Oral history interview with Wallace Westfeldt, 31 October 2002.
(Document/manuscript/pamphlet/archival material)

Materials housed in Special Collections Division of the Main Library, Nashville Public Library.

The interview consists of a transcript and sound recordings in two formats: 2 original audio cassettes recorded in 2002; and a set of 3 data CDs containing MP3 files (a master, a copy master, and a use copy). The original cassettes were digitized during a conversion project in 2006.

In library use only. Available by appointment.

Scope and content: Oral history interview with Nashville Civil Rights Movement participant Wallace Westfeldt, conducted on 31 October 2002 by Milt Capps as part of the Nashville Public Library's Civil Rights Oral History Project. During the ca. 2 hour interview, Westfeldt discusses such topics as his family and education; attending Sewanee; segregation; his journalism career, including working for Nashville's Tennessean newspaper covering civil rights; producing a report on the Nashville sit-ins (A Report on Nashville) for the Nashville Community Relations Conference and a documentary for NBC; and how his coverage of the movement changed him.

Cite as: Oral history interview with Wallace Westfeldt, Civil Rights Oral History Project, Special Collections Division, Nashville Public Library.

This material may be protected by copyright law (Title 17 U.S. Code)

Born in New Orleans, Louisiana, Wallace Westfeldt began his journalism career on a weekly newsmagazine, moved to a daily newspaper, and finally found himself in television news, where he spent 21 years as a writer, reporter, producer and executive producer. Fifteen of those years were with NBC, where Westfeldt rose from his first job as a writer for the Network News Division's White Paper to his position as Executive Producer of both The Huntley-Brinkley Report and its successor, The NBC Nightly News. From 1969 to 1972, he won four consecutive Emmy awards for his work on those programs. He left The Nightly News in 1972 to produce documentaries for NBC Reports, and four years later moved to PBS, where he produced the first ever regularly scheduled program on politics, USA, People and Politics. That program won a Peabody and the Ohio State School of Journalism Award for Outstanding Achievement Within Regularly Scheduled Programs. A graduate of the University of The South, Westfeldt began his journalism career when he was hired as a Time magazine copy boy in 1947. He moved to Time's Dallas Bureau as a reporter, was recalled to stateside military service as a Marine Captain during the Korean War, and then took up his journalism career again in Time's Atlanta bureau. He subsequently accepted a job at the Nashville Tennessean, where he worked for eight years. He was a contributor to the books With All Deliberate Speed (1957) and The First Hundred Days (1961). During the late 1950s, Westfeldt received a Reed Fellowship to go to Scandinavia to study neutralism for a year. Westfeldt produced A&E's two hour autobiography program, One-on-One With David Frost, and worked as a communications consultant. At the time of the interview, he no longer had any affiliation with A&E, lived in Rockville, Maryland, and produced shows for David Frost for various outlets.

In English.

Transcript available in repository.

Forms part of: Civil Rights Oral History Project.