This first transmission coincided with being the first football game telecast in Tennessee—the tenth meeting at Crump Stadium between Tennessee and Ole Miss.

[5] The station originally broadcast from studios located inside the Goodwyn Institute Building in Downtown Memphis.

[6] It was owned by the E. W. Scripps Company, along with the city's morning newspaper, The Commercial Appeal, the afternoon Memphis Press-Scimitar, WMC radio (790 AM), and WMCF (99.7 FM, now WLFP).

It lost CBS programming when WHBQ-TV (channel 13) signed on in September 1953, but continued to share ABC programming with WHBQ until January 1956, when WREC-TV (channel 3, now WREG-TV) launched as a full-time CBS affiliate with WHBQ taking over the ABC affiliation full-time.

Since at least the 1950s, WMC-TV's logo has included an illustration of a riverboat, a symbol of the Mississippi River region which the station serves.

It dropped the "T" from its callsign (simultaneously tacking on the "-TV" suffix to it) on January 1, 1967 (the co-owned FM station had similarly changed its call letters from WMCF to WMC-FM in 1960).

The WMC stations moved to their current location at 1960 Union Avenue in Midtown Memphis in 1959 and celebrated with a broadcast hosted by comedian George Gobel.

In 1960, the stations broadcast live remotes of John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, who both came to Memphis to campaign for the presidency.

When Martin Luther King Jr. came to Memphis to support the sanitation workers' strike that set the stage for his assassination in 1968, then-station general manager Mori Greiner established an unprecedented program called The 40% Speaks, in an effort to promote racial healing in the community.

James Lawson, a leader in the civil rights movement and proponent of nonviolent social change, and Rev.

Two of WMC's siblings adopted the logo style as well: KSLA-TV in Shreveport, Louisiana, and WECT in Wilmington, North Carolina.

In 1979, in an effort to build its viewership for The Today Show, WMC created a lead-in morning program titled Wake-Up Call.

It is cited in the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest-running magic series in television history, having amassed 1,200 original episodes in its 23-year run.

However, rival WREG closed the gap in the late 1980s, and for the next two decades the two stations waged a spirited battle in the Nielsen ratings.

On July 2, 2008, WMC-TV became the first television station in the Memphis market and the second in Tennessee (behind WTVF in Nashville) to begin broadcasting its local newscasts in high definition.

[citation needed] On June 26, 2013, WMC-TV debuted an hour-long weekday morning newscast from 7–8 a.m. on its Bounce TV-affiliated second digital subchannel with a heavy emphasis on weather and traffic updates.