© 2010

KATE L. FLACH

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

MAMIE TILL AND JULIA: BLACK WOMEN’S JOURNEY FROM REAL

TO REALISTIC IN 1950S AND 60S TV

A Thesis

Presented to

The Graduate Faculty of the University of Akron

In Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Degree

Master of Arts, History

Kate L. Flach

December, 2010

MAMIE TILL AND JULIA: BLACK WOMEN’S JOURNEY FROM REAL

TO REALISTIC IN 1950S AND 60S

Kate L. Flach

Thesis

Approved: Accepted:

______Advisor Dean of the College Dr. Tracey Jean Boisseau Dr. Chand Midha

______Co-Advisor Dean of the Graduate School Dr. Zachary Williams Dr. George R. Newkome

______Department Chair Date Dr. Michael Sheng

ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

CHAPTER

I. INTRODUCTION ...... 1

II. FROM REAL IMAGES TO REEL EXPOSURE ...... 5

III. WATCH AND LEARN: ESTABLISHING BLACK MIDDLE CLASS-NESS THROUGH MEDIA ...... 17

IV. COVERING POST-WAR MOTHERHOOD ON TELEVISION ...... 26

V. INTERUPTING I LOVE LUCY FOR THIS? The Televised Trial ...... 34

VI. CROSSING ALL Ts AND DOTTING LOWER CASE Js ...... 41

VII. CONCLUSION:“Okay, she can be the mother…” julia, November 26, 1968 ...... 50

REFERENCED WORKS ...... 54

iii CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

Lynching, or ritualized and publicized community sanctioned murder, was the

single most terrifying tool Southern whites used to protect white supremacy following the end of . Although lynching had seen its peak in terms of numbers and frequency

in the early decades of the twentieth century and had declined since a vibrant movement

to eradicate it had emerged in the 1930s, Southern whites never entirely forsook the

practice even in the post-war period. With new forms of civil rights activism on the rise

in the 1950s, Supreme Court decisions such as Brown v. Board of Education being

rendered and constituted, and communities of urban blacks with middle class sectors

emerging, white segregationists found themselves on the defensive. Given the increased

reach of media in the South in the postwar period, the fewer but arguably more

spectacular instances of lynching that occurred in the 1950s had an impact that exceeded

the small localities in which they were held—an impact, however over which Southern

whites were not in complete control. Intended as a warning to blacks located in the north

and south that new anti-segregationist and anti-racist mores would have no bearing on social relations in at least, the lynching of Till brought national attention to

the state in ways unforeseen by the men who did the lynching and by their defenders.

Much of the credit for the change in the way the nation as a whole reacted to instances of

1 lynching in the South following the murder of Emmet Till goes to his mother, Mamie Till

Bradley.

While lynching continued to have the intended consequence of instilling terror for

some, especially those blacks in the immediate vicinity of the murder, the cultural

memory of lynching and its political use and meaning at the national level would undergo

radical change following the 1955 murder of fourteen year old Emmett Till in

Mississippi. It was Mamie Till’s access to and, especially, her deft manipulation of television media that, I argue, transformed her son’s murder from a successful terrorizing

tool of segregationists into a vehicle for the discrediting of lynching nationwide. With

the assistance of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

(NAACP), Mamie Till distributed photographs and video footage of her son’s body at his

funeral to a cross-race national audience via both newspaper press and television. Rather

than confirming the brutish status of black people, in Mamie Till’s public appearances

and telling of her son’s fate, lynching came across as an inexplicable act of murder

performed by irrational and hateful whites. Though whites, nationwide, had long been

aware of lynching and had been exposed to anti-racist critiques of it since at least Ida B.

Wells Barnett’s ‘crusade’ of the late nineteenth century,1 Bradley used television to re-

expose the nation to lynching in ways that signaled its demise as a useful tool of the Jim

Crow social system. She commanded a reconsideration of the racist rationales and

undermined the practice most effectively by asserting herself in the public eye as an

educated, middle class black mother devastated over the death of her son. Mamie Till’s

poise, middle-class demeanor and her determination to emphasize her son’s youth by

1 Ida B. Wells-Barnett. On Lynchings (New York: Humanity Books, 2002). 1

putting virtuous images of them both before the public destabilized the usual

presumptions regarding lynching. Principal among these assumptions was the notion that

lynching protected a decorous middle-class Southern white womanhood from rapacious

lower-class black male predators—the converse of both depictions was the image of the

overly sexual or slovenly black woman. Not only did Mamie Till’s insistence that

television viewers recognize the youth and wholesomeness of her son unsettle these

assumptions, her presentation of herself as a wholesome and decent mother also

constituted evidence contradicting predominant ideas about class and race identity.

Television’s immediacy provided a visual juxtaposition of Mamie Till Bradley and the

white woman Emmett Till allegedly wolf-whistled at, Carolyn Bryant. Bryant appears, in

contrast with Till, as a lower-class woman whose physical appearance fell short of

middle-class standards of femininity and beauty as otherwise portrayed on television. The

sympathetic posing of Bradley as an articulate, poised, and coiffed middle-class mother,

alongside Carolyn Bryant’s more awkward and working-class appearance, upended the

racial connotations attached to women’s class status and, in doing so, placed the sexual politics of lynching into jeopardy.

To understand the significance of Bradley’s intervention in the symbolic

representation of race, this paper analyzes race and gender mores established in popular

television sitcoms of the 1950s and compares them to live coverage of Emmett Till’s

murder and specifically to media portrayals of Mamie Till Bradley. Bradley’s strategic

intervention in American mass cultural depictions of had a ripple

effect in the culture beyond that of destabilizing ideas about the justifications for

lynching. Her well-coiffed and gracious appearance, compared to Carolyn Bryant’s plain

2

dress and sometimes unseemly behavior, altered public sensibilities linking race and class

paving way for television programs featuring chic middle class African Americans in shows such as julia. Other scholars have shown how previous television programs such

as Amos ‘n Andy and Beulah in addition to film, advertisements and magazines served to

entertain white audiences while “educating” black viewers on how to speak and act. In

this paper, I argue that Bradley’s ‘real-life’ presentation of self in news outlets carried

just as much or more significance as an educating vehicle. Bradley’s debut on all three

networks’ news broadcast over the course of several months in 1955 helped break down

the prevailing race and gender constructs of what middle class motherhood looked like

for a new generation of Americans glued to their television sets as well as an

international audience tuned in to the controversy. Bradley’s evident black middle class-

ness normalized a new image of black motherhood that was later displayed in NBC’s

situation comedy julia, starring Diahann Carroll, which debuted in 1968 and ran for three

seasons. Carroll’s portrayal of Julia in these years presents a more assertive and

independent image of a mother, in strong contrast to 1950s family sitcoms such as

Father Knows Best and Leave it to Beaver in which mothers embodied cooperative

helpmates to fathers who took center stage of the programs. Carroll’s role as Julia did

not resemble these images of womanhood; instead, as a widowed mother who worked but

also maintained a decorous and attractive demeanor, the fictional Julia closely paralleled

the ‘real-life’ image presented by Mamie Till Bradley thirteen years prior via live

television. Thirteen years after Emmett Till’s violent death, new generations of TV-

watchers were psychologically prepared to “believe” in a black woman who met the

expected standards of mainstream middle-class motherhood signaled by an attractive

3

appearance, impeccable deportment, and wholesome devotedness to a son. Bradley’s

assertion of herself as a respectable mother in 1950s mass media helped transform the

gender and racial discourse regarding motherhood and housewifery by visually altering

what “decent” families in general, and “good” mothers in particular, looked like.

This essay is divided into two parts, with chapters II-IV examining how standards

of beauty and motherhood were constructed in 1950s American popular culture,

specifically in magazines and on television. Chapters V-VII in the second part of the

essay, compare Mamie Till Bradley’s appearance in news stories about her son’s murder

with these same hegemonic beauty constructs, and demonstrate how her resemblance to

sitcom mothers translated her into a “safe” black woman, posed a serious challenge to

stereotypes of black women as either reckless jezebels or accommodating mammies. I argue that Bradley’s entry into households via television presented a new face to

American motherhood that resembled images of the white suburban mothers featured on

TV sitcoms. Her interventions in popular media unsettled generalized views of black womanhood in ways perhaps even more powerful than the only other positive images of black women most Americans might have encountered on television, the equally

respectable but confrontational black activists shown directly challenging segregation on

the nightly news in these years. Finally, I show the links between Mamie Till Bradley’s

image and the debut of the first black sitcom centered on a female character: julia. This

essay does not claim that Mamie Till Bradley inspired writers to create julia, but rather

argues Mamie Till Bradley helped create a newly acceptable and newly “safe” image of

black women as mothers that provided a cultural platform for Diahann Carroll’s

character, Julia, to stand on.

4 CHAPTER II

FROM REAL IMAGES TO REEL EXPOSURE

Though stories of lynching circulated primarily by word of mouth in the

nineteenth century, in the more visual twentieth century the power of lynching lay as much on the visual plane as on the oral. It was the distribution of visual images of the lynched body that normalized the practice in the 1910s and 1920s when postcards and commercialized visual mementos of the events became commonplace. Like all photographs, photographic depictions of lynching are important artifacts revealing the cultural logic of historical moment of the picture when it was taken. Literary theorist

Susan Songtag argues that cameras changed seeing altogether, by developing the idea of seeing for the sake of being able to look. Photography is not an objective record since the person taking the picture has the power to reveal and conceal imagery with angles, lighting, composition, and framing. The photographer holds the power, often leaving the person being photographed powerless, as s/he cannot always choose the way s/he is seen in the picture. This image manipulation played an important role in lynching photography by identifying people who were not like “us” and who bear qualities of exotic Otherness.2 The distribution of photographic images of lynched blacks paralleled the circulation of other visual phenomenon at the turn of the nineteenth century such as those presentations of non-white persons in traveling circuses, world’s fairs, and freak

2 Laura Wexler. Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 298-300 5 shows.3 Entertainment geared for white middle class amusement reinforced racial

binaries between whites and non-whites and social binaries between the able and

disabled, civilized and savage, the “freakish” and the “normal.”

Although Emmett Till’s dead, mutilated, and partially decomposed body could have circulated among whites with the same power to render black people subhuman, as

earlier photographs and postcards of lynched victims had, film footage of Emmett Till’s

memorial service and his violated body did the opposite of what lynching photography

accomplished for decades. Rather than the photographs of lynching confirming white

superiority and degrading blacks as subhuman, television humanized Till. It broadcast an

orderly procession of one hundred thousand African Americans gathering to mourn the

death of a young boy. The imagery of the black community gathering to support the Till

family “civilized” African Americans. Television recontextualized the photographs of

Emmett Till by pairing the before and after pictures of his face along with footage of the

funeral procession and grief stricken mother, highlighting Till’s innocence and making

the horror of his mutilation more potent. Photography provided permanence to the image

being photographed, while television provided both the poignancy of juxtaposition and the immediacy of “live-ness”, vividly bringing to life the physical suffering of blacks

while demonstrating their apparent innocence and humanity.

Given the global reach of television to modify regional cultures into a national

consensus, many media scholars, such as Sasha Torres, see the development of a

televisual race ideology that would challenge southern segregation as inevitable. The

need of television news programs to cover live compelling and dramatic stories made the

3 Thomas Fahy. Freak Shows and the Modern American Imagination: Constructing the Damaged Body From Willa Cather to Truman Capote. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 2-9 6

of the 1950s a natural subject for the evening news. The limits of

television story-telling—mass media’s tendency to traffic in narratives with clear-cut

moral messages—favored civil rights workers who recognized in television an

opportunity to retell the story of lynching, of segregation, and of race itself in ways that

cast them as victims of an inexplicably hate-filled white power structure. Mamie Till

Bradley helped shape that televisual narrative more profoundly than any other black

woman in the era of civil rights, including I argue, Rosa Parks. While Parks tried very

hard to come across as an average, respectable, working black woman who would not

move to the back of the bus simply because ‘her feet were tired’ (as the popular narrative

often imagines her), her challenging presence on television as a political activist could

not be entirely hid by this simplistic ruse and, therefore, was less reliable as “live television” than the heartfelt and dramatic circumstances that threw Bradley into television’s spotlight. TV networks could not resist Bradley’s attractive attire and well- spoken decorum enthroning the grieving mother as an ultimate symbol of American decency. In an effort to “make the whole world see” how lynching had taken her son,

Bradley used the power of television wielded by 1955 in the same anti-segregationist direction in which the courts were headed.

One year after the Brown v. Board of Education decision ruled segregated schools unconstitutional, the murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till made international headlines with his mother at the center of almost every story that covered the event. The story’s plot was a simple one. On August 24, 1955 Till and cousins visited Roy Bryant’s grocery store to buy candy. According to Roy’s wife, Carolyn Bryant, after Till paid for his bubble gum, he whistled at her while exiting the store. Other witnesses say he

7

whistled at a checker game being played at the door, while still others believe that he

whistled when trying to say “bubble gum,” as a result from a stutter he developed after having polio as a child. The boys assumed the grocery store incident had passed, however

three days later on August 27, Roy and Carolyn Bryant, Roy’s half-brother J.W. Milam

and three unknown men came to the home of Till’s Uncle Moses to avenge the perceived

insult Till had committed against white womanhood. Emmett’s cousin Wheeler Parker

Jr. recalled that “they didn’t call him Emmett; they called him ‘the fat boy from

Chicago.’”4 This reference to Till’s home, in addition to many others made

during the trial, reflects the fear that many southern whites had regarding “uppity”

northern blacks—often associated with the NAACP—that Jim Crow segregation tried to

keep out of southern racist society through acts of terror such as lynching or the threat of

lynching. Once removed from his Uncle’s house, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam beat Till

mercilessly, shot him in the head, and threw him into the Tallahatchie River with a

seventy pound, three-foot high circular gin fan5 tied around his neck with barbed wire.

Three days later, Mamie Till Bradley learned of the discovery of her son’s body.6 Even

prior to viewing her nearly unrecognizable son, Bradley and the NAACP kept news

stations, radio stations, and newspapers interested in her son’s disappearance and later in his death and the trial for his murder.

4 The Untold Story of Emmett , produced by Keith A. Beauchamp, 70 minutes, Till Freedom House Productions, LLC, 2005, 1 DVD 5 The cotton gin is a machine mechanized to clean cotton fibers from its seeds. Eli Whitney invented the modern American version of this machine in 1793, which increased cotton production causing a higher demand for slaves in the agricultural south to maintain growing cotton plantations. Milam and Bryant’s decision to tie Till’s body to a gin fan may have been coincidental based on convenience, however the symbolic use of equipment indicative of the South’s slave era may suggest that the gin fan is a metaphorical reminder to southern blacks to remember their “place” in the Jim Crow South. 6 Mamie Till-Mobley and Christopher Benson. Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America. (New York: The Random House Publishing Group), 122-127 8

After the discovery of Emmett’s body, a Chicago news station interrupted I Love

Lucy with a news bulletin to make the announcement; for which the Till family later received hate mail.7 The importance that TV news accorded Till by placing the young

black boy as more significant than America’s beloved sitcom is what enraged viewers

when presumably, had a bulletin interrupted Lucy to announce a white boy washed

ashore, it would have garnered sympathy rather than anger from viewers. All three

television networks broadcast Bradley’s decision to have an open-casket funeral, along

with newspapers worldwide. The Chicago Defender covered the day of the funeral at

Robert’s Temple describing the attendees’ outrage, many of

whom needed to sit down after viewing the mutilated boy. Journalist Robert Elliot wrote

that many of the viewers commented on how they felt attached to Emmett when they saw

him as if he could have been their son.8 In this way, television took the funeral beyond

black newspapers and into white hearts as well as their homes. Rather than photographs

of lynched Till confirming white superiority and dehumanizing the victim as a sex craved

brute, television personalized Till and his mother’s grief, and in wrapping Emmett and

Mamie in the sentimentality of domesticity, civilized the estimated one hundred thousand

African Americans who attended his funeral by portraying them as respectful citizens

supporting the Till family.

The trial for Emmett Till’s murder resulted in the acquittal of Roy Bryant and

J.W. Milam. The jury reached its decision based on the state’s inability to prove that the

mutilated and bloated body was Emmett despite the clear evidence of such things as

7 Till- Mobley, 130 8 Robert Elliott, “Thousands At Rites for Till,” The Chicago Defender, September 10, 1955. National Edition, 1 9

Till’s father’s ring on his finger. Four months after the trial ended, Alabama journalist

William Bradford Huie paid Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam four thousand dollars to

publish their confession in Look magazine. In his responses to the interviewer’s

questions, Roy Bryant emphasized the class difference between himself and the Tills with

evident resentment that the boy’s black family had appeared to be more affluent than his

own family. He began the interview explaining that unlike Till, the Bryant family did not

own a television, car, or a nice home; instead they lived in the back of their grocery store.

Throughout the interview the men mentioned Emmett’s residence in Chicago six times. 9

Emmett’s urbanity seemed to outrage Bryant, as if, in addition to black affluence, black flight to northern urban centers was in itself a violation of the race structure of the South.

Demands for anti-lynching legislation, desegregation, and black voting rights bloomed after Till’s murder. The South, especially Mississippi, drew international criticism for its violent killing in 1955 resulting in international boycotts on Mississippi goods. Within two years of the confession, the three Mississippi stores owned by Milam and Bryant in Sharkey, Money, and Glendora all closed as a result of boycotts from local blacks. Signs placed along Mississippi highways read, “Mississippi—The Most Lied

About State In The Union.”10 Television networks broadcast rallies in Chicago, Detroit,

New York, and Baltimore in addition to Till’s funeral and trial to national audiences in

Copenhagen, Paris, and Tokyo.11 Mamie Till Bradley did not accidentally become the heroine of the event—she put herself in the public just as much as television crews

9 William Bradford Huie. “The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi,” Look magazine, January 24, 1956 10 William Bradford Huie. “What’s Happened to the Emmett Till Killers?,” Look magazine, January 1957 p. 63-66 11 Till-Mobley, 191 10

sought her out. Mamie Till Bradley chose to be an active participant in revealing the

extent of—and irrationality of— anti-black hatred in the American South.

The evidence that Till’s death made for “better TV” is supplied by the contrast

between television’s coverage of Mamie and its coverage of the widow of George W.

Lee, another black male mutilated and murdered by whites in Mississippi just three

months prior to the murder of Emmett Till. In June of 1955, Reverend George W. Lee of

Belzoni, Mississippi—an activist in the movement to register southern blacks to vote—

was shot by two anonymous white southern men removing the entire left side of his face.

The Chicago Defender and Jet, the same newspaper and magazine that played a major

role in publicizing Emmett Till’s death, printed a photograph of Lee’s face postmortem.

Despite the grotesque imagery of Lee’s face his death did not receive the publicity that

Till’s did.12 Headlines and articles on fifty-one-year-old Lee presented him as a lynched

man entirely removed from the family relations that might have helped to create a

compelling narrative around his death. The Chicago Defender’s headline above the

photograph of Lee’s dead body read, “Lynching in Mississippi: Minister Shotgunned To

Death Gang Style.”13 Other captions included, “Mass Meeting Set At Lynching

Scene,”14 “Vote Drive to Avenge Lynching,”15 and “Remember Reverend Lee.”16

Coverage of Till’s murder, by contrast, often included titles that either referred to him as a young boy, gave his age, or emphasized him as a son and Mamie Till Bradley as a

12 Davis W Houck. and Matthew A. Grindy, Emmett Till and the Mississippi Press. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008), 20-21 13 Alex L. Wilson. “Lynching in Mississippi: Minister Shotgunned To Death Gang Style,” The Chicago Defender, May 21, 1955, 1 14 Author Unknown, “Mass Meeting Set At Lynching Scene,” The Chicago Defender, May 21, 1955, 1 15 Author Unknown, “Vote Drive to Avenge Lynching,” The Chicago Defender, May 28, 1955, 1 16 Author Unknown, “Remember Reverend Lee,” The Chicago Defender, May 28, 1955, 1 11

grieving mother such as, “Mother’s Tears Greet Son Who Died a Martyr.”17 All of the

articles mentioned Lee’s work as a minister, grocery store owner, and activist for civil

rights; however, only the “Lynching in Mississippi” piece wrote in the last sentence that

Lee “was survived by his wife Mrs. Rosebud Lee.” Other than Rosebud’s name, the journalist provided no information on her as a grieving wife and a brief two sentences mentioned the roughly 1,000 attendees at the funeral.

Jet magazine devoted a four-page article to Reverend Lee’s murder and although sympathetic, the article’s subtitle refers to Lee as a “militant Negro minister.”18 The

Chicago Defender and Jet both emphasized Lee’s involvement with the NAACP and printed postmortem images during his funeral, however only Jet described Lee as

“militant.” Jet’s images show Lee before and after his death and one photograph of his

wife Rosebud with her hand on her husband’s cheek. The article glosses over Rosebud’s

decision to utilize her husband’s death in order to reveal the extent of , unlike the emphasis on Mamie Till Bradley’s contribution three months later. The only image of

Rosebud shows a shadowed profile leaving the viewer unable to see what she looked like, which may have prevented readers from truly feeling a connection to the grieving wife.

The extent of exposure Mamie Till Bradley received differed from Rosebud’s in that

Bradley appeared frail from devastation and her tears and visible sorrow became the focal

point of news images. Understating Rosebud’s role in exposing Lee’s murder and

presenting her as a faceless widow removed her agency as a grieving wife and activist.

Both Lee and Bradley worked with the NAACP to expose the deaths of their loved ones

17 Mattie Smith Colin. “Mother’s Tears Greet Son Who Died A Martyr,” The Chicago Defender, September 10, 1955. National Edition , 1 18 Author Unknown, “Is Mississippi Hushing Up a Lynching?: Mississippi Gunman take Life of Militant Negro Minister,” Jet, May 26, 1955, 8-11 12

yet all three news networks only covered Emmett Till’s murder and trial, indicating that

Emmett, and in particular Mamie, had a marketable quality that Rosebud lacked. Mamie

Till Bradley’s middle class lifestyle, womanhood and northern dialect presented a new

kind of blackness that television networks had never broadcast before.

An even closer counter example of the representation of a “less compelling”

lynching exists in the case of Clinton Melton. Not too long after the murders of

Reverend George Lee and Emmett Till, a white man murdered black thirty-five-year-old

Melton on December 3, 1955 in Glendora, Mississippi four miles north of Money,

Mississippi where Emmett Till’s murder took place. Melton, a life-long resident of

Glendora and father of four children, held a reputation as a hard worker and someone who had gotten along with local whites. Despite the fact that controversy over Emmett

Till’s murder was so close to Glendora and that the community and especially the men alleged to be responsible for it were under unusual scrutiny, it was J.W. Milam’s friend,

Elmer Kimball who murdered Melton while driving Milam’s truck. Unlike the families of Lee and Till, Melton Clinton and his wife Beulah did not participate in civil rights activism. Born and raised in rural Mississippi, Beulah’s response to her husband’s murder was to try not to bring too much attention to herself, likely for fear of retribution by vengeful whites. Even after her husband’s death, Beulah Clinton did not accept help from the NAACP, nor did she choose, or perhaps was unable, to compel the sort of media attention that Mamie Till did to form around her husband’s murder. Clinton’s intentions to disconnect herself from the NAACP did not succeed in a quiet kind of justice either.

13

Despite the multiple witnesses who testified against Elmer Kimball no convictions were forthcoming in his murder trial.19

As with Till’s murder, the story the newspapers told used the grief and suffering experienced by Melton’s wife and children as a focal point to tell a story of victimized innocence. One article in particular included a telegram sent by the Emma Lazarus

Federation of Jewish Women’s Club to President Eisenhower and his wife, pleading with the Eisenhower’s to sympathize with the Melton family and to make a stronger effort to

“put an end to wanton murder stalking Mississippi.”20 The gender specificity of women as particularly vulnerable was a constant factor in the ways the media estimated the heinousness of the crimes, emphasizing either a mother’s grief or a widow’s financial vulnerability. Though Rosebud and Reverend Lee’s childless state may have failed to tug at the heartstrings of readers the way the suffering of a bereaved mother could, the projection of “broken families” as a result of the death of a husband could have made for a compelling story as the telegram sent by the Jewish Women’s Club makes clear. The difference between the impact and significance of Till’s and Melton’s murder lay not so much with the facts of the case, but with the inability of Beulah Melton to present herself as a televisual subject worthy of mass media’s constant attention. Because she had not established any sort of media persona nor stimulated a dramatic narrative to form around her plight, the mysterious death of Beulah just nineteen days after her husband’s murder, received barely any media attention at all. Allegedly Beulah accidentally swerved off of

19 Houck and Grindy, 147-149 20 Author unknown, “Send U.S. Troops to Mississippi: Courier’s Plea to Ike Gains National Support,” , December 24, 1955, A5 14

the road into a bayou, though many Glendora citizens claimed that local whites forced

her off of the road to prevent her from testifying in Kimballs’ pending prosecution.21

Even at the time, the minimal press involvement in the Melton deaths compared

to Emmett Till’s did not go entirely unnoticed by media experts and observers. Reporter

David Halberstam suggests that the Meltons being native Mississippians as opposed to a

major northern metropolitan city like Emmett Till from Chicago, may have been one of

the reasons why the Meltons “lacked reader appeal.”22 The sensationalized media

coverage of Emmett Till’s death and trial was not a function of any particular

heinousness attached to the crime. Instead the unique way that this lynching was

reported is intimately connected to the extent to which his mother, Mamie Till Bradley,

took over and centered herself in the coverage. With the exception of her color, Mamie

Till Bradley’s unafraid attitude and her proud and unapologetic presentation of self in

terms of dress, decorum, and dialect were qualities that television viewers would have

been familiar with by watching prime time TV programs. It was Bradley’s ability to

match TVs prescriptive ideal of motherhood that made the murder of Emmett Till a

sensation that rocked the nation in ways no other lynching had ever done.

Media coverage of Till’s murder and the trial created a battle surrounding what

defined motherhood. Racists, antiracists, liberals and conservatives constructed their meaning of motherhood to formulate their views on American citizenship, race relations,

and gender roles. The overall post-World War II consensus regarding families placed

mothers as directly responsible for the physical and psychological well being of their

children. The two main concerns for “good” mothers included taking care of their home

21 Houck and Grindy, 149 22 . “Tallahatchie County Acquits a Peckerwood,” Reporter, April 19, 1956, 26-30 15

and family, in particular their children. Considering that the ultimate form of

womanhood was often imagined to be motherhood, the media portrayed Mamie Till

Bradley and Carolyn Bryant as women and mothers differently in order to construct each

woman’s image to either parallel or clash with proper womanly personas portrayed in

popular culture.23

23 Ruth Feldstein. Motherhood in Black and White: Race and Sex in American Liberalism, 1930-1965. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 86-90 16 CHAPTER III

WATCH AND LEARN: ESTABLISHING BLACK

MIDDLE CLASS-NESS THROUGH MEDIA

Slave-era ideology constructed several interconnected images of black

womanhood, each serving the slave owning class’s interests to objectify black women.

Objectification is essential in the process of establishing difference where “one element is objectified as the Other, and is viewed as an object to be manipulated and controlled.”24

Elements of white beauty such as blonde hair, blue-eyes, thinness and light skin

complexion could not be considered beautiful without a juxtaposition of the Other— black women with kinky hair, dark eyes, full lips and figures, and dark skin. This

hegemonic control over beauty seemed inescapable as women and men of color who

appear to acknowledge the racist system of ideas, continued to create a color hierarchy

within the race between “lesser” dark-skinned blacks and “better” light-skinned blacks.25

According to art historian Michael D. Harris, “Racial discourses, though they are discourses of power, rely on the visual in the sense that the visible body must be used by those in power to represent nonvisual realities that differentiate insiders from outsiders.”26 Main stream popular culture limited representations of black women to

24 Patricia Hill Collins. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. 2nd ed. (New York and London: Rutledge Classics, 2009), 77-78 25 Ibid, 97-100 26 Michael D. Harris. Colored Pictures: Race and Visual Representation. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 2 17 either dark skinned mammies or light skinned jezebels. Although black women such as

Lena Horne, Eartha Kitt and became super stars for black and white

audiences, their success was mostly indicative of their racial ambiguity and extreme sex

appeal. The most successful black beauties had “mulatto looks” or appeared so white

that their blackness could be overlooked making these women “safe,” or non-threatening

beauty icons.27 Limited representation of black women in the media left few sources that represented black women as beautiful, middle class, or essentially the opposite of all slave-era stereotypes. Magazines geared towards black audiences such as Ebony, Jet, and

Negro Digest became some of the few media outlets that presented images of a black middle class ideal that resembled white middle class magazines. Black and white women’s magazines became another facet of 1950s consumer culture that used fictional stories, “real life” accounts and advertisements to engender postwar gender roles and the

“new” middle class family.

Images of ideal womanhood remained as separate as most racial mores leaving only black magazines and newspapers to celebrate black beauty and womanhood. Most white women’s magazines post-World War II printed articles on the “happy housewife heroine” who somehow became a success by, happenstance, a selfless sacrifice or having the tenacity to overcome struggle, all of which resulted in women whose individual endeavor took them out of the home and into the public eye. Unlike most white magazines who printed fiction and non-fiction articles on housewives whose

27 For more information on African American women in film, see Bogle, Donald, Brown Sugar: Over One Hundred Years of America’s Black Female Superstars. (New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group, 1980); or Bogle, Donald, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films 4th ed. (New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004) 18

circumstance temporarily or permanently took them out of their domestic role, black

magazines such as Jet, Ebony and Negro Digest often endorsed stories on women who successfully combined motherhood and career. Historian Joanne Meyerowitz argues that such articles in black magazines served as lessons in overcoming racism by displaying female “superwomen” who represented racial advancement. 28

White magazines such as Reader’s Digest, Life and Coronet paralleled popular

television programs by portraying glamour and beauty in domestic settings with the

housewife clad in pearls, stockings, heels and cinch-waist dress. Geared towards white

middle class readers, such images of manicured sex appeal in the home suggest that

domesticity and sexuality were connected despite its contradictory reality. Unlike white

middle-class magazines, black magazines printed more explicit images and articles on

female sexuality. This may reflect the tradition of public sexual expression in the blues,

but also images of black glamour and sexuality became a political statement rejecting

white standards of beauty. Black readers often perceived displaying black female

sexuality in magazines as a form of racial advancement by presenting black womanhood

as equal to white.29 Just as Joanne Meyerowitz argues that articles in magazines taught

black readers how to overcome racism, all forms of popular culture serve to teach its

readers, viewers or listeners the proper way to look and act in order to imitate the identity

sold in a variety of media outlets. A Negro Digest article titled “Are Black Women

Beautiful?,” addressed the issue of the white “monopoly on beauty.” The article begins

28 Joanne Meyerowitz. “Beyond the Feminine Mystique: A Reassessment of Postwar Mass Culture, 1946- 1958,” in Not June Cleaver, eds. Joanne Meyerowitz (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 231- 232 29 Ibid, 244 For more information on portrayals of women in postwar magazines, see Walker, Nancy, Shaping our Mothers’ World: American Women’s Magazines (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000) 19

by the author discerning his use of the term “black” in which he explains, “I mean black women – whose skins are the deep, rich velvet shades of ebony.” Explaining his use of the term lets the reader know that he is not talking about the publicized black beauties

who appeared white, such as and Dorothy Dandridge. The author argues that

black women who still buy skin whitening creams and hair dyes is “proof” that black

women perceive “perfect beauty” as being white. Although the author argues that whites

have a “monopoly on beauty” and use “propaganda” to set such standards, he notes that

this condition is changing now that black women are used “more as models – a condition

brought about largely through the influence of fine Negro magazines.”30

Beauty standards often reflected larger racial issues and therefore received the

attention of many magazine articles. A persuasive article in Negro Digest written by an

anonymous woman argued that successful black men too often dated and married

“superior” white women. The author argues that although black women have “short

comings” compared to white women, black men would be happier marrying within the

race even though she acknowledges that this opinion is based on mere jealousy since she

is “a victim of progress and change, one of many Negro women who have lost their

husbands to white women.”31 Many articles on race issues often portrayed white racists

as foolish and dumb, especially in articles on blacks who “passed” as white. One article

in particular however, mocks white beauty standards by arguing that the same primping

techniques white women do to look pretty, are the same physical attributes black women

naturally have. The author, Roi Ottley argues, “they run us down for our kinky hair, yet

white women spend a fortune, and indeed great parcels of their time, having their hair

30Simms E. Campbell. “Are Black Women Beautiful?,” Negro Digest, June 1951, 16-20 31 Author unknown, “Are White Women Stealing Our Men?,” Negro Digest, April 1951, 52-55 20

curled and marceled – which in fact is a form of kinking.” When addressing skin color

he states, “There is nothing the white folks like better than a nice good-looking brownskin, which they euphemiously call ‘suntan.’ To be sure, if you are born with a natural brownskin this don’t count.”32

Although black magazines attempted to affirm that black was beautiful despite

white beauty standards, most of the advertisements peppered in between these articles

and images contradicted the message sent to its black readers. On the cover of one of

Jet’s August issues in 1955 is Marlene Owens, the daughter of famous track star Jesse

Owens. In 1955, out of all of Jet’s weekly magazines, only two men graced the cover

while women appeared on all the rest with Marlene Owens being one of the darkest

women. Ironically however, once the reader opens its cover a full length ad for Nadinola

bleaching cream contradicts the image of Marlene Owens on the other side of this

advertisement. The ad shows a woman with fair skin holding a telephone to her ear while

looking directly at the camera next to a slogan that reads, “The nicest things happen to

girls with light, bright complexions.” Below the slogan, the narrative description of the

product begins by asking the reader if their phone has stopped ringing and suggests that

maybe her “dark, dull, and unattractive” complexion is to blame.

Advertisements for skin bleaching cream only confirmed the concerns the

anonymous woman mentioned above seemed to have regarding black men who preferred

white women. Ads that overtly tell women that dark skin is “dull” and “unattractive”

indicate that black men really do prefer white women, or at least black women with

“light, bright complexions.” This idea that black men prefer white women is strongly

32 Roi Ottley. “Understanding White Folks,” Negro Digest, September 1950, 31-33 21

suggested in two other advertisements for Nadinola. The first ad shows a black woman

who looks white facing a darker black man as if they are about to kiss. Her hand is

resting upon his cheek providing a clear contrast of her whiteness to his blackness and the

slogan reads, “See how a lighter, brighter complexion improves your chance for

romance.”33 The second ad for the same product has what appears to be the same woman

and man, both facing the camera while she is leaning into him so that her forehead is

touching his cheek as he is gazing down at her while she is looking up. In addition to the

cuddling couple again providing the viewer with a clear juxtaposition of skin color, the

image is accompanied by the phrase, “So lovely, so adored with her honey light

complexion!”34 Each ad shows the woman wearing what appears to be large diamond

jewelry and strapless gowns, while the man is wearing a tuxedo. Even while talking on

the phone the attractive Nadinola model’s appearance symbolizes wealth which suggests

that Nadinola not only gives women “light, bright” skin, but a glamorous rich appearance

as well. Similar imagery is used in an Apex hair straightening ad where another fare

black woman is placed next to the phrase, “Glamorize Your Beauty…with that intriguing

soft hair look!”35 All of these ads use women who look white, leaving the viewer to

assume that these women are black solely based on the product they are modeling for.

Although most of the ads include men, it is clear that the product is mainly aimed

towards its female viewers as black male self-worth does not depend on physical

attractiveness as much, which is why the men are always significantly darker than their

33 Advertisement, “See how a lighter, brighter complexion improves your chance for romance,” Jet, February 10, 1955, Vol. 7, No. 14 , 2 34 Advertisement, “So lovely, so adored with her honey light complexion!,” Jet, July 14, 1955, Vol. 3, No. 10, 2 35 Advertisement, Glamorize Your Beauty…with that intriguing soft hair look!,” Jet, September 8, 1955, Vol. 8, No. 18, 40 22

female counterparts.36 The appearance of these models not only look white, but the ads themselves mimic the hair and skin ads in white magazines. This parallel in advertising sells glamour and middle class identity to both black and white women using similar images. Magazines used advertisements and models to project an image of what middle class beauty looked like and ironically, these images in black and white magazines looked the same.

Nearly every advertisement in Jet magazine for example, was geared towards teaching women how to alter their appearance sexually and domestically. One advertisement displayed in multiple Jet issues covered three full length pages to sell

“dual-purpose aprons.” The ad is deceiving in that it displays a model wearing six different aprons for different purposes such as cleaning, cooking, barbecuing, arranging flowers, hosting a cocktail party and tea luncheon. Ironically, suggesting that each style of apron has a specific purpose makes the aprons not “dual purpose” at all. The advertisement falls under the “Modern Living” section of the magazine while the narrative describes the aprons as “finding their rightful place in the fashionable housewife’s wardrobe.”37 Similar to advertisements found in white middle class magazines, sexuality and domesticity are portrayed as intertwined aspects of femininity that in reality contradict one another. Such ads however adhere to gender mores and arguably male fantasy of women confined to their domestic space, yet also readily and sexually available. Describing the multiple aprons as “modern” connects to the broader scope of 1950s culture where middle-class households modernized through consumerism.

This advertisement is selling aprons to black “housewives,” indicating that black women

36 Hill Collins, 98 37 Advertisement, “Aprons for Double Duty,” Jet, March 3, 1955, Vol. 7 No. 17, 38-40 23

can be middle class, or at least appear middle class, through consumerism. The

advertisement however, refers to these housewife accessories as “Jet’s aprons,” suggesting that they are not a name brand item typically sold in department stores. This

may explain why a black woman is used as the model and the advertisement is even in

Jet, considering that unless a product is specific to blackness, white corporations and ad

creators consciously evaded black audiences.

According to an article on “Negroes in the Ads” in Negro Digest, one advertising

executive responded to the lack of blacks in advertising by explaining, “You want to sell

to the greatest number of people. Therefore, in your advertisement, you present someone

they will want to emulate.” Another executive insisted, “You’d lose your audience if a

colored man appeared in an ad.”38 Black men and women only appeared in advertisements that depicted blacks within slave era stereotypes, which is why those

blacks are typically displayed in a southern setting as mammies or Uncle Toms such as

Aunt Jemima’s maple syrup or Uncle Ben’s rice. Keeping blacks out of white

advertisements and keeping white advertisements out of black magazines, left few

companies willing to buy ad space from magazines such as Jet, Ebony and Negro Digest.

Selling ad space is an essential financial asset and considering that only products specific

to African Americans purchased space to advertise—hair straightener and skin bleaching

cream—this left magazines no choice than to sell space to products like Nadinola and

Apex, even if the ads contradicted the agenda of writers and editors to alter beauty

standards to include blackness.

38 Walter Christmas. “Negroes in the Ads,” Negro Digest, December 1949, Vol. 8, 70-73 24

Black magazines presented articles and images that deviated from white

magazines’ portrayals of beauty and middle class-ness. Similar to other avenues of

popular culture, magazines taught readers about fashion, class and status through its

content and advertisements. Since the white dominated film and television industries

minimally included black actors/actresses, black magazines became the only form of

popular culture to widely distribute images of black women as beautiful, intelligent, and

middle class. White magazines helped teach its viewers about the latest clothing,

accessories, or appliances to maintain a racially specific middle class lifestyle by

eliminating black women from its content. Black magazines however specifically

addressed the absence of black women in larger social and cultural discourses and used

this material to teach black women how to appear middle class while simultaneously

bringing larger race issues to surface by overtly portraying black women in Jet, Ebony

and Negro Digest as subjects rather than objects. The increase of televisions in American

households during the 1950s furthered the white hegemonic monopoly on beauty and

class standards by shifting popular television genres to middle class familial dramas and

sitcoms. Fictional television programs helped create post-war American identity while

the television set as a household staple represented American modernity. Not only did

possessing a television represent middle class status, but the opportunity to participate in contemporary visual culture and in that way kept up-to-date on consumer trends signified middle class status as well.

25 CHAPTER IV

COVERING POST-WAR MOTHERHOOD ON TELEVISION

The number of television sets in American households grew forty fold from

910,000 in 1948 to 37,590,000 by 1955 when about sixty-four percent of American

homes contained a TV.39 Northern households were far more likely to possess

televisions than those in the South due to the broadcast freeze in 1948. In an attempt to

control the media, Mississippi, Arkansas, and South Carolina insisted on a local channel

separate from major broadcasting networks. With technology not yet advanced to fulfill

a request for local channels separate from national broadcast networks, the Federal

Communications Commission (FCC) issued a federal freeze on licensing new stations leaving the residents of southern states completely without television. Unable to resolve technical issues with separating channels, the freeze lasted until 1953 leaving the three states without television access during the height of its boom. Mississippi aired the CBS- affiliated WJTV, its first local television station, in January, 1953. Later that year in

December, NBC created a rival station WLBT-TV. The two networks struggled to stay alive and eventually merged in order to become a stronger unit when trying to preserve the segregated southern way of life by censoring footage of the emerging black civil rights movement. The local networks filtered television footage to omit images of articulate African Americans and perspectives against southern race issues such as

39 Harry Hansen. The World Almanac Book of Facts for 1955. )New York: New York World Telegram Corporation, 1956) 26 segregation.40 Prior to 1965, local southern television stations suppressed racial news

coverage because they claimed they did not want to increase tensions or inspire

disorderly conduct.41 Withholding television from the citizens of Mississippi, Arkansas

and South Carolina isolated these southern states from fully assimilating into the modern

“American way” more so than it shielded them from the racial issues that permeated the

Deep South.

Media as an industry is shaped by American political and social ideologies and

plays a major part in how blackness has been defined in the past fifty years of television

history. Black situation comedies consist of a core cast of African American characters

and their socio-cultural, political and economic experiences. Television from 1950-1953

is what media scholars have termed the “Minstrelsy Era,” which are shows that originated

on the radio and evolved from nineteenth century minstrel shows. The two programs that

aired during this era include Amos ‘n’ Andy and Beulah, both of which began on the radio

starring white performers who spoke in “black dialect,” and ended up on the small screen with black actors playing lead roles. 42 One of the longest running radio sitcoms, Amos

‘n’ Andy survived nearly two decades on the air but lasted only two seasons on television

once the NAACP pressured CBS to cancel the program in 1953 despite its success. CBS

canceling Amos ‘n’ Andy is considered one of the first successful civil rights battles post-

World War II, especially considering that the show embodied nearly every negative black

stereotype with the cast consisting of Amos, the Uncle Tom; Andy, Amos’ kooky

40 Steven D. Classen. Watching Jim Crow: The Struggles Over Mississippi TV, 1955-1969. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 34-37 41 Ibid, 48 42 Robin R. Means Coleman and Charlton D. McIlwain, “The Hidden Truths in Black Sitcoms,” in The Sitcom Reader: American Viewed and Skewed, eds. Mary M. Dalton and Laura R. Linder (Albany: New York State University Press, 2005), 125-126 27

sidekick; Kingfish Stevens, the smooth criminal; Lawyer Calhoun, the underhanded

crook; Lightnin’, the slow janitor; Sapphire Stevens, the loud woman, and Mama, the

overbearing mother-in-law.43 Similar to Amos ‘n’ Andy, Beulah lasted only two seasons

as well. Although Beulah became the first sitcom to star an African American actress,

the premise of the show was far from groundbreaking. A CBS news bulletin described

Beulah as “that bubbling, chuckling, ever-happy domestic whose good spirits and

laughter echo through the whole house…Ernest Whitman plays boyfriend Bill, to whom

‘Beulah’ has been engaged for nine years. Bill is a nice guy, but just can’t hold onto a

job very long, a shortcoming which leads ‘Beulah’ to suspect that the engagement will go

on and on.”44 Beulah originally starred Hattie McDaniel on the radio broadcast for five

seasons; however, the star of the television program changed hands a few times from

Ethel Waters to Hattie McDaniel to . Known for being the first African

American to win an academy award for her role as Scarlet O’Hara’s mammy in Gone

With the Wind, Hattie McDaniel and the actors from Amos ‘n’ Andy argued with the

NAACP for pushing them out of the only roles available to them in “all-white”

television.45 The cancellations of Amos ‘n’ Andy and Beulah was due in part to the

persistence from the NAACP, however most of the ethnic radio sitcoms that transitioned

to television became a short-lived trend replaced completely by the genre of suburban

family comedies by 1955.46

43 David Marc. “Origins of the Genre: In Search of the Radio Sitcom,” in The Sitcom Reader: American Viewed and Skewed, eds. Mary M. Dalton and Laura R. Linder (Albany: New York State University Press, 2005) p. 16-19 44 Papers of the NAACP: Part 15 Series B, Segregation and Discrimination, Complaints and Responses, 1940-1955 45 Ibid 46 Marc, 19 28

The end of ethnic sitcoms marks the beginning of what media scholars refer to as the “Nonrecognition Era” of television from 1954-1967. This era parallels with the burgeoning civil rights movement in that minstrelsy representations of blacks clashed with images of church bombings, murders, protests, boycotts, marches and police attacks that filled news broadcasts. Aside from a few cameo appearances or minor roles on shows such as Hogan’s Heroes and Car 54, Where Are You?, most networks did not know how to incorporate black actors in television sitcoms without “alienating viewers on either side of the civil rights debate,” therefore networks chose to ignore the crisis by not incorporating blackness into situation comedies and dramas at all.47 Eliminating blacks from fictional television programs left only one arena where blacks could appear, the nightly news. This narrow avenue of TV representation for over ten years showed the

American public that blacks had transitioned from minstrel buffoons to activists.

Portraying blacks as a force to be reckoned with may have skewed white middle class perceptions of race as an uncomfortable social issue that only became more prevalent during the movements of the 1960s. Although images of race hatred may have garnered white support of the civil rights movement, images of “regular” black men, women and families separate from the movement did not exist on television.

The absence of black sitcoms during the “Nonrecognition Era” was partially what made Mamie Till Bradley’s appearance on television so compelling. Until her son’s death, Mamie Till did not participate in the civil rights movement thus the media portrayed her as a mother, unlike other black women who appeared on the news as activists such as Rosa Parks, Myrlie Evers and Fannie Lou Hamer. Images of the well

47 Coleman and McIlwain, 127 29

spoken and dressed Mamie Till as a mother, paired with images of her and Emmett Till as a family, paralleled with television sitcoms of 1955 more so than footage of civil rights workers on the news. The emphasis on black middle class motherhood is what separated

Mamie Till from other black families who suffered from the murders of loved ones at the hands of white southern racists.

Historian Joanne Meyerowitz argues that the complexities of postwar public discourse on women typically addresses the “domestic stereotype and its meanings, how and where it was produced, and the manifold ways that women appropriated, transformed, and challenged it.”48 By 1955, images of domesticity and motherhood

transitioned on television from shows on the “positional” family and their ethnic

struggles to the “personal” family centered on appropriate gender roles in marriage.

Ethnic “positional” television programs such Beulah, Amos ‘n’ Andy and The

Honeymooner’s typically focused on economic hardships whereas “personal” family

stories displayed a familial symmetry where dad helped the children with homework or

learn sports and mom attended to the children’s emotional needs, cooked and clean. I

Love Lucy marked the turning point from “positional” to “personal” situation comedies.

The shows premise centered on Lucy’s antics and her hot-headed Cuban husband Ricky

Ricardo, however during the second season Lucy and Ricky moved from their New York

City apartment to suburban Connecticut along with adding “little” Ricky to the family, softening their rough ethnic edges.49 In addition to advertisements and film, television

48 Joanne Meyerowitz “Women and Gender in Postwar American, 1945-1960,” in Not June Cleaver, eds. Joanne Meyerowitz (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 2 49 Judy Kutulas. “Who Rules the Roost?: Sitcom Family Dynamics from the Cleavers to the Osbournes,” in The Sitcom Reader: America Viewed and Skewed, eds. Mary M. Dalton and Laura R. Linder (Albany: New York State University Press, 2005), 51 30

presented an image of middle class-ness by presenting family scenarios through the lens

of 1950s consumer culture. The economic struggles of ethnic households did not provide

an appropriate setting to promote commodities that networks and their commercial

sponsors wanted to sell. Since consumer products advertised to white middle class

families, networks encouraged shows that depicted a homogenized society rather than

working class communities.50 The television itself reinforces middle-class status by

becoming an artistic medium between the advertiser and the viewer, whereas the ability

to own a television and watch commercials also signified middle-class status.

In addition to consumer culture and suburban development, family sitcoms

distributed knowledge and promoted an image of a social economy with women as homemakers, naturalizing women’s place in the home and masking the social and economic requirements to enter the privileged domain. The household represented a family’s relation to society, with the housewife as just another symbol of the suburban aesthetic, as she updated herself and the house according to contemporary fashions. The middle-class aesthetic is produced on television through deep-focus photography which displays characters within their gender specific spaces. Mothers and daughters are more likely filmed in kitchens, while men and boys are seen often in dens or workrooms with the camera displaying surrounding furniture.51

Father Knows Best, one of the first most successful family sitcoms lasting six seasons, debuted on television in 1954 after four successful years on radio. Father

50 George Lipsitz “The Meaning of Memory: Family, Class, and Ethnicity in Early Network Television Programs,” in Private Screenings: Television and the Female Consumer ed. Lynn Spigel and Denise Mann (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 71-72 51 Mary Beth Haralovich “Sit-coms and Suburbs: Positioning in the 1950s Homemaker,” in Private Screenings: Television and the Female Consumer ed. Lynn Spigel and Denise Mann (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 115-128 31

Knows Best became a popular show for “realigning family gender roles” that previous

television shows such as The Honeymooners and I Love Lucy blurred with their central

comic figures (Jackie Gleason and Lucille Ball) trying to pull off shenanigans by lying to

their spouses and getting into yelling matches. Magazines often praised Father Knows

Best for providing a new “message” with scenarios viewers “could even learn something

from.” The producer, Eugene Rodney, acknowledged in an interview with Cosmopolitan

that the program’s middle class audience wanted to watch “family relations, allowances, boy and girl problems.” Similar programs such as The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet and Leave it to Beaver portrayed suburban families successfully and harmoniously raising children in the image of their parents. These situation comedies reinforced gender roles through images of women and girls as social status achievers, sex objects, and domestic managers while men and boys were taught to be breadwinners, leaders, and handy men.52

On and off the screen, female gender roles during the 1950s confined women to

domestic spaces by limiting roles where women could develop a sense of agency or

power outside of the home. Feminist philosopher Sandra Lee Bartky argues that women

may interpret their gendered duties, such as maintaining a beautiful appearance, as

empowering in order to establish personal efficacy. According to Bartky, women are

constantly devalued leaving their appearance as one of the few ways to achieve a sense of

control. A woman’s husband, children and household are symbols of a housewife’s

abilities and accomplishments within the home. By presenting herself as “well-groomed

and well-dressed, looking young and attractive, she conveys the sense that she does her

52 Ibid, 113-115 32

work thoroughly, with style and ease.” Advertising and commercials however, challenge

a woman’s ability to maintain her appearance with products that allow the woman to master the image of herself and home. Viewers are reminded that the appearances of

children and the home reflect the extent of mothering abilities.53

53 Kristen Hatch. “Selling Soap: Post-War Television Soap Opera and the American Housewife,” in Small Screens, Big Ideas: Television in the 1950s ed. Janet Thumin (New York: I.B. Tauris and Co. Ltd., 2002), 47-48 33 CHAPTER V

INTERUPTING I LOVE LUCY FOR THIS? The Televised Emmett Till Trial

All three television networks in addition to a variety of newspapers and magazines covered the discovery of Emmett Till’s body followed by the trial and acquittal of Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam, providing live and photographic images to the public during most of September, 1955. When television networks sent camera crews to

Mississippi to document the Emmett Till trial, they introduced Mamie Till Bradley to its viewers. Bradley did not embody black stereotypes of being poor, hysterical, or uneducated. Prior to the start of the trial one morning, a camera man filmed her testimony in front of the court house. Fashionably dressed with what appeared to be a matching set of diamond earrings and necklace, she wore makeup and had her hair neatly styled with a hat to match her black and white dress. Bradley’s appearance superseded that of Carolyn Bryant who appeared plain with a simple hair style and a solid color dress with no visible jewelry. Just as Bradley’s impeccable speech and composure matched her stylish self-presentation, so was Bryant’s graceless demeanor reflected in her lack of adornment and unfashionable dress. Bradley’s appearance as a black woman compared to white Bryant’s did not fit into the standards of the racial divide set by Jim Crow, nor

34 did it accord with nationally held ideas about race and class that typically linked white

with middle class-ness and black with lower or even underclass status.54

Bradley, taking an active role following the events of her son’s murder, asserted her own subjectivity as a black woman and mother. Bradley’s appearance and decorum on television challenged black women’s exclusion from celebrations of white womanhood. The success of Till’s nationwide exposure is attributed to Bradley’s ability to prove herself as a “good” mother. The extent to which Bradley properly mothered

Emmett corroborates his innocence and his “Americanism” making Emmett’s appearance as a victim dependant on the quality of his mother.55 Although Bradley obtained traits of

respectable motherhood, other aspects of her life worked against her such as her divorce

from Emmett’s father, whom the army later hanged during World War II for allegedly

raping and murdering a woman in Italy.56 Raising Emmett as a single mother and

working full time to support her family also threatened Bradley’s status as a respectable

woman.57 In addition to Mamie Till’s employment, Emmett Till’s age posed a potential threat to Mamie’s presentation of them both as respectable innocents. Aged fourteen and on the cusp of adulthood, Emmett could have been represented either as a sexually active male dangerously lacking in a grown man’s ability to control his sexual urges or as a young boy, unlikely to harbor either the audacity or the desires of an adult male.

Through a repetitive assertion of early photos of her son as a friendly, uncomplicated, innocent, Mamie Till pushed the national audience to see him only as the latter.

54 Beauchamp, The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till 55 Ruth Feldstein, 92-94 56 Till-Mobley, 202 57 Ibid, 90-92 35

While the mores of the Jim Crow south put all white women above blacks, regardless of their relative class status, those same mores also pressured white women to assume middle-class demeanors in order to justify their inclusion within the protective zone segregation sought to enclose white women for their own protection. Bryant’s rural lack of sophistication and weak approximation of a middle-class woman, set next to

Mamie Till’s vigorous embodiment of middle class-ness and urbanity, created an opening for a critique of not just the murder of Emmett but also the house of cards that represented race-class-gender ideological social structures in the South at this time.

Thus, much effort went into transforming Carolyn Bryant into the middle-class ideal that

Southern gender-class-race ideology demanded.

Four days prior to any media source revealing Carolyn Bryant’s image, newspapers already began describing her as white, married, “demure” and “comely.”

Before dropping out of high school, Carolyn won two beauty contests as a teenager before marrying Roy Bryant; this was widely reported both to emphasize her ability to attract sexual attention and to heighten the sexual tension of her story on Emmett Till’s behavior at her husband’s grocery store.58 Emphasis on Carolyn’s beauty in addition to

Roy Bryant’s and J.W. Milam’s service during World War II depicted a perfect picture of white femininity and masculine patriotism alluding to the Bryant’s and Milam’s having more of a middle-class status than what they actually had.

The first picture of Carolyn Bryant appeared on September 6, 1955 in

Mississippi’s the Clarian-Ledger after four days of many newspapers prepping their

58 Houck and Grindy, 26-29 36

readers on her beauty.59 The photograph printed appears to be a professional photograph of Bryant from the shoulders up only showing the upper half of her short sleeved v-neck shirt. The solid color of her shirt is plain and lower v-neck collar line suggests that the photograph may be of a younger Bryant considering that photographs taken of her with her children show her more modestly dressed. Her strong brow is emphasized by her stern emotionless facial expression while connecting her gaze with the camera.

Photographs taken during the trial, in addition to film footage, resemble the gaze from the picture described above as she often looks directly into the camera appearing emotionless and cold. Many of the pictures taken during the trial reveal the Bryant’s two sons sitting on Roy’s lap with Carolyn sitting directly next to them. In the few images that show her with the children, she appears detached and disconnected from her sons as they lean against her body on the courtroom bench while her arms remain limp at her side.

Carolyn’s physical appearance matches her emotional demeanor as cold and her looks as plain despite newspapers’ reports of her as a “beauty.” Throughout the two week trial Carolyn appears to wear a similar dress daily, if it is not the same dress. The shirtwaist dress is made of a single material that is one solid dark color. It has a peter pan collar and a row of buttons that goes down the center, however the seam that connects the skirt to the top of the garment sits awkwardly at her hips rather than her waist, indicating that she did not purchase the dress from a department store but instead may have improperly sewn it herself. On the final day of the trial after the jury acquitted Milam and Bryant, a photograph taken of both men’s wives embracing their husbands shows that

Juanita Milam, J. W.’s wife, is wearing the exact same dress in the same color and fabric

59 Ibid, 40 37

as Carolyn. Considering that Roy Bryant owned one of the only stores in the vicinity, it

is likely that Carolyn and her sister-in-law bought the dresses from a mail-order catalogue

such as Sears or Montgomery Ward, unlike Bradley’s various dresses which appear more

high-end as if purchased from a department store that did tailoring to make sure each

dress fit each female customer properly. Bryant and Milam’s appearances contradicted

1950s beauty standards emphasized in popular culture media which signaled their lower class status and rural nature. When exiting the courthouse, Roy Bryant staged a passionate kiss between himself and his wife for the benefit of the cameras, at the end of which Carolyn declared “Well this is one way to make up for lost time.”60 Instead of lightening the moment and rendering the accusation of murder ludicrously inconsequential, the Bryants appeared to audiences as lacking in a sense of etiquette or taste, as well as unmindful of the gravity of the charge. Carolyn Bryant’s undignified reference to her sexual relationship with her husband undermined her own implicit claim to sexual innocence and suggested she lacked the refinement and decorousness of a true middle-class woman.

Juxtaposed to Carolyn Bryant and in spite of the burdensome grief she was experiencing, Mamie Till Bradley appeared supremely poised when talking about her recently deceased son and confident when referring to the details of the trial. Mississippi newspapers reluctantly admitted to her ability to remain “composed” and to her use of

“good English.” The Jackson Daily News stated that Bradley appeared “more intelligent than her many self-appointed spokesman.”61 Whether viewed on television or in a

60 Ibid, 106 61 Ibid, 95 38

newspaper photograph, at a glance Bradley’s middle class status is evident due to her

physical appearance, only bolstering her image as a “good” woman and mother.

Unlike Bryant, Bradley continuously wore different dresses with each one

elaborately crafted with multiple colors and patterns in addition to her accessories to

match each outfit. When Bradley first arrived in Mississippi from Chicago to view her

son’s remains, she was photographed falling to her knees when approaching the coffin in a one piece floral dress with a jeweled necklace, perfectly placed hair and full make-up.

Despite the many images of Bradley sobbing, her hair and make-up always remain

perfectly intact showing the world via television that even during the saddest moment of

her life, she is still capable of maintaining a lady-like appearance. During the funeral

Bradley’s black dress was embellished with white lining and an embroidered pattern

peaking out of the corner of her three-quarter length sleeve directly below her elbow.

This image allows the viewer to see her matching earrings and necklace in addition to a

gold watch and broach. Bradley tightly grips her handkerchief and black clutch as she

leans towards the casket while crying, presenting the viewer with a clear image of

Bradley’s grief juxtaposed to the happy photographs she pinned inside the casket of her

and her son before his death. The images of Bradley facing the camera while crying and

unable to stand give her the agency that was not given to Rosebud Lee whose only

picture of her shadowed profile hides her emotions leaving viewers unable to connect

with her the way pictures of Bradley allow.

The televisuality of Emmett Till’s murder created a sense of immediacy that

showed viewers images of Carolyn Bryant kissing her husband just as soon as an image

of Mamie Till crying at her son’s casket appeared on international televisions. Compared

39

to the depictions of womanhood typically portrayed in 1950s popular culture, Bradley’s appearance and decorum resembles that of television housewives more so than Bryant’s.

Bradley’s exposure via television helped to establish her credibility as a mother by infringing on the existing caste system of white femininity and appearing in public as a subject outside of the sexualized or mammy role typically allotted to black women.62

Breaking the racial boundaries of motherhood, Bradley’s appearance on television became just as much of a performance for white entertainment as a form of activism against Jim Crow America, regardless of whether she intended to do so. Increasing news coverage of the civil rights movement dared television networks not to return to televising previous minstrel characters or themes in situation comedies or dramas. Rather than risk ridicule from the NAACP and other civil rights organizations for misrepresenting blackness, networks chose to leave black actors out of fictional television for over a decade and therefore created a series of programs completely devoid of the racial friction portrayed in news broadcasts.

62 Ibid, 95 40 CHAPTER VI

CROSSING ALL Ts AND DOTTING LOWER CASE Js

Iconic shows such as Father Knows Best, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, I

Love Lucy and Leave it to Beaver all had similar, if not nearly identical, televisual

aesthetics, which makes identifying common themes typically left out of this genre of

sitcoms easy to identify. According to media theorist John Thorton Caldwell, television’s

aesthetic is a reflection of existing cultural fears of race, class and sexuality which he

dubs “TV’s unwanted houseguests.” Caldwell argues that prior to the 1960s the

“segregated cinematic world” placed black characters in “the back” and white families

“up front.” Even shows such as Beulah placed its leading black character, Beulah, as the

“backstage” domestic who worked for the “frontstage” white family that the program emphasized. When julia debuted in 1968 starring African American Diahann Carroll,

Julia could only take the “frontstage” role once she assimilated a white kind of sexuality and glamour allowing her to enter the white middle class world. 63 Julia’s assimilation

into white middle class-ness did not always result in the acceptance of the show by white

and black audiences. julia debuted on television the same year of Black Panther Huey P.

Newton’s jail sentence and Martin Luther King’s assassination. julia’s premise overtly

clashed with the largely broadcast period of black empowerment causing many black and

63 John Thornton Caldwell. Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television, (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 68 41 white viewers, for different reasons, to argue that Julia’s blackness, beauty and middle

class lifestyle did not accurately portray “real” African Americans.

By the mid-1960s, television networks could no longer avoid international and

domestic pressures to address the “value” of the civil rights movement to the United

States’ position in the Cold War. In 1965, NBC introduced the first interracial drama, I

Spy, with a team of U.S. intelligence agents starring Bill Cosby as Alexander Scott and

Robert Culp as Kelly Robinson. According to film and media historian Mary Beth

Haralovich, “I Spy’s agents use advances in civil rights as a weapon of the Cold War,

asserting progress in U.S. race relations and defending against charges that the United

States is a racist economy.”64 Race discrimination had long affected U.S. foreign policy

during the Cold War, especially during the 1950s when issues such as voting rights

abuses, lynching, and segregation began making international headlines. International

media of civil rights and Vietnam protesters publicly criticized American diplomacy and questioned how democracy could appeal to Third World countries when the U.S. continually abused its black citizens. I Spy conforms to a U.S. response to the Cold War dilemma by reassuring audiences that black and white citizens partnered up to protect

U.S. interests abroad.65 Although characters Scott and Robinson represent an integrated

partnership and patriotism, their relationship is color-blind in that the program never

acknowledged Scott’s blackness, or the contemporary issues surrounding African

Americans and race. I Spy therefore became another program with a race-less narrative,

despite its interracial and “equal” duo.

64 Mary Beth Haralovich. “I Spy’s ‘Living Postcards’: The Geo-Politics of Civil Rights” in Television, History, and American Culture: Feminist Critical Essays, ed. Mary Beth Haralovich and Lauren Rabinovitz (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999), 98 65 Ibid, 101-102 42

Unable to completely avoid the race issue any further, color-blind racial

undertones became a common theme in what media historians refer to as the

“Assimilationist Era” (1968-1971). The “Assimilationist Era” returned blacks to fictional

television yet omitted portrayals of any type of cultural or ethnic difference by

conforming black characters to the white middle class norm. This era introduced shows

such as julia (1968-1971), The Bill Cosby Show (1969-1971) and I Spy, even though I

Spy aired from 1965-1968. Although some historians consider the “Assimlationist Era”

an improvement over the “Minstrelsy Era” of the 1950s, it nevertheless presented blacks

as accommodating and nonthreatening by sending the message that blacks could only be

prized if black culture was abandoned and replaced with values of whiteness.66

Although julia appears as one of the few programs that attempted to reintegrate

blacks into television, the premise for the show was also part of a larger trend of female-

centric shows titled after its leading female character. During the mid-1960s programs

such as Karen, Tammy, Angel, The Show and The Lucy Show all became short

lived television hits in addition to julia. Two obvious significant differences that

separated julia from the other sitcoms was that it featured a black family and it also was

the only show whose title did not have a capitalized name. When julia aired, NBC

wanted to appear as a network attempting to break the racial divide in television so it

purposely scheduled it opposite the popular Red Skeleton Show with the expectation for

julia to fail.67 Although julia unexpectedly lasted three years, NBC’s failed intentions

66 Coleman and McIlwain, 130 67 Aniko Bodroghkozy. “Is This What You Mean By Color TV?”: Race, Gender, and Contested Meanings in NBC’s Julia,” in Private Screenings: Television and the Female Consumer, ed. Lynn Spigel and Denise Mann (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 143 43

reflects the lack of agency shown in Julia as a character, program and as a black media

figure, which is also represented by the spelling of her name.

In addition to the trend of female-centric situation comedies and dramas, a new televisual aesthetic in the 1960s shifted from the two-parent nuclear family genre sitcoms to single-parent programs becoming the highest rated comedies and dramas for television networks. ABCs president of nighttime programming addressed the new trend by explaining that single-parent households (always the result of death and not divorce) allowed writers to create another element to television by giving the remaining parent the ability to “embark on romantic endeavors” or to “attend to their children.”68 This

television genre mostly aired shows with single-mother households, in which julia fit this

premise well with only one key difference: race. julia, created by NBC writer-producer

Hal Kanter, portrays Julia Baker, a black middle class widowed nurse raising her son,

Corey, on her own. After a plane crash in Vietnam killed Julia’s husband, she and Corey move to an integrated apartment complex in where she finds work in an aerospace clinic. Although Julia’s middle class apartment appears too “posh” for a nurse’s wage, the show’s set does not deviate from other programs’ unbalanced living quarters for other single-parent programs such as part-time bank secretary Lucy in The

Lucy Show. The “posh” décor omits any sense of Julia’s African American culture and identity, presenting Julia and Corey Baker as a black, but not too black, bourgeois family.

Although Julia is presented as a black woman fully assimilated into white culture, her

68 Demetria Rougeaux Shabazz. “Negotiated Boundaries: Production Practices and the Making of Representation in Julia,” in The Sitcom Reader: American Viewed and Skewed, ed. Mary M. Dalton and Laura R. Linder (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 152 44

glamour and class status remained a highly contested element of the show by black and

white viewers, even though it resembled other contemporary programs.69

Discontent with the representation of Julia as a middle-class black woman, mother

and beauty icon deviated from white and black ideologies concerning black motherhood.

Film and media theorist Aniko Bodroghkozy has analyzed letters written to NBC in

response to julia. She concludes that for many black viewers, julia seemed too

unrealistic and did not accurately portray the overall race struggle that the majority of

African Americans were peacefully, and not so peacefully, fighting to overcome. White viewers on the other hand typically agreed with this critique, however from their

perspective that Julia represented the “New Negro” who illegitimately threatened the

white racial hierarchy.70 It appears as if julia influenced its viewers to grapple with race identity by trying to establish what it meant to be black and what it meant to be white.

The widely popular Moynihan Report, published in 1965, on black matriarchal families, clashed with the image of the black single mother that julia presented and may have

contributed to further obfuscate how white Americans viewed black motherhood.

Daniel P. Moynihan, then Assistant Secretary of Labor for Policy Planning and

Research released The Negro Family: The Case for National Action in order to influence

the government’s poverty and race agenda due to his observation of “crumbling Negro”

families. Moynihan’s report was not intended as a scholarly contribution to poverty

knowledge; it simply “reflected what we saw as a consensus among social scientists

69 Shabazz, 153-154 70 Bodroghkozy, 154-155 45

writing in that generation or the previous one.”71 Moynihan refers to his correlation

between high black unemployment rates and broken marriages as “indicators of social

dysfunction” however, Moynihan blames the matriarchal family as the “fundamental

source of weakness of the Negro community.” Moynihan’s black matriarchal thesis

argued that African American women failed to fulfill traditional “womanly” duties by

working more than mothering, resulting in unsupervised black children failing at school.

Black matriarchs, according to Moynihan, obtained aggressive behavior which

emasculated their husbands by failing to be feminine, submissive and dependent.

Essentially, the black matriarch represented a failed mammy.72 The Moynihan Report reinforced the representational system of defining blackness independently from whiteness, whereas the colorblindness of julia denied race by alluding to black and white mothers as being alike, rather than different. Although programs on single-parent households became a successful trend for white television families, Julia as a single black mother had an entirely different meaning as it connected to a larger racial discourse that the Moynihan Report helped establish.

The novelty of a black centered program challenged traditional and previous definitions of racial identity and difference. Although julia presented an alternative image to television sitcoms and dramas, her representation of black motherhood paralleled the televisual performance of Mamie Till Bradley thirteen years prior. This is not to say that Hal Kanter viewed Mamie Till Bradley as an inspiration to create Diahann

Carroll’s character, however the general public’s reactions to both women’s

71 Alice O’Connor. Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History, (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001), 203-204 72 Hill Collins, 83-84 46

representation of black middle class motherhood have too many parallels to go unnoticed.

Both women lost their husbands in war and raised their sons independently in a large metropolitan city while still maintaining a middle-class lifestyle. Television exposed

Bradley and Julia’s social status through imagery in which their apartments clad with modern décor reaffirmed both women’s assimilation into white middle class norms. For

Bradley, photographs of Emmett’s last Christmas displayed in the media and during his funeral established the Till’s social status. One photograph in particular of Emmett posing next to the television his mother gave him during his last Christmas displays his dress slacks with a pressed white shirt and striped tie. Neatly matched down to the accessories of his belt and socks, he appeared just as polished as the brand new television set he posed next to. Surrounded by large windows with pretty white curtains and a desk topped with a reading lamp, Emmett stands on a fashionable carpet revealing the beautiful home his family’s middle class provided him.

Similar to the media’s reaction to Mamie Till Bradley’s glamour and decorum juxtaposed to Carolyn Bryant’s southern simplicity, many white julia viewers objected to defining Julia’s beauty and class at the expense of her disheveled white neighbor Mrs.

Waggedorn. One mother in Philadelphia wrote to NBC claiming that she would never watch julia again because the show kept “portraying the white mother to be some kind of stupid idiot. The colored boy and mother are as sharp as tacks which is fine but why must the other family be portrayed as being dumb, dumb, dumb.” Another Pennsylvania mother complained that the show portrayed Mrs. Waggedorn as a “dumb bunny” and

Julia as a candidate for “Mother of the Year.” A third letter sums up the perceived threat

47

that many whites felt towards black middle class motherhood exemplified by Mamie Till

Bradley and later julia by stating:

If Diahann Carroll were to play the roll [sic] of the neighborly housewife, and vice versa [sic], the black people of this country would be screaming “Prejudice.” Why must Julia be pictured so glamorously dressed, living in such a luxurious apartment, dining off of the finest china while her white neighbor is made to appear sloppy, has rollers in her hair… If your show is to improve the image of the negro woman, great! But—please don’t accomplish this at the expense of the white housewife.73

These letters written to Hal Kanter and NBC reveal feelings of a form of reverse

discrimination displayed in the program. All three of the letters include the author’s

occupations as white housewives and mothers. The disapproval of Mrs. Waggedorn’s character juxtaposed to Julia indicates that these angry viewers saw a stereotypical representation of white housewives in Mrs. Waggerdorn that demeaned white women.74

Similar responses to Mamie Till Bradley’s appearance on television and later julia suggest that motherhood and housewifery were perceived as sacred roles specific to white womanhood that could not be properly upheld by black women, which is why julia did not “accurately” portray black and white families according to these viewers.

Just as viewers critiqued Julia’s class and femininity, the same occurred with the exposure of Mamie Till Bradley and the continuous reference to the Tills’ “northern brogue,” dress and lifestyle. For Bradley and Diahann Carroll as Julia, assimilating to white norms threatened the white hierarchical social status while also undermining black culture. Juxtaposing Bradley to julia does not reveal simply superficial coincidences.

73 Bodroghkozy, 152-153 74 Ibid, 153-154 48

The purpose of this comparison is to reveal the thirteen year gap between televisual representations of black middle-class motherhood and the similar reactions by shocked white viewers. The shock value associated with Bradley’s and Julia’s class status is associated with white perceptions of blacks as second class citizens rendering them incapable of becoming middle class. Although some viewers did not agree that “real” black women could uphold a middle-class “posh” lifestyle as presented in julia, the unexpected three-season survival of the sitcom indicates that Diahann Carroll’s character was an image that could inoffensively merge into mainstream popular culture with relative ease.

49 CHAPTER VII

CONCLUSION: “Okay, she can be the mother…” julia, November 26, 1968

Black viewers heavily critiqued julia for not adequately portraying black culture and over simplifying the extent of contemporary race issues. One episode in particular titled “Paint your Waggedorn” presents watered down versions of a variety of race issues that black activists had challenged for decades. Guest star Susan Olsen, known primarily

for her role as Cindy Brady on The Brady Bunch, played Pamela Bennett, a young girl

visiting her grandparents who also live in the same apartment building as Julia and

Corey. Excited over having a new playmate in the building, Corey and his white friend

Earl Waggedorn invited Pamela to play football. Mrs. Bennett, not fond of Pamela playing such a “rough sport,” suggests the kids do something else in which Corey and

Earl agree to play “house.” Corey enthuses, “Okay, she can be the mother and I’ll be the daddy.” Mrs. Bennett’s eyes widened at this statement as she explains that Corey cannot be the daddy, but Earl can. The following scene transitions to the three children jumping rope while Corey and Earl complain about how bored they are. “Hey- I got an idea!,”

Corey exclaims, “let’s make off like we’re Indians and we captured a white woman!”

The boys chase after Pamela as she runs away screaming and crying. Although the only concerns the children have are with playing together, these scenes reveal the thinly veiled fears that whites had harbored for over a century regarding black men “capturing” white

50 women, which is why Mrs. Bennett insists that Earl, not Corey, can play Pamela’s

“husband.”75

The next scene opens with Mr. and Mrs. Bennett looking at a wall in the lobby of their apartment building that has a picture drawn on it in crayon. Julia walks out of her apartment and overhears Mrs. Bennett complaining that the building is turning into a

“tenement” since “those people” moved in and it would not be long before it turned into a

“.” In a later scene, Corey admits to his mother that he thinks Mrs. Bennett does not like him. Julia explains that Mrs. Bennett thinks that she and Corey and people with darker skin in general are “different.” Corey responds, “Yeah, Mrs. Bennett says we move into nice clean places and make them dirty.” Julia explains that it is up to her and

Corey to teach Mrs. Bennett and other “prejudice people” how wrong they are because

“prejudice is what causes all the trouble in this world.” Corey gets up from the table to leave but stops and turns around to ask, “Mama, why do white people put oil on them and lay on the beach to try to get dark like us?” Julia laughs and responds, “maybe it’s because they know that .” The show ends with Julia saving Pamela from choking on a crayon, revealing her as the culprit of the lobby drawing. The

Bennett’s apologized to Julia for judging her and accusing Corey of vandalizing the apartment.76

All in one episode julia addressed issues of racism and ignorance regarding black beauty. Although the show may have “resolved” the issue and simplified the complexities of racism in the 1960s, the program did undermine traditional perceptions that black people in general, and black families in particular, were inferior to whites.

75 “Paint Your Waggedorn,” julia, produced and directed by Hal Kanter, NBC, November 26, 1968 76 Ibid 51

However, the show also simultaneously suggested that in order to overcome the black struggle; blacks must assimilate to white middle-class norms in order to destabilize black stereotypes and transcend racism. Aired seven months after King’s assassination, this episode may have been inspired by his legacy by visually showing its viewers that although King had died, his methods to overcome racism continued to live. This episode contradicts the efforts made by the burgeoning movement and instead reflects the middle-class decorum and civil disobedience that Martin Luther King encouraged—and Mamie Till Bradley embodied.

Many scholars consider Emmett Till’s murder the first great media event in the history of television. However, the televised success would not have been as prevalent without the driving force of his mother. Although magazines such as Jet, Ebony and

Negro Digest attempted to address the void of representations of black women as intelligent, beautiful, wives, and mothers in popular culture, these forms of print media typically circulated within black communities. The international reach of television and

Mamie Till Bradley’s manipulation of media exposure destabilized previous slave-era stereotypes of black women as either mammies or jezebels and black men as sex craved brutes. Her assertion into the public eye broke the hegemonic construct of femininity by forming a visual juxtaposition with white Carolyn Bryant who failed to measure up to media portrayals of white middle-class motherhood. Carolyn Bryant’s plain appearance and lower class lifestyle presented her southern family as anti-modern and essentially the opposite of the “all-American” consumer image television tried to sell to international audiences. By manipulating television media as a tool to destabilize lynching in the

South, Mamie Till Bradley also upended the racial connotations attached to women’s

52

class status. Bradley’s image altered sensibilities regarding what race and gender

constructs of middle class motherhood looked like and paved the way for future television programs featuring middle class African Americans, specifically julia thirteen years later. Bradley normalized the image of “real” black middle-class motherhood enough for NBC to find Diahann Carroll’s portrayal of Julia “realistic” or “non- threatening” to white audiences. Although some viewers expressed their discontent with julia’s “safe” main black character, the program aired for three seasons (despite NBC’s expectation for it to fail) indicating that viewers purposely tuned in to watch an attractive, dignified and devoted black mother as an ideal of American womanhood.

In an attempt to realign gender roles after World War II, popular culture shifted to

portray housewifery as glamorously labor-free and the middle class lifestyle as singularly

modern. Television not only reinforced this new middle class image with its

programming, but the television set became a symbol of American identity and

modernity. The increase of American households that owned televisions emerged with

the flourishing civil rights movement influencing the creation of a new sitcom genre

centered on white middle class families. The juxtaposition of late afternoon news

broadcasts of the burgeoning civil rights movement followed by evening shows

portraying a nation uniformly made up of white middle class homes, created a

dichotomous set of ideas about race, as separate as their night and day time slots. The

contrast between live news coverage and homogenous familial programs made television

a tool used to bolster the civil rights movement while simultaneously becoming a threat

to American identity and U.S. diplomacy during the Cold War.

53 REFERENCED WORKS

Primary Sources:

The Abilene Reporters-News, May 23, 1947

The Chicago Defender, May 21, 1955, May 28, 1955, and September 10, 1955

Harry Hanson, The World Almanac Book of Facts for 1955. New York: New York World Telegram Corporation, 1956

Jet magazine, February 10, 1955, March 3, 1955, May 26, 1955, July 14 1955, September 8, 1955

Look magazine, January 24, 1956 and January 1957

Negro Digest, December 1949, September 1950, April 1951, June 1951

“Paint Your Waggedorn,” julia, produced and directed by Hal Kanter, NBC, November 26, 1968

Papers of the NAACP: Part 15 Series B, Segregation and Discrimination, Complaints and Responses, 1940-1955

Pittsburgh Courier, December 24, 1955

Reporter, April 19, 1956

The Murder of Emmett Till, Produced by Stanley Nelson. 60 minutes. PBS Video, 2003. 1 DVD

The New York Times, April 04, 1949, April 17, 1949, September 04, 1955 and September 24, 1955

The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till, produced by Keith A. Beauchamp, 70 minutes, Till Freedom House Productions, LLC, 2005, 1 DVD

54 The Wisconsin Weekly Advocate, September 27, 1899

The Waco News-Tribune, September 01, 1955

Ida B. Wells-Barnett. On Lynchings. New York: Humanity Books, 2002.

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Caldwell, John Thornton. Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1995

Classen, Stephen D. Watching Jim Crow: The Struggles Over Mississippi TV, 1955-1969. Duke University Press, 2004

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Haralovich, Mary Beth. “Sit-coms and Suburbs: Positioning in the 1950s Homemaker,” in Private Screenings: Television and the Female Consumer ed. Lynn Spigel and Denise Mann et al Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992

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55

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Lipsitz, George. “The Meaning of Memory: Family, Class, and Ethnicity in Early Network Television Programs,” in Private Screenings: Television and the Female Consumer ed. Lynn Spigel and Denise Mann et al Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992

Marc, David. “Origins of the Genre: In Search of the Radio Sitcom,” in The Sitcom Reader: American Viewed and Skewed, eds. Mary M. Dalton and Laura R. Linder et al Albany: New York State University Press, 2005

Means Coleman, Robin R. and Charlton D. McIlwain. “The Hidden Truths in Black Sitcoms,” in The Sitcom Reader: American Viewed and Skewed, eds. Mary M. Dalton and Laura R. Linder et al Albany: New York State University Press, 2005

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Rougeaux Shabazz, Demetria. “Negotiated Boundaries: Production Practices and the Making of Representation in Julia,” in The Sitcom Reader: American Viewed and Skewed, ed. Mary M. Dalton and Laura R. Linder et al Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005

Till-Mobley, Mamie and Christopher Benson, Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America. The Random House Publishing Group, 2003

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56