WLBT and the License That Changed Broadcasting
Near Jackson, Mississippi
When Thurgood Marshall appeared on the NBC Today show in nineteen fifty-five, WLBT, the NBC affiliate in Jackson, interrupted the broadcast and told viewers it was experiencing technical difficulties. The broadcast was not having technical difficulties. WLBT simply did not want its white viewers to watch a Black civil rights attorney on television.
This was not an isolated incident. It was policy. WLBT routinely cut away from NBC programming that featured Black Americans or addressed civil rights. Its first general manager openly supported segregation. The station sold anti-integration literature in its lobby. It operated, as a matter of station practice, as a propaganda arm of the segregationist order.
In the nineteen sixties, Reverend Everett Parker of the United Church of Christ approached Jackson civil rights leaders, including Aaron Henry, president of the state NAACP, and A.D. Beittel, president of Tougaloo College. Together they built a legal challenge to WLBT's broadcast license, arguing before the Federal Communications Commission that the station had systematically excluded the voices and interests of half its potential audience.
The FCC initially refused to hear the challenge. A Washington appeals court ruled that the commission had to take it seriously. The case eventually produced a landmark legal ruling: the public has standing to challenge a broadcaster's license. Citizens are not merely an audience. They are stakeholders with legal rights in how the public airwaves are used.
The court of appeals ultimately ordered the FCC to revoke WLBT's license in nineteen sixty-nine. The revocation was upheld in nineteen seventy-one. It was the first time in American history that a television station lost its license for violating the commission's fairness rules. Every public-interest challenge to a broadcast license that has followed, every community that has taken a broadcaster to the FCC on grounds of failing its public obligations, traces its legal standing to what happened in Jackson, Mississippi, starting in the nineteen sixties.
