I don't have any. OK, good afternoon, everyone.
What I'm presenting today is sort of a discussion that's based around my doctor
research where I look at the relationship between broadcasting and national identity,
and I look at various media forms between the 1940s and the nineteen sixties and Bermuda.
So I look at initially I started off with television and through my research,
discovered that it was imperative that I also examined radio and then go even further to newspapers.
I do want to point out that I focus quite a bit on the Royal Gazette in my research,
and I do talk about that today because the Royal Gazette newspaper is the oldest media form in Bermuda today.
It was in Bermuda during slavery, during the emancipation of slaves, during segregation, during the desegregation of the colonies.
And today in Bermuda is the only daily newspaper which is actually kind of amazing to try and navigate the microphone, the clicker and papers.
Through a brief analysis of Bermuda's 1959 theatre boycotts,
this paper will demonstrate how internal contestations of identity between Bermuda's white colonials and members of the
black community played out in the colonial Royal Gazette newspaper and the anti-colonial newspaper The Bermuda Recorder.
During the most racially charged non-violent protests in Bermuda's history,
it will highlight how Bermuda's colonial colonial media traditionally represented black Bermuda ants and the role that the black owned
Bermuda recorder played in supporting protesters in their demand for an immediate ending to racial segregation in the island's cinemas.
The illustrations presented here serve to provide an understanding as to how media was
used as a tool that helped to orchestrate articulations of black identity in Bermuda.
June 1959 while celebrating Bermuda's British colonial heritage.
Reports of protests,
picketing and boycotts began to overshadow the festivities of the island's three hundred and fiftieth anniversary of British colonialism.
The anonymous progressive group had organised hundreds of young black protesters,
armed with placards demanding an immediate end to racial segregation in Bermuda cinemas.
Reports of the boycotts covered the front pages of Bermuda's newspapers and as the groups gathered outside of Bermuda's theatre houses,
the group refused to buy tickets for segregated seating.
The British Overseas Office was concerned as word quickly spread of disturbances in the small, normally docile island of Bermuda.
In the House of Commons, it was reported that there had been a series of problems in the island's cinemas,
which bar citizens of African blood from certain parts of the auditorium.
But Bermuda's colonial secretary gave assurance that that that there had only been a few minor incidents with no reports of violence.
However, the extent of Bermuda's racial climate had been downplayed.
In actuality, racial tension on the island had increased as a result of the boycotts and consumed discussions within local parliament.
Members of Bermuda's House of Assembly were fearful the protests would escalate, with some arguing that the boycotts were potentially explosive.
House members suggested to the Bermuda General Theatre President James Pearman
that some small incident could touch of riotous consequences that would do
this country a great deal of harm and encouraged him to accelerate the pace of racial integration in the cinemas before the damage destroyed from U2.
Yet the president's position on immediate integration remained unchanged.
He was adamant that the seating arrangement within the theatres, which saw black patrons sitting in the low,
congested hot area of the cinema and the white patrons sitting in the spacious balconies was not going to happen any time soon,
although they promised it would change.
He argued that the protesters were making an unnecessary fuss about something that they decided to alter months ago,
and this was just a mild annoyance and merely a storm in a teacup.
Wesley Tucker, the island's only black parliamentarian and whose family had personally boycotted the sex segregated cinemas for 20 years,
told the House of Assembly In my opinion, in this country, we are sitting on what might be called a keg of gunpowder.
Dismissing Freeman's description that the boycotts were merely a storm in a teacup, with numbers of protests increasing,
with numbers of protesters increasing daily in the local government trying to mediate the situation,
Pearman defiantly told the House of Assembly that he will shut down all the cinemas
on the island rather than to give in to the demands of the progressive group.
And as a direct attack against the protesters, he told the House of Assembly that they had behaved badly and he does not propose to be coerced by
a crowd of what is largely hoodlums into doing something which he believes is sensible and right.
The impact of Pearson's words was more damaging as his comments of hoodlum behaviour appeared throughout the local headlines.
The use of Bermuda's colonial newspaper to reinforce black Bermudian as being
inferior had been common practise since the newspaper's inception in the 1830s.
Name-Calling and negative descriptions were often stereotypes of Bermuda's black youth seen within the island's white media.
It had also become common. In practise to not acknowledge a person's professional title in local news reporting,
Dr Even Hutson argues that the daily paper often underscored its contempt for coloured people by refusing to attach any title in reference to them.
These acts of identity construction used by white colonial media to represent Bermuda's black
community was an essential tool in maintaining hegemony within the small British territory.
Chris Barker states that the use of stereotypes, as we're discussing here,
involves the attribution of negative traits to persons who are different from ourselves,
which he argues is a staple mechanism of racism and points to the operation of power.
Barker argues black people were represented as naturally incapable of refinement of white civilisation based upon this idea.
Not only were Bermuda's blacks not good enough to sit in the balcony with the white patrons, but they were,
as Pearman alluded to, not even civilised enough to exert patience in the opening of the soon to be desegregated theatre.
However, the use of the term hoodlum on this occasion was was a blatantly false description of the progressive group and sparked even further protest.
What Pearman had not factored in was that the protesters were not badly behaved hoodlums,
but in fact, members of the progressive group were well-educated, financially able,
and most importantly, they controlled their own newspaper, the Bermuda Recorder,
which was formed in the early 1920s to be a voice of the black community.
In 1959 became an instrumental tool in the fight against racial segregation.
The anti hegemonic newspaper provided an outlet for the progressive group to
communicate directly to the protesters as it printed messages of solidarity.
As the theatre boycotts continued at the same time,
the Bermuda recorder allowed the anonymous progressive group to refute false claims and counter accusations of being hoodlums.
The June 24th, 1959 edition of the Bermuda Recorder had numerous articles criticising the theatre president,
and you can see some of the articles that were going up in the newspaper at that point.
Members Also Express expressed their displeasure of the comments in the letters to the editor column,
and both black and white Bermuda fans became participants in the national debate on segregation,
with the letters to the editor columns becoming a battlefield of words for and against Bermuda Social Revolution.
One writer who signed their name, good luck, wrote in the Royal Gazette.
I'm trying to encourage the white folk of Bermuda to counteract the boycott of the Bermuda
cinemas by going to as many moving pictures as are necessary to keep the cinema on its feet.
Another writer such as a person called Disgusted Citizen, attacked not only the theatre officials,
but also those who were in support of maintaining the island segregation policy.
And these are some of the letters that were in support of the protests, both in the Royal Gazette and the Recorder.
Yet it was the progressive groups partnership with the Bermuda Recorder that allowed four members to effectively
renounce the claims of the theatre president and reaffirm their demand for the immediate desegregation of the cinemas.
They wrote Now that the theatres are closed, the cry goes out.
There must be negotiations.
But there is nothing to negotiate, and it goes on to say as long as it's dissent, as long as it's segregated, the the boycotts will continue.
Sign the progressive group.
Paramount's closing of the cinemas and discrediting of the progressive group was anticipated to have weakened the impact of the movement.
Instead, through the discourse of newspaper gave Bermuda Social Revolution even more ammunition as it became apparent that
the protesters were not going to back down and with significant financial loss with the cinemas being closed.
The Bermuda Theatre Company ended their practise of racial segregation and Bermuda Cinemas
were opened fully integrated in fear of financial loss to their own establishments.
Bermuda's hotels and restaurants immediately shifted their segregation policies,
with Bermuda entering racial integration overnight, while black Bermuda ants had won a victory.
With the success of the 1959 theatre boycotts, there remain significant racial inequality between white Bermuda and black Bermuda,
and these relationships continue to be negotiated and navigated within colonial Bermuda and its media industries still today.
Thank you.