Everett C. Parker, an ordained minister who used the communication office of the United Church of Christ as a platform for spearheading reforms in broadcasting in the 1960s and 1970s to gain greater representation of minorities on the airwaves, died Sept. 17 at a hospital in White Plains, New York. He was 102.
His son, the Rev. Truman E. Parker, confirmed the death. He said the cause was unclear.
By applying the principles of the civil rights movement to the public airwaves, Parker became a powerful and effective voice for changing broadcast standards throughout the country. His challenges to broadcast and hiring practices led to reforms at the Federal Communications Commission and to a landmark court decision in which the license of a television station in Mississippi was revoked.
Parker also led a movement for equal-time provisions in broadcasting and launched career training programs aimed at putting more minorities on the air and in management positions.
“Perhaps no single person has had a greater impact on this country’s communications landscape,” FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said in a statement.
Parker began working in radio in high school and organized a broadcast department at the New Deal-era Works Progress Administration in Washington in the 1930s. After attending theology school and becoming an ordained minister in the Congregational Christian Churches, he returned to broadcasting as an executive at NBC and as a producer of church-related programs.
In 1954, Parker organized the Office of Communication at the national headquarters of what eventually became the United Church of Christ, after the merger of two Protestant denominations. His interest in overturning a blatantly prejudiced system of broadcasting in the South began with a phone call from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., whom he had known since the 1950s.
“Will do you something about the way we’re being treated on radio and television?” King said.
Parker began by asking that stations extend equal treatment in courtesy titles: At the time, African Americans were seldom granted the dignity of being referred to on air as “Mr.” or “Mrs.”
He also demanded that stations, which were licensed by the federal government, provide equal time to refute on-air criticism of the civil rights movement.
When an interview with civil rights lawyer Thurgood Marshall — later a Supreme Court justice – was scheduled to be broadcast on WLBT-TV in Jackson, Mississippi, the transmission was somehow “lost.” Parker recruited more than 20 volunteers to record every minute of broadcasting by WLBT and demonstrated that black people seldom appeared on the station and that it often carried racially charged commentary.
In 1964, Parker petitioned the FCC to deny the renewal of WLBT’s broadcast license. The station’s lawyers argued that he had no legal standing to charge WLBT with wrongdoing and asked that he be put in jail.
Two years later, a U.S. Circuit Court held that a citizens’ group, such as one led by Parker, did have the right to raise its concerns before a federal regulatory agency. Nonetheless, the FCC ignored the decision and renewed WLBT’s license.
Parker carried on the legal battle until a federal appeals court vacated WLBT’s license in 1969 and ordered the FCC to find a new owner for the station.
“After nearly five decades of operation,” a judge wrote in a blistering opinion that shook the FCC to its foundation, “the broadcast industry does not seem to have grasped the simple fact that a broadcast license is a public trust subject to termination for breach of duty.”
The judge was Warren E. Burger, who soon became chief justice of the United States.
During those years, Parker also began to investigate the employment practices of broadcasters, compiling statistics that showed an abysmal record of minority hiring. In the 1970s, he began to organize education and internship programs for minority students interested in broadcasting.
“Discriminating practices by some Southern stations is a continuing daily insult to the Negro people those stations are licensed to serve,” Parker said in 1967. “Such discrimination is an affront to Americans everywhere who grant exclusive licenses to broadcasters only to see some of them openly defy the laws of the land.”
Everett Carleton Parker was born Jan. 17, 1913, in Chicago. His father sold kitchen equipment.
After graduating from the University of Chicago in 1935, he was a radio producer in Chicago and New Orleans before working for the WPA. He returned to Chicago in 1938 to open an advertising agency.
He then attended the Chicago Theological Seminary, receiving a divinity degree in 1943. After working at NBC, Parker taught at Yale Divinity School from 1945 to 1957, while also working on various broadcasting projects.
He also produced films and TV broadcasts over the years, including the 1977 PBS series “Six American Families.” He also championed the cause of the Wilmington 10, a group convicted of arson in a racially charged case in North Carolina. A federal court overturned the convictions in 1980.
Parker led the UCC’s Office of Communication until 1983, then taught at Fordham University in New York into his mid-90s. An annual lecture in Washington sponsored by the Benton Foundation, which promotes equity in telecommunications, is named in his honor.
His wife of 65 years, Geneva Jones Parker, died in 2004. Survivors include three children, Ruth Weiss of Larchmont, N.Y., Eunice Kolczun of Tulsa, and the Rev. Truman E. Parker, a United Church of Christ minister in Mountain Home, Idaho; seven grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren.
Parker testified dozens of times before Congress and the FCC about discriminatory practices and in favor of maintaining fairness and equal-time provisions in broadcasting.
“All we’ve ever wanted to do is make it possible for people to express themselves through the system of broadcasting,” Parker told the New York Times in 1983. “If broadcasters are to serve the public interest, they need to be reminded that they serve all the publics.”