SIX

“Miserable Women on Television”

IRENE MCCABE, TELEVISION NEWS, AND GRASSROOTS “ANTIBUSING” POLITICS

The slender mother of three alternatively goaded, rallied, calmed and steadied her followers through a long morning of active protest against pupil busing. Thousands of admirers—all of them white, most of them women, and all of them angry—followed Mrs. McCabe by protesting at the schools, chaining themselves to fences, blocking buses and defying arrest.

—“WIRY MRS. IRENE MCCCABE SPARKS ANTIBUSING GROUP,” Holland Evening Sentinel, September 8, 1971

Hopefully people will look along the way at six miserable women on television and write their congressman in favor of the [antibusing] amendment.

—IRENE MCCABE, quoted in “Mothers Begin Walk to Back Antibusing,” Cumberland News, March 16, 1972

AFTER WALKING 620 MILES, Irene McCabe and her fellow marching mothers arrived in Washington, DC, with sore feet and, thanks to television cameras from ABC, CBS, and NBC, a nation of people watching. The mothers’ march from Pontiac, Michigan, to Washington, DC, marked the end of eight months of intense protests against court-ordered “busing” for school desegregation initiated by McCabe and the “antibusing” National Action Group (NAG). The gendered connotations of the acronym were intentional, as suggested by a sign on the van that accompanied the group on their mothers’ march to Washington: “If at first you don’t succeed, NAG, NAG, NAG.”1 NAG’s protests started locally in Pontiac but quickly drew media attention from television news networks, propelling McCabe into the national spotlight and making her a symbol of resistance to civil rights. While McCabe did not have any formal media training, she proved skillful at making NAG’s protests into television-friendly events. “She got up on those platforms and you’d think she was born on the stump,” NAG’s lawyer, L. Brooks Patterson, noted after McCabe’s death in 2004.2

FIGURE 21. Irene McCabe speaking at National Action Group Rally in Hawthorne Park, Pontiac, Michigan. Associated Press, September 19, 1971.

Focusing on a series of widely televised NAG “antibusing” protests in the early 1970s, this chapter examines how McCabe cultivated a multifaceted television persona, combining political acumen and sexuality; how she articulated private and public identities of motherhood that both troubled and exemplified television’s boundaries between private and public spheres; and how her self-inflicted suffering during the mothers’ march lent the event a dramatic narrative quality that echoed other television genres. All of this unfolded against the backdrop of President Richard Nixon’s administration attacking television news broadcasters for their liberal bias, which made McCabe more appealing to news producers as a representative of white opposition to civil rights.

McCabe is part of a long history of women from across the political spectrum who have rooted political claims in their identities as mothers or housewives.3 African American women—like Ellen Jackson and Ruth Batson in Boston (discussed in chapter 3) and the Woodlawn Organization’s “truth squad” mothers in Chicago (discussed in chapter 2)—worked as parent-activists to combat school segregation and to secure a better education for their children. McCabe’s “antibusing” politics resonated with the “15,000 white mothers” who marched against “busing” in New York in 1964 (discussed in chapter 1). While motherhood figured prominently on both sides of the fight over school desegregation, McCabe and other white “antibusing” mothers benefited from political and cultural frameworks that privileged white families and mothers.⁴ White mothers who complained about the government taking away their children through “busing” profited from decades of federal, state, and local policies that had created and maintained segregated neighborhoods and schools. Aggrieved mothers became the public face of “antibusing” politics, but their concerns about their children depended on defending white schools and neighborhoods. While thousands of mothers across the nation raised their voices against “busing,” none received the same level of national television attention as McCabe.

More than simply enacting a white backlash to civil rights, McCabe learned from other protest movements, creating television-ready scenes that garnered attention and framed her cause in a favorable light. In particular, McCabe made use of several media strategies that African American civil rights activists had used just years earlier. If television news had played an important role in framing African American civil rights protests for a national audience in the 1950s and 1960s, by the 1970s news programs offered frequent and sympathetic coverage to “busing” opponents—what the Chicago Defender described as an “anti-democratic and anti-black movement.”⁵ As historian Nathan Irvin Huggins noted in 1978, “Media exposure [for minority movements] has cut both ways. The cameras recorded the White Backlash as eagerly as Black Power. . . . They broadcast the sentiments of the white Pontiac, Michigan, housewife protesting ‘forced busing’ as earnestly as they had the achievement of Mrs. Rosa Parks in the Montgomery bus boycott.”⁶ As Huggins suggests, McCabe successfully leveraged the characteristics of television news—its emphasis on newsworthy events and crisis, its selective use of historical context, its nominal political neutrality, and its emphasis on and production of drama and narrative—to make her case against “busing.”

NO ORDINARY HOUSEWIFE

Born and raised in Pontiac, McCabe claimed to have never traveled south of Detroit before she started to protest “busing” at the age of thirty-six.7 Like many other women who became grassroots activists, McCabe, a married mother of three, emphasized her lived experience as a mother and housewife as the reason she became involved in politics. McCabe regularly described her and her fellow marchers as “ordinary housewives and mothers,” and she explained to a Washington Post reporter, “I’m an amateur. When I address people at rallies, if they can relate to me it’s just because they know I’m the same type of person they are, that I am a housewife . . . just mainstream, grass-roots America.”⁸

Most housewives, of course, were not interviewed in major newspapers and did not regularly appear on the nightly television news, but it would be a mistake to see these claims of ordinariness as empty rhetoric. McCabe’s televisual appeal drew on her ability to visibly lead and capably speak for “antibusing” parents, while also being able to persuasively present herself as a representative member of this group. McCabe’s authority to appear on television and speak on “busing” depended on her ability to identify as both an “ordinary” housewife and the president of a grassroots political group.⁹ Like many in the crowd, television cameras looked to McCabe as a representative voice of white parents concerned about the federal government’s role in their private family lives, but at the same time television also tracked McCabe as a public political figure who led a six-week mothers’ march to Washington, DC, while her family was home in Pontiac.

These dual identities are clearly displayed in news coverage of the “antibusing” march McCabe led in Pontiac on September 6, 1971. Pontiac had been propelled into the news a week earlier when members of the Ku Klux Klan dynamited ten empty school buses that were parked in the bus depot.¹⁰ The bus bombings prompted federal district court judge Damon Keith, who issued the “busing” order, to warn, “This case will not be settled in the streets of Pontiac.”¹¹ With tensions high in Pontiac, McCabe led several hundred residents on a two-mile protest march from downtown Pontiac to Madison Junior High School in the northeast section of the city. CBS and ABC covered the march, which presented television news camera operators and viewers with easily identifiable images that differed sharply from the KKK’s vigilante violence: orderly marchers with women and children foregrounded, dozens of U.S. flags, and clearly worded placards expressing support for the “busing” boycott (e.g., “Bury the Bus, Keep Freedom Alive” and “Our Kids Like Neighborhood Schools”). After wide shots of the crowd walking toward the camera (CBS estimated six thousand marchers, ABC four thousand), both stations cut to footage of McCabe addressing the large crowd from an elevated platform at the junior high school. These visuals quickly established that this was a mass gathering and that McCabe was recognized as a leader on this issue. CBS offered viewers a medium close-up of McCabe encouraging defiance of the “busing” order. “How many are going to keep their children home?” McCabe asked to cheers from the crowd. “Home, home, not a bus, nowhere but home [crowd cheers]. Don’t weaken, don’t get discouraged, don’t let their threats frighten you, because they wouldn’t hold up in court. And so what if they do, we’ll go together [crowd cheers and man, off-camera, yells, ‘They can’t put us all in jail’]. If we don’t stand up now to this threat, we have no country left for our children. It’s not busing; it’s not integration; it’s communism, and we will not have it [crowd cheering].”12 McCabe’s final phrase, “We will not have it,” is nearly inaudible over her supporters’ cheering. These audible displays of support coupled with crowd reaction shots gave viewers their first glimpse of McCabe’s authority in local “antibusing” politics. ABC’s coverage of the march offered another angle on McCabe’s influence. After introducing her as “most prominent among the antibusing forces . . . Pontiac housewife, and leader of the National Action Group,” ABC’s caption listed her simply as “housewife.” This caption fit the clip ABC selected, which featured an earlier part of McCabe’s speech than the segment CBS aired. “When the buses roll from Le Baron Elementary,” McCabe declared, “my daughter will not be on that bus, she will not be in a parochial school, she will be home [crowd cheers].”¹³ As these clips suggest, McCabe’s authority stemmed from her ability to address the crowd as both a “housewife” and, as the CBS caption read, “National Action Group President.” Both of these roles would continue to be prominent parts of McCabe’s television persona in the weeks and months ahead.

ABC’s coverage of the Labor Day march is also notable because it showed the media attention that McCabe and the march generated. Whereas CBS’s camera offered a view of McCabe’s face as seen from the crowd, ABC’s cameraperson was positioned on the dais to McCabe’s right. The resulting medium shot placed McCabe in the center of the frame with members of the crowd and a large U.S. flag in front of her and a clutch of other media personnel around her on the platform. This vantage point reveals at least three microphones, a still photographer, and a video cameraman. While the relevance of McCabe and the “antibusing” march is implied by her inclusion in both the CBS and ABC broadcasts, the ABC clip also makes visible the substantial media interest in her.

FIGURE 22. Irene McCabe speaks to a crowd at an “antibusing” rally in Pontiac. This camera angle gives viewers a sense of the media’s focus on McCabe. ABC Evening News, September 6, 1971.

This framing is quite different from the ways television news covered women’s political activism in this era. McCabe stepped into the national spotlight in 1971, one year after the Women’s Strike for Equality and other protests garnered extensive news coverage of the second-wave feminist movement.14 The three broadcast networks portrayed these protests as absurd spectacles that were visually, but not politically, interesting to male viewers.¹⁵ While McCabe was conventionally feminine and not afraid to use her body to draw attention, both ABC and CBS framed her in conventional shots that presented her as a newsworthy political actor.

Nightly news broadcasts featured segments on Pontiac for four days following the Labor Day march, reporting on the school boycott led by the McCabe and the National Action Group. These reports further established Pontiac as the major national site of tension over “busing” and McCabe, featured prominently in each segment, as the most important leader of the “antibusing” campaign. An ABC segment on September 7, the first day of the NAG-organized school boycott, showed McCabe leading boycott supporters to the Pontiac Board of Education building where she rolled a toy school bus carrying two guinea pigs into the office of schools superintendent Dana Whitmer.16 Outside the building, McCabe taunted Mayor Robert Jackson, yelling, “Come on Mayor Jackson, you’re driving the bus. Come on, chicken.”¹⁷ Two days later, when McCabe asked protestors to stop gathering at the school bus depot and move elsewhere, all three news networks were on hand. Both CBS and NBC broadcast a heated exchange between McCabe and an unidentified marcher who was unhappy with McCabe’s change of tactics. “You’re the one who told us to come out here and walk,” the woman yelled at McCabe. “We’ve walked till our legs are falling off, and you’re telling us to give it up?” “Change your tactics now, stay one step ahead of them,” McCabe advised.¹⁸ The woman also questioned McCabe’s willingness to stand with the protesters, shouting, “Martin Luther King marched with his people. He marched with his people; he went to jail with them.”¹⁹

Citing King might seem like an odd way to criticize an “antibusing” leader, but McCabe drew freely on the language and protest tactics of the civil rights, black power, and antiwar movements. “Martin Luther King walked all over and he got a lot of things done,” McCabe announced at a NAG “antibusing” rally. “This is our civil rights movement.”²⁰ McCabe later told the Washington Post that she learned to make demands from “the black militants.” “They’ve won many things, they’ve won their demands. . . . We’ve been losers because we haven’t played the game by the rules that they’ve already set down. . . . I’m playing the game by their rules.”²¹ While McCabe did not elaborate on these rules, NAG’s protests under her leadership dovetailed neatly with the conventions of television news coverage. NAG’s protests generally occurred on weekdays during daytime hours so they could be filmed for later prime-time broadcast; they were well-organized public events; they were focused on a specific issue; and McCabe served as the group’s clear leader and spokeswoman. To keep the “antibusing” protests in the media spotlight for as long as possible, moreover, McCabe organized different types of protests to give reporters new events to cover that built on the existing NAG storyline. “Publicity, attention—every day,” she told the National Observer, “that’s what we’ve got to have.”²² When a NAG picket line shut down a General Motors auto body factory, for example, it did not prompt GM to lobby for “antibusing” legislation (NAG’s stated goal), but it did draw coverage from all three networks. CBS reported that NAG “tried something new today,” while NBC reported that the group had adopted a “new tactic.”²³ CBS even noted the end of the school boycott, with anchor Walter Cronkite reading a quote from McCabe.24 As a result of this repeated media exposure, McCabe received several speaking invitations that led her to “antibusing” meetings in Memphis, Dallas, and Columbus, Georgia.²⁵

This recurring news coverage was important for McCabe because it allowed NAG’s “antibusing” message to reach a large national audience at a time when the group could only claim a few thousand members in and around Pontiac and nearby Detroit. An NBC report on NAG’s push for a new school boycott across Michigan on October 25, 1971, is particularly telling in this regard. As reporter Steve Delaney’s introduction to the segment details, NAG’s call for a statewide boycott was unsuccessful: “This was supposed to be school boycott day all over Michigan, but the drive by white parents to keep students home was effective only in Pontiac.”²⁶ Still, the three-minute segment featured footage of McCabe and NAG supporters marching at the board of education building and relayed their call for more police in schools to prevent interracial violence. While McCabe and NAG lacked the statewide influence to move other Michigan parents to boycott, they found television news stations to be eager audiences for their protests.

In their pursuit of television visibility, McCabe and NAG benefited from the work of conservative politicians and media commentators who were beginning to hone their claims of liberal media bias. Vice President Spiro Agnew, for example, regularly criticized the media, singling out what he saw as the undue influence and liberal bias of television news. In a 1969 speech in Des Moines written by Pat Buchanan, Agnew argued that network newscasters “decide what 40 to 50 million Americans will learn of the day’s events in the nation and in the world. We cannot measure this power and influence by the traditional democratic standards, for these men can create national issues overnight. . . . For millions of Americans the network reporter who covers a continuing issue—like the ABM [antiballistic missile] or civil rights—becomes, in effect, the presiding judge in a national trial by jury.” Taking aim at civil rights, black power, and antiwar activists, Agnew also emphasized that television could shape protest tactics. “How many marches and demonstrations would we have,” Agnew asked, “if the marchers did not know that the ever-faithful TV cameras would be there to record their antics for the next news show?”²⁷ Agnew’s attack on television news prompted thousands of citizens to write similarly critical letters to the mailrooms at ABC, CBS, and NBC.²⁸ NBC News president Reuven Frank argued that “the Agnew speech shook every broadcasting professional,” while the CBS Washington news director and bureau manager described the speech as sending “shock waves through the mass media.”29 More broadly, several newsmen shared the sentiment that the news media had given too much attention to minority protests. “In TV news departments we appear to know a lot about the black minority,” NBC producer Shad Northshield commented. “It’s the silent majority we must explore. We haven’t done it. We didn’t know it was there!” CBS Morning News anchor Joseph Benti concurred: “We spend so much time on angry blacks, angry youth. But what about that vast forgotten army out there? How many hardworking law-abiding whites are mad as hell because their story isn’t being told?”³⁰ An NBC producer remarked simply, “The audience is becoming bored with Negro stories.”³¹ McCabe’s “antibusing” protests were thus welcomed by television networks eager to broadcast more about the white working-class and middle-class citizens President Nixon called the “silent majority.”

When Agnew complained that network news “can elevate men from obscurity to national prominence within a week,” he was referring to Black Power activist Stokely Carmichael, but television news could also propel conservative grassroots activists like Irene McCabe to national prominence.³² This television coverage prompted a critical editorial in the Christian Science Monitor, which argued that “giving national prime time and front-page headlines to a group of bellicose ladies has put the emphasis in the wrong place.” Describing the history of school segregation in Pontiac, the editorial noted that the “busing” order should have been “no sudden surprise” and argued that “for the press and public to try to peg a history of bigotry and tension . . . on bussing is an injustice to the majority who are trying to do their best at the moment to accommodate needed social change.”³³ This coverage of McCabe and NAG is emblematic of how television news presented “busing” disputes in different cities. While news stories occasionally included school board members, civil rights advocates, or parents who supported “busing,” these voices made up only a fraction of the coverage. With their talking points broadcast repeatedly, “antibusing” activists controlled the terms of the debate.

In addition to benefiting from television news’ preference for contemporary events, McCabe was candid about using her physical appearance and sexuality to draw more attention to herself and the “antibusing” cause. “I do these silly things to get attention. We women have to do our share of stirring up people power,” she told journalist Maryanne Conheim. “Antibusing crusading can’t all be so dour and long-faced.”³⁴ McCabe frequently appeared in a tight-fitting T-shirt with the slogan “Bus Judges, Not Children” or with a bumper sticker across the front of her sweater. This brand of display worked well on television, more so than in newspapers, because television cameras presented viewers not just with attractive images of McCabe but also with footage of her leading marchers and confronting male politicians and education officials. Television news coverage of McCabe, while obviously edited, did not editorialize about or visually linger over McCabe’s appearance. In contrast, newspaper reporters constantly searched for words to create a picture of McCabe for their readers. One journalist described McCabe as looking “like the pretty wife in television commercials,” while other reporters described her variously as a “green-eyed frosted blonde with a voluptuous figure,” an “uninhibited, shapely blonde who favors tight tee shirts, false eyelashes and heavy blue eye liner,” a “slender, peppery housewife,” and as performing with the “coolness of a veteran stripper.”35 Television viewers might have used these same terms to describe McCabe, but the terms were not inscribed into the television news segments in which she appears. Television news enabled McCabe, within the constraints of a male-dominated commercial medium, to speak for herself and present the physical image she desired. While scholars of this era of television news have shown how the assumed news spectator was constructed as male, television news must have also brought images of McCabe to female viewers across the country, many of whom shared her politics and others who did not.³⁶ Women played a significant role in leading “antibusing” protests across the country, and many of these women likely saw McCabe on television and drew inspiration from the skill she displayed as a grassroots activist on camera.³⁷ Rather than “men talking to men,” as Harvey Molotoch described the news business in 1978, McCabe offers the interesting case of a woman, framed by men, talking to other women.³⁸

FIGURE 23. Irene McCabe in a National Action Group t-shirt at an “antibusing” meeting in Memphis, Tennessee. Associated Press photo, September 23, 1971.

PONTIAC BEYOND THE TV FRAME

The story in Pontiac was ostensibly about school desegregation, but none of the television networks referred to Davis v. School District of City of Pontiac (1970), the court case that led to the “busing” order. In Davis, Judge Keith wrote:

This Court finds that the Pontiac Board of Education intentionally utilized the power at their disposal to locate new schools and arrange boundaries in such a way as to perpetuate the pattern of segregation within the City and thereby, deliberately, in contradiction of their announced policies of achieving a racial mixture in the schools, prevented integration. When the power to act is available, failure to take the necessary steps so as to negate or alleviate a situation which is harmful is as wrong as is the taking of affirmative steps to advance that situation. Sins of omission can be as serious as sins of commission. Where a Board of Education has contributed and played a major role in the development and growth of a segregated situation, the Board is guilty of de jure segregation. The fact that such came slowly and surreptitiously rather than by legislative pronouncement makes the situation no less evil.³⁹

Keith’s Davis ruling made Pontiac one of the first cities outside the South to be placed under court order to desegregate. The notion that the school desegregation controversy had moved north fueled much of the news coverage of Pontiac, but Judge Keith’s ruling made it clear that school segregation in Pontiac was not a new occurrence but had developed over several decades. Just as important, the Davis decision cast a critical light on so-called de facto segregation. Rather than seeing school segregation as a product of market forces and private decisions that government had no legal responsibility or authority to address, Judge Keith found that Pontiac school officials had taken specific actions regarding school siting, zoning, and student assignment that had contributed to the growth of a segregated school system and were unconstitutional. The Davis ruling was one of a number of successful cases brought by the NAACP and its Legal Defense Fund in the early 1970s regarding school desegregation outside the South, including cases in other Michigan cities—Benton Harbor, Kalamazoo, and Detroit—as well as Keyes v. School District No. 1 (1973), the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision that found evidence of unconstitutional segregation in Denver. The optimism prompted by these cases was severely constrained when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned federal district judge Stephen Roth’s decision in Milliken v. Bradley (1974), ruling that desegregation plans could not extend into suburban school districts unless multiple districts had deliberately engaged in segregated policies. The Nixon administration, moreover, encouraged the Justice Department to focus its resources on de jure segregation in the South rather than de facto segregation.

The Davis ruling confirmed the existence of school segregation in Pontiac, a fact that was obvious to anyone who cared to look. A 1968 report from the Michigan Civil Rights Commission described Pontiac as “clearly segregated, with non-whites confined to a slowly expanding ghetto in the southern part of the city,” which whites commonly referred to as “colored town.”40 “Although Pontiac adopted a ‘Fair Housing Ordinance’ last year,” the commission’s report continued,

conditions remain as they have been for the past two or three decades. . . . Pontiac is a city divided by racial and ethnic prejudices and fears. Negro and Spanish American citizens are excluded from full participation in employment, housing, education, and social services. They are often denied equal protection under the laws and equal access to jobs and law enforcement agencies. The physical isolation which has resulted between white and nonwhite citizens has led to a communications gap of staggering proportions. Civil and governmental leaders have little concern for, or understanding of minority group problems. Negroes and Spanish Americans grow more and more distrustful of a community they feel is trying to contain them.⁴¹

Pontiac NAACP chairman Elbert Hatchett, who attended public schools in the city, knew well the dynamics of Pontiac’s racial segregation and recalled that this knowledge had proved invaluable when he served as the plaintiff’s attorney in the Davis case. “We knew the Pontiac school system backwards and forwards, and we knew that it was a system that had race as one of the considerations in the manner in which they undertook to educate the populace in the city of Pontiac,” Hatchett recalled. “And we knew that the schools that were in the white affluent areas were given the benefit of much better facilities, much better equipment, much better everything than the counterparts in the predominantly black areas.”42 Like Hatchett, Pontiac teacher Jo Ann Walker understood the differences between the city’s majority black and white schools and elaborated on these disparities in her testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Equal Educational Opportunity, describing the difference in resources and educational environment in these schools as “like going from hell to heaven.” Whereas failing furnaces caused students in black schools to wear winter coats inside on cold days and teachers lacked pencils and chalk, at Le Baron, where the only black students were in special education classes, Walker noted that “there was a stockroom full of paper and pencils, everything you needed to do the job.” Le Baron Elementary, Walker told the Senate committee, “is the school where Mrs. McCabe’s daughter would go if she were not boycotting.”⁴³ In his testimony to the same committee, Hatchett fielded a question from Senator Walter Mondale of Minnesota, the committee chairman, who asked, “Was your case [Davis] really so hard to prove as the Government often claims northern cases to be?” “The [school] board came to the court and forthrightly admitted . . . that the school system was segregated,” Hatchett replied. “The only thing we were left with was to argue the cause. . . . So it was not quite as difficult as many of the northern cases.”⁴⁴ The history of school segregation in Pontiac that preceded the Davis case and court-ordered desegregation was crucial to making sense of NAG’s “antibusing” protests, but little of this context reached television viewers. Television news reporters were drawn to the Pontiac protests as a new northern angle on the school integration story, but did little to explain the series of events that had led to the “busing” conflicts.

More than simply providing balance to their “busing” coverage, had television news reporters spent more time talking to black residents in Pontiac, they would have found conflicted feelings regarding “busing” as a means of achieving education equality. Sadie Davis, whose son Donald Davis Jr. was the named plaintiff in the Davis case, told the Detroit Free Press that she “does not necessarily” support “busing,” but that “I support total integration of the schools, and, in Pontiac, busing is the only way you can integrate.”45 Sadie’s husband, Donald Davis Sr., made it clear that he was concerned about the limited curricular options and materials at the majority-black Franklin School. “I don’t blame white parents for not wanting their children to go to Franklin,” he said. “I didn’t want mine to go there either. Maybe now they’ll try to upgrade the education there.”⁴⁶ Charles Tucker Jr., a black businessman and member of the city commission, also noted the importance of equal resources: “All I want is that every person gets equal services from the community’s tax dollars. Blacks really aren’t all that interested in living in areas because they’re white areas. . . . It’s hard to accept the fact that we must have integration in order to provide the same kind of services for people living on the (predominantly black) south end as they have had on the (predominantly white) north end. But I guess at this time, we must.”⁴⁷ Television newscasts regularly sought out a black politician or parent as a representative voice to balance their focus on white “antibusing” protesters, but such voices received limited airtime and, more importantly, could not possibly represent the range of African American viewpoints regarding “busing.” Many black parents opposed “busing” in favor of more control of schools in black communities, while others offered cautious and qualified support for busing while raising concerns about the quality of schools, the distance of bus rides, and the safety of black children bused to white neighborhoods. Rather than adapting their coverage to present the multiple and often conflicting black opinions on “busing,” network newscasts structured their busing segments in ways that presented individual black politicians, activists, or parents as representative of black opinion.

The range of opinions on “busing” among white Pontiac residents was also more varied than television news coverage of McCabe and NAG would suggest. Shirley Frantz, president of the Alcott Parent-Teacher Association in northwest Pontiac, confessed that she “was afraid to go to the black end of town” but changed her opinion on “busing” after an exchange visit to the majority-black Bagley School, where her ten-year-old son was assigned. “All you ever heard was that Bagley was the worst school in Pontiac,” she said. “But the principal helped to change my mind. He made me feel right at home and I know he’ll take good care of [my son]. If more mothers had gone, they’d have felt better, too.”⁴⁸ Several letters to the editor in the Detroit Free Press criticized McCabe and the white protesters. One letter argued that while “Irene McCabe may feel she is spouting good old fashioned WASP Christian ethic,” she will one day need to answer charges of “inciting to riot through demagoguery” and “racism.”49 Michael Elli wrote, “I, and I suspect others like me, are becoming increasingly disgusted with the continuing antics of the white mobs in Pontiac. I sincerely wish that Irene McCabe would take her red-neck friends and go back to Alabama, where they belong, and make Michigan a better place to live in.”⁵⁰ While this writer either did not know or wanted to ignore the fact that McCabe was born and raised in Pontiac and found abundant support among longtime Michigan residents, letters like these suggest that Pontiac’s white residents were not as unified in their opposition to “busing” as television news coverage suggested.

Television news, of course, rarely offered this type of historical depth or detailed surveys of public opinion. William Grant, education editor for the Detroit Free Press, suggested that this was particularly true for school desegregation. “School desegregation is one of the issues which the media are least suited to cover,” Grant argued.

The media are best able to report on events which unfold within a short time span—a day, a week, a few weeks at most. Those things which develop over much longer periods of time are likely to be covered by many different reporters. It is difficult for newspaper stories, and even more difficult for broadcast reports, of a long-running event to capture the origins and history of the issue. . . . Desegregation involves understanding law, education, and social science. There are few lawyers, educators, or social scientists who have managed that broad understanding. It is not surprising that few journalists do either.⁵¹

If school desegregation was difficult for local reporters to cover, these challenges were even more acute for national television reporters, who arrived in cities like Pontiac with few local sources and little knowledge of the issues surrounding desegregation in that specific community. In the absence of the local knowledge or contacts required for informed background reports, television reporters and their camera operators were drawn to events and speakers that would make the issue easily legible to a national audience. McCabe and other activists understood that a highly vocal and visible “antibusing” minority could garner most of the media’s attention. Television news personnel did not need to share the politics of grassroots activists to be drawn to “antibusing” leaders and protests and to deem these people and events worthy of regular news coverage.

MOTHERS’ MARCH ON WASHINGTON

Among the important strategies McCabe learned from media-savvy civil rights groups was to organize protests as television-friendly events. Her most successful and widely reported event was a 620-mile “mothers’ march” from Pontiac to Washington, DC, to support a constitutional amendment prohibiting “busing.” The specific length of the march was selected to recall the “antibusing” amendment, House Joint Resolution 620, sponsored by New York congressman Norman Lent. McCabe and five other Pontiac mothers set off on the six-week trek on March 15, 1972, and both print and television reporters noted the event’s historical echoes. “How and why,” one article asked, “did the trim housewife emerge as a national figure emulating the tactics of the civil rights marchers of the ’60s?”52 At the Pontiac send-off for McCabe and the marching mothers, ABC’s Jim Kincaid noted, “Irene McCabe and her National Action Group have taken a page from other demonstrations in the past. It won’t be the first walk to Washington, but it may be one of the longest.”⁵³ In addition to the clear reference to the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the marchers also made a side trip to Massillon, Ohio, the starting point of Coxey’s Army, a group of unemployed workers who marched on Washington in 1894.⁵⁴ A 1967 Mothers’ March on Washington by welfare rights activists, which did not receive extensive media attention, may also have factored into McCabe’s planning.⁵⁵ As these historical precedents suggest, McCabe’s “mothers’ march” was designed to be easily recognized as a newsworthy event.

Television and newspaper coverage enabled McCabe and her fellow marchers to claim motherhood as both a private and public identity. Like other “antibusing” activists, McCabe framed her opposition in terms of her duty as a parent to protect the private spheres of home and family. “I object to the long arm of the federal government reaching into my home and controlling the children I gave birth to,” she told a reporter in West Virginia.⁵⁶ At another stop on the march, McCabe remarked, “I would have been an unfit mother if I didn’t try to do something about [my children being bused].”⁵⁷ To fulfill her responsibilities as a mother, McCabe argued, she needed to become a “marching mother.” McCabe required media coverage to assume this public identity of motherhood, and in turn the “mothers’ march” cast familiar conventions of women as homemakers and consumers of television in a different light. In their six-week march to Washington, McCabe and the other women traveled hundreds of miles from their children and husbands in Pontiac, and hundreds of miles from the domestic spaces that were central to television conventions for representing family life.58 McCabe and the Pontiac mothers temporarily left their homes, families, and televisions and emerged via television news broadcasts and newspaper accounts as “marching mothers.” These “mad mamas,” as one newspaper called them, leveraged their public identities as mothers to became television performers rather than domestic consumers of television.⁵⁹

Early in the march, McCabe told a newspaper reporter, “This is not my favorite thing—walking, but hopefully people will look along the way at six miserable women on television and write their congressman in favor of the [antibusing] amendment.”⁶⁰ As McCabe’s reference to “six miserable women” suggests, the physical pain endured by the marchers was a recurring theme in print coverage of the march. Two weeks into the walk, one marcher had her calves wrapped in bandages, and McCabe noted, “I’m wearing sun glasses to hide the tears.”⁶¹ After particularly hilly terrain in West Virginia, McCabe told a waiting reporter, “When you consider what we’ve been through, it’s amazing. You think your chest is going to pop open, your heart explodes and then there’s another vicious, vicious hill to climb.”⁶² A photo of McCabe icing her feet accompanied a story on the marching mothers’ arrival in Maryland.⁶³ Just a day before reaching Washington, McCabe stopped for medical treatment on her feet. “I simply could not bear the pain any longer,” she said. “It has been this way for almost two weeks. Every step, I don’t know for how many days, has just been agony.”⁶⁴ The marching mothers’ misery became as much a part of the story as their opposition to “busing,” and here again, coverage of the march built on and challenged television conventions. The mothers’ suffering gave the march a narrative emotional quality similar to television soap operas or medical dramas, and like these genres, news accounts encouraged viewers and readers to follow along with the narrative and suffer vicariously with the mothers. The marchers encouraged this view of them suffering on behalf of others. As a sign on the group’s support van declared, “Irene McCabe Is Walking to Washington DC, So Your Children Can Walk to School.” At the same time, the marchers’ visible suffering buttressed their authority as mothers in the public political sphere. A photo taken after the marchers reached the nation’s capital, for example, shows McCabe meeting with U.S. senators William Brock of Tennessee and Robert Griffin of Michigan, who had cosponsored an “antibusing” constitutional amendment.⁶⁵ McCabe is seated on a couch in Griffin’s office, with one shoe off and her leg elevated on an ottoman. Unlike the trope of women sitting on sofas watching soaps and suffering vicariously, McCabe and the marchers undertook physical challenges in support of legislation and, thanks to their public suffering, earned an audience with powerful politicians.

FIGURE 24. CBS anchor Walter Cronkite announces Irene McCabe’s arrival in Washington, DC. CBS Evening News, April 27, 1972.

The Associated Press and United Press International wire services distributed dozens of stories on the march, which appeared in newspapers across the country, and this print media coverage served as advance promotion for the culminating rally when the mothers reached Washington at the end of April 1972. The news reports inspired a group of eight mothers from Richmond, Virginia, to walk one hundred miles to join the Pontiac marchers. “Irene McCabe is a national heroine,” said one of the Richmond mothers. “It was a spur of the moment thing, but I figured if she could walk 620 miles from Pontiac, Mich., to Washington then I could do it from Virginia.”66

Television cameras from ABC, CBS, and NBC followed McCabe and the other mothers as they arrived in Washington. The coverage on each station picked up the themes that had circulated in print coverage over the prior six weeks, emphasizing that the marchers were attempting to bring national political attention to the “busing” issue, that they had endured physical pain during their long walk to Washington, and most importantly, that they undertook the march as mothers. The marchers’ first stop at the steps of the Capitol, where they met with then Michigan congressman Gerald Ford, Tennessee senator William Brock, Massachusetts congresswoman and “antibusing” leader Louise Day Hicks, and several other prominent politicians, reminded viewers of the political purpose of the mothers’ march. As the mothers walked the final blocks to the “antibusing” rally on the grounds of the Washington Monument, the television reports segued to focus on how the mothers, especially McCabe, had gamely suffered in support of their cause. Each station mentioned the mothers’ feet and their soreness after miles of walking. CBS cut to a medium shot of three of the mothers’ feet, while reporter Tony Sargent said, “Mrs. McCabe and the others all had foot and leg problems along the way, some requiring doctors’ care.”67 These scenes made the mothers’ suffering, described in dozens of newspapers stories filed during the march, visible to a national television audience.

FIGURE 25. The “marching mothers” received media attention throughout their six-week trek from Pontiac to Washington, DC. Associated Press, April 27, 1972.

FIGURE 26. CBS’s shot of the mothers’ feet (McCabe is at right) echoed the newspapers’ stories about the physical pain the mothers endured during the march. CBS Evening News, April 27, 1972.

Not coincidentally, McCabe’s speech at the rally picked up this theme, connecting the physical pain of the march and the pain of childbirth to the building of an “antibusing” coalition. McCabe limped visibly as she approached the podium, outfitted with several microphones. “I can’t believe we walked the whole way,” she told the crowd. “I personally have suffered a great deal of pain on this walk. It was far more physically grueling than I ever could have imagined. The only time I have ever been in such pain has been in labor. Whenever you’re in labor, you finally give birth to something beautiful. We’ve labored long and we’ve been through a great deal of pain, but it’s worth it, because we have given birth to the rekindling of the government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Look, you’re here!”68 McCabe claimed the authority to speak based on her status as a mother and her related ability to present a common-sense view on a complex political issue.⁶⁹ While McCabe’s rhetoric drew on familiar themes of motherhood and populism, television gave her rallying cries a crucial visual component and broadcast her message on a scale inaccessible to the vast majority of grassroots female activists.

In another example of how television news reports framed McCabe differently from the way they framed feminist activists, none of the broadcasts discussed her in relation to her husband or children, despite her regular invocation of her identity as a mother and housewife and despite newspaper accounts of marital tensions while McCabe and the other mothers were away from Pontiac. The Chicago Tribune, for example, noted, “Not too many months ago, Charles McCabe wanted to divorce his wife Irene, the ardent antibus leader and organizer of NAG. Today he’s staying home with the children while she walks to Washington to place her cause before Congress.” The march forced Charles McCabe and the other “unpublicized husbands and families,” the Tribune suggested, to “change their conception of women.”70 In leaving their husbands and children for six weeks, McCabe and the other marching mothers clearly stepped outside the bounds of traditional motherhood, but they prompted little of the gender anxiety that accompanied network news treatment of second-wave feminism.⁷¹ While McCabe did not publicly identify as a feminist or an antifeminist, her support for “antibusing” politics, her visible affirmation of femininity, and her embrace of the terms mother and housewife likely led television reporters and commentators not to see McCabe as a threat to gender norms. At the same time, these assumptions enabled McCabe to engage in political action that surely would have brought censure to other women.

At the end of McCabe’s speech, each network followed her cue (“Look, you’re here!”) and cut to the crowd. In those shots, those gathered, almost all white and mostly women, hold clearly worded placards reading, “Stop Forced Busing,” “Pass H.J. Res 620,” and “Welcome Irene.” Behind the crowd, the Washington Monument is visible, ringed by U.S. flags. It is an impressive but misleading sight. While McCabe and the march promoters promised ten thousand people, the Washington Post estimated that only five hundred to eight hundred people attended the “antibusing” rally.⁷² CBS’s Tony Sargent noted drily, “Despite Mrs. McCabe’s dramatic march, today’s turnout was far smaller than expected.”⁷³ L. Brooks Patterson, NAG’s attorney, expressed his disappointment at the low turnout. “This hillside should have been covered with all your neighbors and friends,” he told the crowd. “They scream the loudest when their children are bused, and they should be here to protest.”⁷⁴ In Michigan, many questioned whether the rally accurately represented public opposition to “busing.” While the Michigan House of Representatives passed a resolution (by a 61–28 vote) honoring McCabe, calling her “the symbol of tens of millions of people who are opposed to forced busing,” the Detroit Urban League was unconvinced. “With the small rally turnout Mrs. McCabe received in Washington, how can the House assume or even support the notion that Mrs. McCabe represents such a large segment of the American population?” asked Detroit Urban League executive director Francis Kornegay.⁷⁵ For her part, McCabe expressed frustration with the turnout to the Washington Post: “If I can give up a year of my life (to fight busing) why can’t they turn out for day?”⁷⁶ McCabe’s disappointment was no doubt sincere, but it underestimated the march’s success as a media event. The march reportedly cost $7,500 and was paid for by fund-raising in Pontiac and along the parade route.77 Despite this small budget, it generated daily newspaper reports and television news coverage of the marchers’ departure from Pontiac and their arrival in Washington. Here again, news media, especially television, helped McCabe dramatically scale up her “antibusing” message. Television news brought McCabe’s rally, which despite a month of advance publicity failed to draw one thousand people, to a national audience of millions of television viewers. By any account, this was an extraordinary return on the time and money McCabe and NAG invested in the march.

FIGURE 27. Irene McCabe addresses a smaller than expected crowd at the end of the mothers’ march to Washington, DC. Associated Press, April 27, 1972.

FIGURE 28. While the turnout for the mothers’ march on Washington disappointed Irene McCabe, the event reached millions of television viewers. These supporters hold signs endorsing McCabe and House Joint Resolution 620, an “antibusing” constitutional amendment. ABC Evening News, April 27, 1972.

The mothers’ march reveals both the limitations and promises of television as a tool for political organizing. Television news asks that citizens view certain people, places, and events as newsworthy but does not necessarily lead to particular political outcomes.78 Television brought McCabe’s message to millions but moved mere hundreds to join the rally in the nation’s capital. Television’s importance to “antibusing” politics, however, was more significant and more diffuse that this low turnout suggests. Television news was never interested in McCabe in and of herself; rather, she drew the attention of television cameras as the leader of a group that organized television-ready protests focused on a specific issue. When the “busing” battle died down in Pontiac, television shifted from McCabe to “antibusing” protests in other cities. Television coverage did not drive massive numbers of people to NAG’s rally in Washington or bring McCabe lasting political power, but it did help thwart “busing” for school desegregation. In Louisville, Boston, Cleveland, and several other cities, “antibusing” activists leveraged the characteristics of television news to argue that their rights as parents and homeowners were being violated by activist judges and federal bureaucrats. Likewise, politicians such as Florida governor Claude Kirk, Alabama governor and presidential candidate George Wallace, and President Richard Nixon voiced their opposition to “busing” in carefully planned events and speeches that played well on television.⁷⁹ Support for “busing,” by contrast, was less organized and less vocal, and when “probusing” events were organized, like the forty-thousand-person march in support of desegregation in Boston in 1975, they received far less television coverage than “antibusing” protests.⁸⁰ As the “antibusing” activists who received the most media attention in this era, McCabe and her fellow marching mothers are the most visible example of how grassroots groups and politicians used television to frame the issue of “busing” for school desegregation.

“A SADDER BUT WISER HOUSEWIFE”

While “busing” continued to be a major political issue throughout the 1970s, the mothers’ march on Washington was the pinnacle of McCabe’s political career. In Pontiac, tensions emerged within NAG over the media’s focus on McCabe and over her leadership style. When asked what the march had accomplished, marcher Lorene Fligger noted, “Well, in my case, I walked to Washington.” Another mother, Ardith Heineman, who quit NAG shortly after the march, said, “Irene’s style of doing things is to tell you to do it. If you ask questions she whirls on you and tells you not to straddle the fence.”81 By February 1973, the Associated Press reported, “The National Action Group (NAG), once the most vocal and best publicized antibusing group in the nation, has fallen into a state of near chaos.”⁸² As NAG meetings became increasingly contentious and McCabe faced challenges from rival NAG factions, she stepped down, lamenting, “Too many people are interested in fighting me and not fighting busing.”⁸³ After leaving NAG, McCabe campaigned unsuccessfully for a position on the county board of supervisors and floated the idea of challenging Michigan senator Philip Hart for his seat.⁸⁴ Unlike Boston’s Louise Day Hicks or Los Angeles’s Bobbi Fiedler, both elected to the U.S. House of Representatives largely on the strength of their “antibusing” credentials, McCabe’s campaign did not lead to success in electoral politics.⁸⁵ She expressed frustration that the politicians and political advisers who had once eagerly met with her ignored her once she was out of the national spotlight. After L. Brooks Patterson, the former NAG legal adviser, was elected county prosecutor, McCabe noted, “I was once his voice of the average person. He doesn’t need me now. He’s elected. A guy from Hazel Park [a Detroit suburb] told me a long time ago, ‘they’re gonna use you, honey.’ He was right.”⁸⁶ McCabe also questioned the sincerity of John Ehrlichman, President Nixon’s chief domestic affairs adviser, who had indicated when she met with him after the mothers’ march that Nixon would support a constitutional amendment opposing “busing.” “Perhaps he used us as a ploy to quiet down the antibusing protesting voices,” she told a reporter.⁸⁷ “I’ll never lift a hand to support another political hack,” she later declared.⁸⁸ Reporters sought out McCabe’s opinion on court decisions and “busing” protests for several years after the march, but by the late 1970s McCabe led her life away from television cameras, selling real estate in Clarkston, Michigan, ten miles northwest of Pontiac.

Just over a year after the mothers’ march, the New York Times ran a follow-up story on McCabe. The report, “Busing Foe Fades from Limelight,” began by noting, “Irene McCabe, who once waged an antibusing campaign that won national attention, is a sadder but wiser housewife again.”89 The story is a curious coda to McCabe’s highly publicized campaign, focusing largely on the prosaic aspects of her life in Pontiac: her hobbies, her children’s dentist appointments, and the change in “her hair color from streaked to platinum blonde.” Removed from the public spotlight, the story suggests, McCabe was just a housewife. What the story misses is how McCabe’s identities as housewife, mother, and grassroots activist were always closely intertwined, how these identities were articulated in both private and public spheres, how these identities functioned at both local and national scales, and how McCabe’s engagements with television news made her the face of “antibusing” politics in the early 1970s.

•    •    •

After Pontiac faded from the national media spotlight, another television program took up the subject of the city’s school desegregation. “As We See It” (1975–77) was researched, written, and coproduced by teenagers in sixteen cities that experienced “busing” for school desegregation, including Pontiac, Boston, Miami, San Francisco, and Memphis. Developed by Chicago PBS station WTTW with funding from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, the series used documentary techniques, narrative dialogues, skits, satires, and film segments to examine students’ firsthand experiences of “busing,” as well as the protests and controversies surrounding these desegregation efforts. The series’ pilot episode, “Graduation Flashbacks,” was set at the high-school graduation exercises for the first class to go through court-ordered “busing” in Pontiac. While valedictorian Joe Urla speaks, the camera focuses on a series of students in the audience, and we hear and see their memories of school desegregation. Tony Simuel, a black student in Pontiac who worked on the series, recalled that the episode was trying to show “each student’s perspective on how they viewed their experience in the school.” Simuel’s graduation flashback notes how the school required hall passes after desegregation, commenting, “If you were me the guy was going to stop you every time in the hall.”⁹⁰ The six different viewpoints—from white, black, and Puerto Rican young women and men—do not agree with the valedictorian or with each other. “As We See It” complicates the national news media’s picture of “busing,” because it resists easy talking points and focuses instead on perspectives rooted in the specific history of school desegregation in Pontiac.⁹¹

When Judge Keith’s desegregation order went into effect in 1971, Tony Simuel attended Madison Junior High School, the school McCabe’s daughter and several other children of NAG activists were scheduled to attend. “These kids from other neighborhoods were thrown in, and we were eleven years old, we didn’t care,” Simuel remembered. “It was a little scary at first, but that honestly did not last long at all. . . . The students got along fine if the parents would have just left us alone.”92 Some students surely had less positive experiences of school desegregation, but one of the problems with the news media’s fixation on Irene McCabe is that it made it nearly impossible to hear what black students felt about “busing” for school desegregation in Pontiac or elsewhere.