By Alex Armand, Paul Atwell, Joseph Gomes, Giuseppe Musillo, Yannik Schenk

This paper investigates the role of mass media in shaping racial tolerance and advancing civil rights in the post-WWII United States. We study the first attempt in the history of mass media to use a radio broadcast targeted at children to promote an inclusive American society. In 1946, amid persistent racial divisions, the popular radio series The Adventures of Superman launched Operation Intolerance, a sequence of new episodes promoting equality, rejecting racial discrimination, and exposing the KKK's bigotry. Using digitized historical data on U.S. radio stations and state-of-the-art radio propagation models, we compute geographic exposure to the broadcasts. Exploiting exogenous exposure to the broadcasts, we employ a cohort study design to analyze individual-level data from 1964 to 1980–a crucial period for civil rights activism and legislation in the United States. We find lasting impacts on those exposed as children, including increased support for civil rights, improved interracial relations, and more progressive political attitudes. These effects translate into greater alignment with the Civil Rights Movement, evidenced by increased support for protests and diminished institutional trust, and further manifested by reduced participation in the Vietnam War. Additionally, county-level panel data illustrate how areas covered by the broadcast in 1946 evolve towards less segregationist attitudes, a lower presence of the KKK, and an increase in civil rights activism and prominence in discourse.

Bonn: Institute of Labor Economics, 2024.

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By GAIL WILLIAMS O'BRIEN

On February 25, 1946, African Americans in Columbia, Tennessee, averted the lynching of James Stephenson, a nineteen-year-old, black Navy veteran accused of attacking a white radio repairman at a local department store. That night, after Stephenson was safely out of town, four of Columbia's police officers were shot and wounded when they tried to enter the town's black business district. The next morning, the Tennessee Highway Patrol invaded the district, wrecking establishments and beating men as they arrested them. By day's end, more than one hundred African Americans had been jailed. Two days later, highway patrolmen killed two of the arrestees while they were awaiting release from jail.

Drawing on oral interviews and a rich array of written sources, Gail Williams O'Brien tells the dramatic story of the Columbia "race riot," the national attention it drew, and its surprising legal aftermath. In the process, she illuminates the effects of World War II on race relations and the criminal justice system in the United States. O'Brien argues that the Columbia events are emblematic of a nationwide shift during the 1940s from mob violence against African Americans to increased confrontations between blacks and the police and courts. As such, they reveal the history behind such contemporary conflicts as the Rodney King and O. J. Simpson cases.

University of North Carolina Press, 1999, 334 pages