Oregon professor wins 2013 Farrar Media and Civil Rights History Award

Carol A. Stabile, a professor at the University of Oregon, has been named the winner of the 2013 Ronald T. and Gayla D. Farrar Media and Civil Rights History Award. Professor Stabile wins the Farrar Award for her article published in the September 2011 issue of Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies: “The Typhoid Marys of the Left: Gender, Race and the Broadcast Blacklist.”

This award recognizes the best journal article or chapter in an edited book on the historical relationship between media and civil rights published during the previous two years.

The contest judges, a national panel of three historians with expertise in civil rights and media history, unanimously selected Dr. Stabile’s article as the award winner from a strong field of submissions. In commenting on the award-winning study, the judges wrote:

"Drawing on a rich array of primary sources, Carol Stabile’s essay offers a fresh look at the intersection of anti-communism and civil rights activism during the 1950s, focusing on the broadcast industry as a primary arena of struggle. In the process, she draws attention to two figures, African American musician Hazel Scott and white actor Jean Muir. Both were active proponents of racial justice and equality.

Scott is particularly notable as a black woman who briefly hosted her own television show in the 1950s.  The essay convincingly demonstrates how the views of a small minority, which aggressively defined civil rights as a sign of communist sympathies, could effectively leverage the power of the federal government and corporate sponsors to marginalize and effectively “silence” individuals sympathetic to the cause of racial justice during the 1950s, a formative decade for television as well as for the Civil Rights Movement. In addition to being well-written, the piece has media and civil rights as its central focus   It uses a wide range of historical sources and captures the mood of the period with an account of how race and gender were connected to and used to blacklist media professionals."

Dr. Stabile will deliver the Farrar Award Lecture at the Media and Civil Rights History Symposium sponsored by the School of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of South Carolina on Saturday, March 23.

Carol Stabile holds the rank of Professor at the University of Oregon in the School of Journalism and Communication and the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies. She is also the Director of the Center for the Study of Women in Society at Oregon. She is the author of Feminism and the Technological Fix, editor of Turning the Century: Essays in Media and Cultural Studies, co-editor of Prime Time Animation: Television Animation and American Culture, and author of White Victims, Black Villains: Gender, Race, and Crime News in US Culture.

The Farrar Award judges were Drs. Patricia Sullivan (University of South Carolina), Phillip Jeter (Winston-Salem State University), and Earnest Perry (University of Missouri).

Other Farrar Award Recipients
2012 - William P. Hustwit
2011 - Gordon Mantler