Free 1968 by Mark Kurlansky

Albany, the civil rights leaders learned to avoid the Pritchetts and target towns that had hotheaded police chiefs and angry, volatile mayors. “The movement had a really gut sense of what it took to get in the news and stay in the news,” said Gene Roberts, a North Carolina native who covered civil rights for
The New York Times.
During the 1965 march in Selma, Alabama, Martin Luther King noticed that a
Life
magazine photographer, Flip Schulke, had put down his cameras to help someone being beaten by police. Later King sought out the photographer and told him that they needed him not to help demonstrators, but to photograph them. He said, “Your role is to photograph what is happening to us.”
    In 1965 in Selma, a heavy, middle-aged woman named Annie Lee Cooper hit the sheriff full force with a punch. This got the attention of photographers, who started clicking off pictures as three sheriffs took hold of the woman. She then dared the sheriff to hit her, and he swung his billy club around and struck her so hard on the head that reporters noted the sound. They also got the picture—Sheriff Clark swinging his billy club at a helpless woman. It ran on the front page of newspapers throughout the country. SNCC’s Mary King said, “The skillful use of the news media for public education is the modern equivalent of the ‘pen,’ and the pen is still mightier than the sword.”
    As the civil rights movement became more media conscious, Martin Luther King became its star. He was the first civil rights leader to become a media star and consequently was far more famous and had far more immediate impact than his predecessors or contemporaries. Ralph Abernathy said, “We knew that we had developed into symbols.” King was often accused by people in the movement of stealing the spotlight, taking all the credit by taking all the bows. In truth, that was how the movement used him. He was seldom the innovator. But he was the eloquent speaker, the charismatic presence that made events work on television. He was a reluctant star, more at home in a church than at a demonstration or a press conference. He once said, “I am conscious of two Martin Luther Kings. I am a wonder to myself. . . . I am mystified by my own career. The Martin Luther King that the people talk about seems to me somebody foreign to me.”
    After Albany, television became an integral part of every campaign strategy. Within King’s organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Andrew Young served as the chief adviser on media, or at least on white-controlled media. He understood that to get on television every day, they had to provide daily messages that were short and dramatic, what are now called sound bites, and that these had to be accompanied by what television called “a good visual.” Young emphasized and King quickly grasped that the daily Martin Luther King statement should be no more than sixty seconds. Many SNCC activists thought King had gone too far, that he and his organization overused media. They believed that he was creating short-term news events, whereas they wanted to work more within southern society to create fundamental changes—a slow, off-camera process.
    But the reality was that by 1968, the civil rights movement, the Black Power movement, the antiwar movement, even Congress and conventional politics had become deeply involved with the question of how to get a television cameraman, in the words of then CBS correspondent Daniel Schorr, “to push the button.”
    Two innovations in television technology completely changed broadcast news—videotape and direct satellite transmission. Both were developed in the 1960s, and though neither one came into full use until the 1970s, by 1968 they had already begun to change the way broadcast journalists thought. Videotape is inexpensive, can be reused, and does not have to be processed before broadcasting. In 1968 most television news was still shooting sixteen-millimeter