WLBT-TV, founded in 1953 by the Lamar Life Insurance Company in Jackson, Mississippi, supported racial segregation in Mississippi during the 1950s and 1960s. Lamar Life had close ties to the state’s white political and business elite and to segregationist groups such as the White Citizens’ Council, which even operated a bookstore in the lobby of the station’s downtown Jackson studios. The station suppressed news of the Civil Rights Movement by cutting out coverage from the NBC News feed and pre-empting NBC programs that referred to racial justice or featured African-American actors. In 1955, when civil rights lawyer Thurgood Marshall later appeared on the Today show, WLBT interrupted the interview and blamed technical difficulties, and station manager Fred Beard later said he had pulled it because television networks had become instruments of “Negro propaganda.” NBC, civil rights groups, and the Reverend Everett Parker of the United Church of Christ sent numerous petitions to the Federal Communications Commission protesting WLBT’s racist stance, and after several unheeded warnings to Lamar Life, Parker and the church’s Office of Communication formally petitioned in 1964 to revoke the license. When the Federal Communications Commission ruled that the petitioners lacked standing, the United Church of Christ appealed, and in 1966 the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, in an opinion by Warren Burger, ruled that the public had the right to take part in Federal Communications Commission hearings to protect the public interest. After the Federal Communications Commission again ruled for Lamar in 1967, the church appealed again, and the appeals court found Lamar’s record beyond repair and ordered the license revoked in 1969; Lamar appealed and lost in 1971. That year the Federal Communications Commission granted Communications Improvement, Inc., a biracial, nonprofit foundation, interim control of the station while hearings continued for a permanent licensee. The station kept the WLBT call letters, retained its NBC affiliation, and under new management, including some of the first African American television executives in the South, sought to become “a beacon of tolerance”; William Dilday became the first African-American TV station manager in the South. In 1979 the station was purchased by TV-3, a merger of four groups chaired by Aaron Henry, president of the Mississippi NAACP.