WLBT-TV

WLBT-TV. . In 1964 a group of Jackson citizens and the United Church of Christ challenged Lamar Life Insurance Company's application for renewal of their WLBT license, charging racial discrimination. In 1971 the Federal Communications Commission granted a request for Communications Improvement, Inc., a biracial community board, to operate the station on an interim basis. Under CII, William Dilday became the first African- American TV station manager in the South. In 1979 the station was purchased by TV-3, a merger of four groups, chaired by Aaron Henry, Mississippi NAACP president., WLBT-TV was founded in 1953 by the Lamar Life Insurance Company. WLBT, whose call letters stand for Lamar Broadcasting Television, supported racial segregation in Mississippi in the 1950s and 1960s. Lamar Life had close ties to the state's white political and business elite and with segregationist groups such as the White Citizens' Council. The Council even operated a bookstore in the lobby of its studios in downtown Jackson. , The station posted no news of the Civil Rights Movement, cutting out coverage from the NBC News feed and pre-empting NBC programs that referenced racial justice or featured African-American actors. In 1955, when civil rights lawyer Thurgood Marshall, later appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court-appeared on the Today show, WLBT interrupted the interview and blamed it on technical difficulties. Fred Beard, who was the WLBT station manager at the time, later declared he had pulled the interview, saying that television networks had become instruments of “Negro propaganda.” , NBC, civil rights groups, and the Reverend Everett Parker of the United Church of Christ (UCC) sent numerous petitions to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to complain of WLBT's racist stance. The FCC issued several unheeded warnings to Lamar Life. In 1964, the Rev. Parker and the UCC's Office of Communication formally petitioned the FCC to revoke WLBT's license. When the FCC issued a ruling that the petitioners had no standing because they had no economic interest in the station or were not subject to electronic interference from WLBT's signal, the UCC appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. In 1966, the court, in an opinion by Warren Burger, who later became chief justice of the United States, ruled that the public had the right to take part in FCC hearings in order to protect the public interest. At a new hearing held in 1967, the FCC again ruled in favor of Lamar. The UCC again appealed to the Appeals Court, which found Lamar's record to be beyond repair and ordered the FCC to revoke Lamar's license in 1969. Lamar appealed, but lost in 1971. , While hearings were being held for a permanent licensee, the FCC gave control of the station to a bi-racial, non-profit foundation called “Communications Improvement, Inc.” The station retained the WLBT call letters and claimed the original station's history as its own. It also retained the NBC affiliation. The group worked to make the station “a beacon of tolerance.” While most WLBT employees were retained, a new group of managers, including some of the first African American television executives in the South, recreated the station as a far more neutral news source.