Recovering the past: Race, nation, and civil rights drama in the nineties

The mass media, and television in particular, have been the main source of information about the civil rights movement, yet there have been few examinations of coverage of the movement and even fewer of docudramas that recreate the movement. There have been more than forty fictional portrayals of the civil rights movement in television and film, most of them made in the 1990s. This study looks at the rise and content of civil rights drama in the nineties, and connects key texts and their popularity at the time to the era's racial and gender politics and important shifts in the business of television. Instead of looking at the difference between the representations and the "real" movement, this dissertation approaches "history" as a site of ideological struggle in the production and reception of these texts.; Chapter one examines how the rise of civil rights drama in the 1990s was a part of debates about post-movement racial "progress," brought on by a series of high-profile racially-charged events such as the Rodney King beating and the O. J. Simpson murder trial. Chapter two shows how changes in the television industry made civil rights drama a more viable genre. While civil rights drama was hard to sell to a mass audience, it was used repeatedly to appeal to upscale viewers as television, and cable in particular, began to focus on niche audiences. Chapter three looks at debates over historical authenticity in the genre and explains that in the nineties, "accuracy" in civil rights drama came to mean not only adhering to the historical record, but placing black characters at the center of the story. The last chapter focuses on civil rights melodramas, women-centered texts that became prominent in the nineties. Narratives of racial reconciliation that focused on women were often seen as 'believable' because they tapped into popular constructions of women as more fair and understanding than men. Television has been central to the nation's understanding of the civil rights movement. Therefore, is important to look more closely at the relationship between representations of the movement, racial politics and national identity.