story telling ability, and the patience to sit at your computer and write and write and rewrite and rewrite virtually every day.