“Just Tonight Only”: Medgar Evers and Planned Ephemerality on Jackson, Mississippi, Television Stations, 1957–1963

This article analyzes the broadcast scheduling practices of Jackson, Mississippi television station WLBT between 1957–1963. Through editorializing and omission, WLBT created a hyperlocal televisual flow for Jackson audiences that operated in service of segregationist viewpoints and an ideal, imagined white audience. In 1963, Medgar Evers gave a seventeen-minute speech on WLBT, the footage of which is now “lost.” I argue that WLBT, through an initiative of planned ephemerality, created broadcast conditions under which Evers’s message of integration could not be accessed after its original, one-time broadcast.