*Includes references to racial slurs*
Newton B “Sonny” Carter was the station’s official photographer. Actually, he was the station’s only photographer in 1965.
We reporters were allowed to shoot silent film, but when it came to sound, that was Sonny’s job. Only he could fire up the old 16mm Auricon which sat on a wooden tripod heavy enough to stand-in as three legs of the bridge on the River Kwai.
There were three lenses on the big camera, normal, wide angle and telephoto, which rotated into a slot ready to expose the news of the day in the sleepy southern state capital Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in glorious black and white, with an optical sound track.
It was a major operation to move the camera from place to place with its bulky, dark grey metallic body and double-circled, 1200 foot film magazine crown, looking like those famous mouse ears, or even the day-to-day 400 foot magazines for every day news. Mostly it rested on its sleepers at the state legislature, where politicians could be paraded in front of its lenses to blather their partisan comments.
We knew of better cameras, svelte models used in richer, urbane television markets – Auricons which had been chopped and customised, lipo-sucked of their excess metal, so they could be mounted on a shoulder harness, rendering them portable. It was a miracle that we dare not dream of, for our news operation was grounded in practical affordability. We had the one, ancient, anchored-on-stilts Auricon for sound; two silent, crank-wind Bell & Howells with three turret lenses, and two compact Revere single normal lens silent cameras that took a 50-foot magazine of black and white film, and fit nicely into suit coat pockets.
Such an arsenal of cameras was sufficient to cover the news of the day, yes, but left little room for creativity. Not that there was much creativity about in those days of newscasts, with two minute talking heads voice-overs, the silent film of store openings and traffic fatalities (wide shot, medium, close-up), and grainy black and white Associated Press wire photos pasted on cardboard mounts.
Still, it didn’t mean that creativity was dead, for, on one day in 1965, it struck Newton B “Sonny” and me like a bad virus and wouldn’t quit. We became evangelists for this idea. We lobbied news director/chief anchorman/mentor Carlton Cremeens like we were Madison Avenue types intent on securing a multi-million dollar contract.
It came to us while standing over paper demitasse cups of muddy Community coffee in the cubbyhole that passed as a canteen. What if, we postulated, what if we could get a good sound track off the old Auricon then, in post production, run it as an A roll on the film chain, bringing in a B roll of silent over the sound, making the story look as though several sound cameras had shot it. Post-production in the news business, at this point in time, in this size market, meant scraping and gluing the film as fast as you could to make sure it got on the air in time. Not that our brilliant idea hadn’t been done before on some higher plane of broadcasting, it was just that we hadn’t done it and it probably hadn’t even been thought of in Baton Rouge, so we wanted to do it.
♦
The story we picked to do it with was an impending civil rights march through downtown Baton Rouge. Civil rights stories were hot at the time, but only at the network level. In the sleepy old South of the Sixties, the civil rights movement was a threat to a way of life most white folks were comfortable with. “Rabble rousers”, “Communiss”, “Yankee carpetbaggers”; those were the people behind all this talk of equal rights for “nigrahs”.
Nig-rahs. That was the local pronunciation for the word Negro, just halfway between Negro and nigger. Just enough to feign the right pronunciation, but add the insult. It was used by all the locals, police, businessmen, clerks, waitresses, politicians, but it wasn’t used by local broadcasters, who gave it the full nee-grow.
This attitude of not giving way to a new social order meant that the most visible sign of the civil rights movement, the protest march, was met with resistance by locals. It was a resistance in which all civilised pronunciations went out the window and the old order slurs were hauled out.
But pronunciation was the least offensive weapon in the old order arsenal. There were rocks and garbage and water thrown at marchers and, in some towns, the local police and their dogs were used against the walking dissenters.
There wasn’t much coverage of such events from local TV stations, it was mostly recorded by networks. And that was our first hurdle – News Director and anchorman Carlton.
Carlton was an Irish-American, with enough of a drawl to identify him as native Southern, but enough of the emerging modern day journalist to pronounce Negro correctly. It was this dichotomy that stretched his conscience. He knew the lingering trouble for the television station if the protest march were to show up on the news. He knew the emerging civil rights movement was a news story which could not be ignored.
Thinking back, it was a difficult decision for Carlton, because the business of television news then was not so much ratings, but living among friends and neighbours. It was why we covered hamburger joint openings – to keep the advertisers sweet. It was why no journalist really criticised politicians, or publicly aired their dirty laundry, and there was plenty of it behind the scenes.
It was a nice arrangement, having no ripples on the surface of this society. The thing was, not everyone enjoyed the benefits of this kind of society. Certainly not black people, nor the ultra poor, nor strangers who asked questions about why this society worked this way when the discrimination was obvious.
And those who gave voice to strangers asking questions, like journalists, were on the exit list. Too much of a perceived swing to the Left and, not only would people not watch your news, they would shun you personally like last year’s sewage. There was the bonus too that you could wind up on the Klan’s hate list and perhaps have your front lawn singed by a flaming symbol of Christ, or worse, get caught out, punched up and turned inside out.
So Carlton weighed the facts to himself – social conscience or social cop-out.
Journalism got the best of him that day and Newton B and I were off to change the face of television news as we knew it before he could change his mind.
Of course we would need permission from police for our plan, and, with some scepticism, we got it. We were, after all, responsible members of society at this point in time. Long before the appointed hour, we arranged interviews with the march leaders, knowing the hubbub of the march would preclude us planting our cumbersome tripod for this essential element of the story. Then we proceeded to edge the big white Chevy Suburban news truck (painted with conspicuous blue paint letters identifying us to the world; privately known as the Blue Goose) up the street well in advance of the march.
The plan was this; Newton B would shorten the legs of the tripod so it could be set up in the back of the truck, thus giving us portable sound capability in the form of an eight cylinder dolly track. I would drive the truck slowly in front of the demonstration, while Newton B would shoot the loud sound of singing as the marchers linked arms and walked in solidarity through downtown. Then, Newton B would secure the ageing Auricon, hop out and shoot the supporting cutaways with the silent Bell & Howell while I pulled out of the way farther up the road.
All was going well. I was crawling along in front of the protestors at a speed which didn’t even register on the speedometer, safe enough for me to turn and see Newton B, eye to the viewfinder and rubber belt taking up the exposed film.
The populace was out, lining both sides of the street, hurling insults at the people taking their grievances public. There was the strain of “We shall overcome, some daaay...” from the marchers, and inwardly I felt a sense of accomplishment, a buzz at getting the elements right and having all the big city ammunition in our media arsenal to present a story in a different way.
That’s when the radio went off. The two way radio that connected us to base like some elastic umbilical cord:
“KSB 968 base to Unit One. Come in.”
There was an urgency in the tone, but I turned down the volume so as not to interfere with Newton B’s sound recording. Then the pager went off, the fail-safe umbilical device when we were out of the truck. I clicked it off until Newton B signalled that we had enough sound footage and he was ready to shoot silent. He hopped out with the Bell and Howell and I sped ahead to a corner, turned and jammed the shift lever into park. There, a phone box beckoned and the elastic of that umbilical began to tug at my conscience. I fetched a nickel, dialled the private newsroom number and, full of self-belief, identified myself, sure in the knowledge that my creative fame had spread throughout the country by now, even before the story was finished.
I’ll never forget Carlton’s rage:
“What the goddamn hell are y’all doing?”
“Shooting the civil rights march, like we said.”
“Well that’s not the story I get. The fucking switchboard is flooded with calls wanting to know what Channel Nine is doing leading the nigger [sic] parade.”
In all fairness, Carlton was just quoting the calls. He didn’t use that language.