Equal Time: Television and the Civil Rights Movement explores the
crucial role of network television in reconfiguring new attitudes in
race relations during the civil rights movement. Due to widespread
coverage, the civil rights revolution quickly became the United States'
first televised major domestic news story. This important medium
unmistakably influenced the ongoing movement for African American
empowerment, desegregation, and equality. Aniko Bodroghkozy brings to
the foreground network news treatment of now-famous civil rights events
including the 1965 Selma voting rights campaign, integration riots at
the University of Mississippi, and the March on Washington, including
Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech. She also examines the most
high-profile and controversial television series of the era to feature
African American actors--East Side/West Side, Julia, and Good Times--to
reveal how entertainment programmers sought to represent a rapidly
shifting consensus on what "blackness" and "whiteness" meant and how
they now fit together.