Black Power TV 0822354098, 9780822354093

Citation preview

Black Power TV

Black

Power

TV

Devorah Heitner Duke University Press Durham and London 2013

© 2013 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper ♾ Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan Typeset in Arno Pro by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. ■

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Heitner, Devorah, 1975– Black power TV / Devorah Heitner. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8223-5409-3 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8223-5424-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. African Americans in television broadcasting— United States—History—20th century. 2. African Americans on television—History—20th century. 3. Public-access television—United States—History— 20th century. 4. Black power—United States— History—20th century. I. Title. PN1992.8.A34H45 2013 791.45′08996073—dc23 2013004648

For Dan

contents

■ Acknowledgments ix

introduction

■

Reverberations of the King Assassination 1



one

■



two

■



three

■



four

■



conclusion

■

Welcome to Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant, Your Community Program! Visualizing Black Brooklyn, 1968–1971 24 Say Brother and Boston’s New Principles of Blackness 53 No Thanks for Tokenism: Telling Stories from a Black Nation, Black Journal, 1968–1970 83 That New Black Magic: Black Arts and Women’s Liberation on Soul! 123

153

■ Notes 159 Bibliography 171 Index 185

acknowledgments

■■ This book owes its life to an ambitious and inspiring cohort of media

makers and activists who pioneered this genre. Many of the producers, artists, journalists and technicians who created the television shows examined in this volume spent many hours with me, recollecting this formative moment in their careers. I wish to extend heartfelt thanks to everyone whom I interviewed, but especially to Madeline Anderson, Kay Bourne, Elombe Brath, Hazel Bright, Angela Fontanez, Kent Garrett, Nikki Giovanni, Jewelle Gomez, Louise Greaves, William Greaves, Charles Hobson, Anna Horsford, Stan Lathan, James Lowry, Kit Lukas, Ernestine Middleton, Al Perlmutter, Lou Potter, Bobby Shepard, Jim Tilmon, Marian Etoille Watson, and Eric Werner. I also wish to express my gratitude to St. Clair Bourne and to Wali Siddiq (formerly Lou House), both of whom passed away after I had the privilege of interviewing them and thus never got to see this work completed. Meeting and getting to know the work of all of these groundbreaking and inspiring media makers was without a doubt the most rewarding part of writing this book. The initial research for this book was funded by a Mellon Humanities Center Travel Grant from Northwestern University as well as a Humanities Center Graduate Affiliate Award. I am also grateful for fellowships from the Northwestern University Graduate School: both a Research Fellowship and a Graduate Research Grant. The University of South Carolina’s Institute for Southern Studies funded a research trip to South Carolina. The American Association of University Women American Fellowship provided much-­needed support during the initial write-­up year. I am grateful to students in my Civil Rights and Media, Race/Media/ Culture, and Black Cinema courses for insights on the problems and possibilities of African American media representations. In the past two years, five accomplished students, Riley Hutchinson, Maya Imhoff, Kate

Schreiber, Amy Slay, and Jenny Steege, helped me with some of the final, vital tasks in readying this book for publication. Shayla Thiel Stern’s graduate students at the University of Minnesota offered astute and thoughtful responses to the manuscript, and folks who attended my talk at the University of Chicago’s race workshop provided great feedback on chapter 3. Germaine Haleguoua, at Velvet Light Trap, offered excellent comments on a small slice of what became chapter 1, and readers at Television and New Media helpfully reviewed what became a portion of chapter 2. Contributing to Watching while Black offered an exciting chance to collaborate with Beretta Smith-­Shomade and to address aspects of Black Journal that did not find their way into this work. Numerous archivists and librarians pointed me to resources, gave me excellent advice, and attempted to help me obtain funding for my work. I wish to especially recognize Ruta Abolins, at the Peabody Archives; Karen King, at the Maryland Public Broadcasting Archives; and Leah Weisse and Mary Ide, at the wgbh archives; as well as Michael Kerbel, at the Yale University Film Study Center. At the Yale Film Study Center, the emerging scholar Hannah Zeavin provided expert assistance with obtaining film stills, and I am very grateful to Michael Kerbel, William Greaves, and the Yale Film Study Center for allowing me to use those stills here. Archivists at the New Jersey City University Library; the Moorland-­Spingarn Library, at Howard University; the moving picture archive at the Library of Congress; the Museum of tv and Radio, in New York City; the ucla film and tv archives; the Ford Foundation Archives; and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture helped me locate and access video and documents from the history of Black public-­affairs television. Camille Billops welcomed me into the Hatch-­Billops collection, a treasure trove of artist interviews and other materials. Tracy Capers, at the Bedford-­ Stuyvesant Development Corporation, went above and beyond the usual mission of her position to help me locate the letters and other materials I consulted for the Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant chapter. My friend Laura Wolf-­ Powers offered critical insights and research leads on Brooklyn and urban planning. A brilliant and ambitious cadre of scholars offered mentorship, resources, and advice along the way, and I wish to express my gratitude to these individuals. While this project is very much transformed since its original version, I continue to be very grateful to Jim Schwoch, who was enthusiastic from the moment we first discussed this project. Jim’s generosity as an adviser, his encyclopedic knowledge, and his understanding x  Ackn owled g m ents

of the stages of the research process have been crucial resources for my development as a scholar. Martha Biondi is a passionate advocate for her students and for emerging scholarship in this field. She introduced me to the scholarship on the Black Power era and to Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant, which started me down the path to this book. She has been tremendously supportive of this project and I have benefited from her mentorship as well as her example as a scholar and activist. Mimi White’s thinking and writing on television, and her thoughts on this work, have been enormously influential. Her wisdom and generosity helped me survive graduate school. Jacqueline Stewart’s connections between lived and scholarly community, her brilliant writing on Black cinema, and her commitment to the archival practice have been a tremendous inspiration. Her support and friendship has meant so much to me as I’ve moved from being a media maker in the wonderful Women in the Director’s Chair days to media scholar and professor. I am grateful for feedback on various chapters and sections in progress from the Social History workshop and the American Culture workshop at the University of Chicago, as well as the African American History dissertation group at Northwestern University. Other faculty at Northwestern were exceptionally supportive and have offered mentorship at crucial times. I especially want to thank Jennifer Devere Brody and Darlene Clark Hine. At DePaul University, Jacqui Lazu, Amor Kohli, Darrell Moore, and Sandra Jackson offered insights on this work, and opportunities to share it. My generous and sharp friends Liz Duffrin, Ryan Lopez, and Cory Stevens were kind enough to read drafts and offer comments at various points in this book’s development. As the book neared completion, comments from individuals who attended talks at the University of Minnesota and University of Chicago’s Race Center were especially helpful. My work has been supported and sustained by a rich scholarly community in and beyond Chicago. Progressive scholars and fellow travelers have offered advice on this work, the research process, and scholarly life. I am grateful to Aniko Bodroghkozy, Steve Charbonneau, Steven Classen, Mary Gray, Jennifer Fuller, Bambi Haggins, Moira Hinderer, Michael Kramer, Daniel Makagon, Josh Malitsky, Vicky Mayer, John McMurria, Quinn Miller, Amy Abugo Ongiri, Laurie Ouellette, Yeidy Rivero, Ahmad Sadri, Beretta Smith-­Shomade, Shayla Thiel-­Stern, Jennifer Tilton, Amy Tyson, Gayle Wald, and Michele White. Three anonymous readers for Duke University Press offered astute and generous readings of this book. I am immensely grateful for their sage advice and detailed comments. Ken Ackn owled g m ents xi

Wissoker and Jade Brooks, at Duke University Press, have been both insightful and supportive throughout the process. Thanks to my whole Chicago circle for making my life here so sweet and helping me to stay focused on the bigger picture. Thanks especially to Gilit Abraham, Emilie Amrein, Lori Baptista, Frida Furman, Tracy Kostenbader, Sarah Levine, Nadia Oehlsen, and Lara Oppenheimer. These women have sustained me with their friendship through thick and thin. Amy Ahlstrom, Katie Flynn, Moira Hinderer, Cecilia Lucas, Sara Schnadt, Catherine Sky, Chloe Smolarski, and Jen Tilton are my girls on the coasts, and these righteous women also have my undying loyalty. The art, activism, and scholarship that these women create give me hope for the world. On a minimal research budget, I know I could not have written this book without the hospitality of a number of friends and extended family members who housed me on the road, bought me meals, picked me up from airports, and otherwise contributed to both my survival and sanity on the road. My father Howard and stepmother Lois were especially generous with both schlepping and hospitality while I was in the New York metropolitan area. Rebecca Bachman, Lynea Diaz Hagen, Federico Hewson, Todd Krichmar, Lori Macintosh, Joe Milutis, Roman and Mae Mars, Naomi Schrag, and Laura and Josh Wolf-­Powers all contributed to my life in general and on the road in various ways. Thank you! I am grateful to my family for so many things. My patient and funny father, Howard Heitner, has been supportive since forever. My mother, Cindy Heitner, never knew I would take this path, but my determination to see it through was certainly inspired by her tenacity and strength. My sister Sarah’s sense of humor about all that our family has been through and her faith in me are gifts that I am deeply grateful for. My father’s wife Lois, and her sons Glenn and Seth have added so much to my life in recent years. My cousin Ethan Heitner’s art and activism always challenges me to do my work and live right, and his love and support have been more helpful than he knows. My cousin Jessica Shternshus’s supportive encouragement is much appreciated. My partner Dan Weissmann became part of my life as I was sowing the seeds for this project. His incredible family soon followed. Dan’s mother, Lenore Weissmann, a fellow PhD, has been exceedingly encouraging, always ready to celebrate the next achievement with champagne, and to proofread over chocolate. I wish to offer my deepest thanks to Dan, who knows a thing or two about activism and media. He also is very knowledgeable about commitment, love, laughter, and the sweat of a long project. His exacting journalist’s ear for story kept my chapxii  Ackn owled g m ents

ters crisp and his consistent faith in me, excitement about this work, and sense of humor boosted my spirits as I completed this project. Our son, Harold, who joined our family during the book-­writing years, has also been a source of inspiration and motivation as his faith in the world reminds me why I was so passionate about social justice in the first place.

Ackn owled g m ents xiii

introduction

Reverberations    of the King  Assassination ■■ “Everyone was expecting a truly violent racial outburst,” recalled Ver-

non Jarrett, a prominent African American journalist working in Chicago, thinking back to April 4, 1968, the day Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Indeed, racial unrest had been steadily mounting throughout the decade, and the previous three years had been marked by uprisings in Watts, in 1965, and Newark and Detroit, in 1967. Even as racial discord increased and King’s positions on the war in Vietnam and other issues became more controversial, for many Blacks and whites he continued to be a preeminent national symbol of the hope for racial harmony. High-­profile assassinations, controversy over the Vietnam War, and a tremendous divide between races had left the country riven, and many Americans apprehensive about the future. Many feared that the possibility for racial consensus was irrevocably lost after King’s murder. Across the urban United States, local government officials and white business and property owners alike feared another, even larger uprising by African American residents; Washington, D.C., Newark, and many other cities erupted with riots when King’s death was announced. Local television stations around the country offered extensive footage of King’s funeral. The funeral broadcast on wls-­Chicago attracted a large-­enough audience that the station decided to initiate a Black television program, For Blacks Only. Of course, the assassination and funeral were major news stories, but my research points to the telling implication that another goal of the significant airtime given to the funeral was to induce African Americans to stay in their homes, in front of their

television sets, as fears of riots mounted. Many cities did experience intense violence; in Chicago alone, eleven were killed and hundreds injured. Events parallel to those in Chicago catalyzed into existence television programs focusing on local, Black public affairs in cities across the United States. Ironically, a major genre of Black critical expression emerged, in part from these too-­little, too-­late attempts at containment. For Blacks Only’s genesis in the wake of the King assassination illustrates how this crisis and the increasing visibility of long-­standing racial tensions opened up a new space for Black television representation. In Chicago, wls sought out an African American host for the new show, which immediately marked it as different from the rest of television fare. However, because of overwhelming racism within the industry, very few African Americans worked in television. The station instead looked to radio, which offered a slightly larger pool of Black talent in its ranks, and hired the local radio personality Holmes “Daddy-­O” Daylie as the host. The station offered Daylie a program focused on Black issues. Daylie accepted the station’s proposal on the condition that he would have a Black producer. He suggested the influential print journalist Vernon Jarrett for the producer position, and Jarrett enthusiastically joined the project. Coming from years at the Chicago Daily Defender as well as the Chicago Tribune, Jarrett brought with him a deep knowledge of Chicago’s African American community and a strong connection to a tradition of advocacy journalism. The station’s acceptance of Daylie’s demand shows how the social unrest of the period put Black staff members in a powerful position. Instead of meekly accepting what they were offered, staff members at many new Black programs immediately negotiated for editorial control, making these new television programs into influential sources for Black points of view. Black Public-­Affairs Television: Televising Black Public Spheres

Jarrett and Daylie shaped For Blacks Only into a program that injected critical Black perspectives into an overwhelmingly white televisual context, creating a Black public sphere in an unlikely space. For Blacks Only and similar programs employed what the communication scholar Catherine Squires has called a “counterpublic strategy” of engaging “wider publics,” in this case any Chicago resident with a television and counterhegemonic ideas.1 According to Squires, a marginalized public could employ enclave, satellite, or counterpublic strategies, depending on external pressures and 2  I ntro d u cti o n

available resources—a marginalized public may need to employ an enclave strategy of “hiding counterhegemonic ideas and strategies in order to survive or avoid sanctions, while internally producing lively debate and planning.”2 Under more flexible circumstances, a group might employ a counterpublic strategy of debating with wider publics through legal means, media critiques, or protest techniques. A third strategy, that of a satellite public, “seeks separation from other publics for reasons other than oppressive relations but is involved in wider public discourses occasionally.”3 Black public-­affairs programs were a hybrid of enclave and counterpublic strategies. Programs like For Blacks Only spoke to Black audiences with insider references, intentionally addressing African Americans in ways that others were unlikely to understand, about issues that most whites knew little about. While the widespread distribution of the program precluded the possibility of what Squires terms an “enclave strategy” of speaking exclusively to Black audiences to avoid repression and reprisal, the program employed code switching in order to gain some of the advantages of an enclave strategy, in a widely accessible public medium. Yet their primary strategy was a counterpublic strategy—while For Blacks Only’s title and content emphasized their focus on Black audiences, the program was distributed in a medium that by 1968 entered almost every home, giving whites and other audiences a window into African American perspectives. By privileging Black audiences and letting other viewers work to keep up, For Blacks Only reversed television’s tendency to address white audiences to the exclusion of others. Defining a space as “for Blacks only” in the overwhelmingly white hierarchy of television turned the tables from the Jim Crow legacy of “whites only” public facilities and declared a triumphant separation by choice: a Black space. For Blacks Only covered both hard news and cultural news, consistently offering alternative perspectives on issues such as police brutality, gangs, Black student activism, school desegregation, and price gouging, as well as featuring artists, writers, and musical performances.4 While a handful of “specials” on Black history and culture had aired on both commercial and public television earlier in the decade, they had avoided controversial topics like police brutality that became central issues on programs like For Blacks Only. Around the country, other station managers almost simultaneously responded to the same events that catalyzed For Blacks Only, by hiring a small but unprecedented number of African Americans to start similar programs. Black public-­affairs programs emerged in large cities, such as San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Milwaukee, Atlanta, HousReverberati o ns o f th e Ki n g Assassi nati o n 3

ton, and Detroit, as well as in smaller cities, such as Syracuse, New York; Omaha, Nebraska; and Columbia, South Carolina. These programs had bold names that anchored them to local and national communities and to Black liberation movements. Black culture and politics were documented and racism sharply critiqued on New York’s Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant, Positively Black, and Like It Is; Boston’s Say Brother; Los Angeles’s From the Inside Out; Pittsburgh’s Black Chronicle; Philadelphia’s New Mood, New Breed; Detroit’s Colored People’s Time and Profiles in Black; San Francisco’s Vibrations for a New People and Black Dignity; Cincinnati’s Right On!; Omaha’s Kaleidoscope; South Carolina’s For the People; and Atlanta’s Ebony Journal, as well as on national programs such as Black Journal and Soul! Black Power tv tells the story of the emergence of these programs and considers their intervention in both Black liberation history and television history, through case studies of four very different Black public-­affairs programs: the local shows Say Brother and Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant, and the national shows Soul! and Black Journal. In this book I examine the content, aesthetics, and production culture of these four programs, and I critique each program’s distinct approach, while considering the collective intentions and impact of this emerging genre. These programs created a space for publicizing internal debate in Black communities, negotiating between a lively mix of strategies proposed by Black leaders during the Black Power era, from about 1965 through the early 1970s, including armed revolution, electoral participation, economic self-­help, cultural nationalism, community policing, affirmative action, collective agriculture, separatism, and other strategies. Programs like Black Journal, Soul!, Inside Bedford-­ Stuyvesant, and Say Brother made these multiple strategies for Black liberation visible and comprehensible to an ever-­widening audience, both Black and non-­Black. By offering documentaries on figures in Black history, and by exploring Black culture and art, these shows claimed that history and culture are constitutive of Black humanity and achievement. By televising performances, Black public-­affairs programs also made avant-­garde arts performances from the Black Arts Movement available to a wide range of viewers, many of whom would not otherwise have access to this type of art. Programs like Say Brother, Black Journal, Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant, and Soul! offered a sharp contrast to mainstream television programming, which marginalized, maligned, or ignored African American communities and pathologized Black cultures and Black families, answering the desires African American spectators felt for a chance to see themselves and their communities represented on television. Extending their impact still 4  I ntro d u cti o n

further, these programs served as a training ground for a new generation of African American producers, journalists, and technicians that has continued to redefine the industry long after the majority of Black public-­ affairs programs have ceased production. The aesthetic of these new programs represented a striking deviation from television that audiences were familiar with, highlighting the shift to a more politicized Black aesthetic. The set design immediately communicated to viewers that these programs framed their stories from a Black perspective, as conventional news had not. Consider, for example, the striking image of Lou House, the host of Black Journal, the first national Black public-­affairs program, making a Black Power salute and greeting the viewer in Swahili, on a red, black, and green set with images of Black communities projected in black and white behind him. Through both hosts and guests, these shows inserted new Black aesthetics and fashion into an overwhelmingly white television landscape. While the few African Americans on news and entertainment television in the 1960s had conventional self-­ presentations, the afros, dashikis, and jewelry of hosts and guests on Black public-­affairs tv redefined acceptable tv fashion. Julia, from the nbc sitcom of the same name, certainly did not have an afro, and the newscaster Melba Tolliver was almost fired from her news-­reporting job for wearing an afro, though overwhelming viewer support swayed the station in her favor. In this era, the personal image was political and the “politicization of hair” and bodies and clothing became an important site to assert Black identity and pride.5 Elombe Brath, a fifty-­year veteran of Black media, describes the psychic transformation of this era: “The whole Black thing just exploded—the state structure was very resentful of Black people daring to say that ‘black is beautiful,’ we’re not going to try to imitate white people anymore. They took it as an offense.”6 Embodying the “new Black aesthetic” came to signify a kind of currency on these programs.7 Challenging Jim Crow TV

Television was ripe for change. Most African Americans, and even some whites in the tv industry, echoed Jarrett’s sentiment that “something needed to be done about television, which was so Jim Crow it wasn’t even funny.”8 The Kerner Commission, assigned to investigate the causes of the uprisings of the mid-­1960s, focused a significant portion of its critique on the exclusion from U.S. media of African American perspectives on the “civil disorders.” The report argued that the media had exacerbated the Reverberati o ns o f th e Ki n g Assassi nati o n 5

riots by sensationalizing them and ignoring their root causes. The report made headlines all over the country, many quoting the line “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”9 The paperback version of the report sold over two million copies. Few African Americans were surprised by the report’s findings. “The Kerner report actually dramatized what we had been saying about these two societies,” said Elombe Brath.10 It addressed the kinds of issues that would become central to programs like For Blacks Only and Detroit’s Colored People’s Time, such as police brutality, housing discrimination, inadequate access to jobs and housing, and persistent school segregation. The Kerner report criticized media outlets for sending poorly prepared reporters into riots and castigated television stations and newspapers for reporting and writing “from the standpoint of a white man’s world,” ignoring the “slights and indignities that are part of a Negro’s daily life”—a perspective that might have helped viewers outside Black communities to contextualize the uprisings.11 Despite the report’s recommendations that newspapers and broadcasters hire Black journalists, most media organizations continued on as they had before, doing little to recruit, train, or promote people of color—indeed, African Americans were actively excluded from many media professions. But a few media outlets began to provide token Black media representation in response to the report’s criticism of media organizations. The pressure of years of uprisings and the wave of fear and remorse following King’s assassination finally prompted some media executives to return to the findings of the Kerner report and begin to act on some of its recommendations. Today, while images of African Americans on television are still too infrequent and too often stereotyped, it can be difficult to remember how absent African Americans were from the screen and how keenly that void created a hunger for more and better representation. African Americans were so absent that in the late 1950s Jet Magazine began to publish listings of every African American appearance on tv. On the relatively rare occasions that Blacks appeared onscreen, African American families and friends gathered around their sets to partake in the pleasures of representation. The increasing visibility of the civil rights movement influenced programs like Julia (1968–71) and I Spy (1965–68), which tried to demonstrate the liberal intentions of their producers by featuring Black protagonists. These programs emphasized African American equality and eschewed the stereotypes that were the hallmark of earlier shows like Amos ’n’ Andy. This program, evolved from a radio show by the same name, was 6  I ntro d u cti o n

performed by white actors using “negro dialect” and trafficked in stereotypes inherited from minstrel shows. Both the radio broadcast and later the television program had been targeted for protest by the naacp, and the television show stopped production in 1953 (though it was syndicated until 1966). Despite the progress represented by including Black characters, the prime-­time entertainment images of African Americans that emerged in the late 1960s promoted a fantasy of unrealized social gains. While Julia and I Spy showed accomplished, middle-­class Black characters and avoided stereotypes, they also minimized racism at a time when the United States was at a boiling point of racial tension. By turning a dial, viewers could move from violent racial uprisings to a world where Black characters encountered no discrimination. Indeed, programs like Julia offered white viewers the attractive illusion that America’s race problems had been solved. Established public-­affairs television programs of the 1960s, such as nbc’s Meet the Press (1947 to present) did not pretend the race problem had been solved, yet their emphasis on government officials as the predominant source for perspectives on race and other social issues predisposed them to hegemonic points of view. Programs such as abc’s Issues and Answers (1960–81) and Meet the Press defined the genre of public affairs by featuring journalists’ interviewing carefully selected policy-­makers and analysts, mostly government officials. This emphasis on the expertise of people in power meant an overwhelming exclusion of Black points of view from mainstream public-­affairs broadcasting. Civil rights leaders such as Bayard Rustin and Martin Luther King Jr. were occasionally featured, but neither Black Power–oriented leaders nor ordinary Black citizens were featured. One exception to the exclusion of more radical Black perspectives was a 1966 episode of Meet the Press that featured Stokely Carmichael, along with Roy Wilkins, Martin Luther King Jr., and other civil rights leaders who held differing points of view about the aims and tactics of the movement.12 While the questions from the hosts seemed designed to provoke disagreements between these men, they refused to engage in a public showdown. Instead, they held an in-­depth discussion of a range of Black liberation strategies. This kind of coverage was exceptional; controversial figures like Carmichael rarely got to speak on television, and when they did, they were often edited down to incendiary sound bites calculated to frighten white viewers.13 In contrast to programs like Face the Nation and Meet the Press, or public tv’s national public-­affairs program, net Journal, Black public-­affairs programs consciously rethought mainReverberati o ns o f th e Ki n g Assassi nati o n 7

stream television’s tendency to insist that expertise emanates solely from those in power. Though Wilkins, King, and Carmichael could engage on Meet the Press, on most American print and broadcast media the turn to Black Power strategies in the mid-­1960s was accompanied by a decline in sympathetic coverage of Black political organizing and community activism. During the height of the African American civil rights movement (1945–65), movement leaders and activists utilized media to advance the cause of Black liberation. Movement strategists like Bayard Rustin and Dr. King were savvy in their deployment of mass media. In return, journalists and news organizations understood that the movement created compelling tv. This mutually beneficial relationship raised the profile of the movement while boosting the popularity of television news. Because of this mutual relationship, the spectacular aspects of the Black liberation movements of the twentieth century dominate our popular consciousness: sit-­ins, activist confrontations with police, and the large marches. In the Black Power years (roughly 1965–74), activists used new strategies to continue to harness the power of the spectacular, but the Black Power movement’s tactics and narratives did not appeal to white identification. Instead, white audiences responded with fear to images of Black Power, as viscerally as some had responded with outrage to televised images of families being attacked by dogs and fire hoses. The performative aspects of the Black Panther Party harnessed media attention, but usually not sympathetic coverage or reception. In Framing the Black Panthers, the author Jane Rhodes argues that the Black Panthers exploited the press, while Michael Staub, a scholar of American culture, argues that the press-­induced “moral panic” about the Panthers was part of what forced so many of them underground, weakening their efficacy.14 For Black Power activists who sought societal transformation from the grassroots to the government, notoriety, fame, and visibility was both a strength and vulnerability. Black public-­affairs television reframed the work of the Black Panthers and other radical Black activists, offering some of the first in-­depth and sympathetic television coverage they received. While the insensitive and surface-­oriented news media coverage of inner-­city life was criticized by the Kerner Commission, the riots themselves offered television stations a significant but troubling motivation to challenge the television industry’s overwhelmingly white composition. During periods of intense upheaval, urban stations hastily hired a few Black journalists to provide firsthand riot coverage. Stations sent them, 8  I ntro d u cti o n

with little or no training, into Black communities to document events that white journalists were afraid to cover. One such journalist, originally assigned to report on rioting in Newark, New Jersey, in 1967, was Gil Noble. Noble later became the host and producer of Like It Is, one of the longest-­ running Black public-­affairs programs, on New York City’s Channel 7, an abc affiliate, which ran continuously until Noble was incapacitated by a stroke in 2011. Noble’s story demonstrates how the uprisings in this era had an unintended effect of fostering the first small cohort of African American journalists in television, and how politicizing it was to commence a media career under such war-­like conditions.15 Talking Back to Television: Media Activism in the Civil Rights Years and Beyond

A climate of media activism brought about institutional and financial support that was crucial to facilitating the transformation of Black public-­ affairs television from the token window dressing it was to the substantive challenge to the status quo that it quickly became. As scholars such as Steven Classen, Kathryn Montgomery, Chon Noriega, Heather Hendershot, and Aniko Bodroghkozy have noted, the 1960s and 1970s were an unprecedented era for television activism.16 Their detailed accounts of these struggles help us understand the power of pressure groups and the mix of regulatory and social pressures put to bear on the television industry. For example, Noriega recounts how Chicano activists collaborated to get the racist caricature Frito Bandito banished from television, and how they agitated for new kinds of Chicano representations in both entertainment and news television. Most of all, these scholars show us in great detail that the public space opened by television in this era was a resource that many groups felt was worth fighting for. An emerging sense that representation was a right, not a privilege, structured media activism in this era, and one liberal fcc commissioner even encouraged citizens to take ownership of the airwaves with the handbook How to Talk Back to Your Television Set.17 In the previous decade, activists involved in civil rights struggles agitated for regulatory and fiscal structural change in television. While broadcast regulation, especially the so-­called fairness doctrine, theoretically obligated television stations to represent diverse social and political perspectives, the reality was that, except for a few exceptional cases, stations were never penalized for their routine exclusions of Black people and perspectives. The “fairness docReverberati o ns o f th e Ki n g Assassi nati o n 9

trine” was a media communication policy that required opposing views to be aired when controversial subjects were covered. Introduced by the fcc in 1949, the doctrine was never consistently enforced, but it was used both by broadcast activists and others to support demands that media cover different perspectives. In 1987, in a wave of other serious erosions of media regulation, the doctrine was eliminated. Despite the fairness doctrine, in the Black Power era, as before, Black voices were marginalized, if they were included at all, even on public-­affairs broadcasting. Black media activists coupled demands for access to the airwaves with critiques of entrenched racism and the racist exclusion of Black media workers. Television regulation itself was secondary to activism in creating and sustaining these programs, though staff members at Black public-­affairs programs assiduously cultivated their relationships with the more sympathetic and progressive regulators, such as the first African American fcc commissioner, Benjamin Hooks. A few southern stations, especially the pro-­segregation wlbt, in Jackson, Mississippi, were notorious for “blacking out” national civil rights coverage in the 1950s. The activists clandestinely documented these exclusions and the “technical difficulties” that would interrupt national news coverage of the movement, and activists documented other tactics employed to keep the airwaves white. Activists in Mississippi labored clandestinely under threat of violence. Indeed, the civil rights activist Medgar Evers was killed shortly after his first and only local television appearance, indicating the high stakes of visibility.18 Despite this targeting of activists, and the loss within their first license-­challenge case, the activists pressed on, and wlbt finally lost its license in a higher court. The wlbt case empowered other media activists to challenge broadcast licenses, a threat stations took seriously despite its infrequent realization. Activists’ response to the censorship of programs such as Black Journal culminated with Alabama etv losing its broadcast license. While these cases were exceptional, and few stations were actually censured to this degree, the fact that both a commercial and an educational station lost their licenses because of racist programming policies sent a powerful message to other stations. While the riots, the Kerner Commission’s report, and the King assassination were the catalysts for the proliferation of tv programs with a Black perspective, television activism pressured stations to continue to expand the Black public-­affairs programming that had begun in the summer after King’s assassination. Groups like Black Efforts for Soul in Television (best) trained citizen groups around the 10  I ntro d u cti o n

country on tactics for pressuring their local stations.19 Yet, even with assertive citizens pressuring stations, victories such as Alabama etv and wlbt were exceptional. The ownership structure of television made speaking with a Black voice in the medium more challenging than it was in the Black press, where African Americans had greater control of the means of production. Along with the fears produced by the riots, broadcast activism kept some Black programs on the air longer than they would otherwise have survived. Activism by the staff members of new programs was also central to keeping the programs on the air while keeping censorship at bay. The contradictions between the desire to contain Black bodies and the desire to air Black voices became very apparent as these programs premiered, grew, and found eager audiences. These contradictions betrayed broadcasters’ ambivalence toward television’s role in ameliorating racial inequality and social discord. On one hand, television seemed to offer a perfect, nonviolent outlet for Black discontent, and even provided a way to contain Black audiences by keeping them at home. But coupled with the attraction local officials and station managers had toward giving Blacks a place to let off steam without rioting, television producers and executives were also fiercely protective of the public influence that television wielded. Reflecting this ambivalence, they offered minimal resources to these new programs and chose to air them at off-­peak times, when fewer viewers would see them. Despite a “positive investment” in the whiteness of television, by 1968, social pressure was so great that these “safety valves” for Black expression seemed necessary.20 Black Power Televised

Speaking at a conference on media and cities, in May 1968, one month after the King assassination, the historian Lerone Bennett declared that “divided publics and divided communities” were “a fundamental fact of life and of communications in America.” This implied, he argued, “that white-­oriented media cannot solve the race problem in America” because they were “part of the race problem: they reflect the interests, values, and aspirations of white people.”21 The message that the media was transmitting, Bennett said, was “that white is right.” “Let us begin there,” he concluded, “and let us realize that the black rebellion is a rejection of that message and of media institutions which project that message.”22 Bennett describes a psychic and political transformation in African American relationships to mass culture, a rejection of mainstream culture for having Reverberati o ns o f th e Ki n g Assassi nati o n 11

done so little to integrate Black people or Black perspectives. Despite the legal victories of the civil rights movement, white supremacist thinking continued to dominate mass culture, from prime-­time entertainment to news programming. The phrase “Black Power” meant different things to different individuals and organizations. For some, it meant political power through militant struggle and potentially through armed conflict; for others, it meant reorganizing and separatist politics. Others engaged the electoral system, leading to the election of a wave of Black mayors in U.S. cities during the 1970s, to new, Black elected officials in Washington, and to a presidential run for Shirley Chisholm. Charles Hamilton and Kwame Ture wrote in their manifesto, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation, that they were calling for a “new consciousness among black people,” which they defined as a “sense of peoplehood: pride, rather than shame, in Blackness and in an attitude of brotherly communal responsibility among all black people for one another.”23 Black Power also fostered new cultural and aesthetic assertions. James Smethurst, a scholar of African American literature, argues that rather than seeing Black arts as the “cultural wing of Black Power,” one could see Black Power as “the political wing of Black arts.”24 Inclusively defining Black Power as the aim of all the groups that struggled for Black self-­determination, Smethurst identifies culture as a central facet of the Black liberation struggle in this period. Embodying and promoting the cultural and political expression of Black Power centrally occupied programs like Soul! and Say Brother. Sensitive to the controversial nature of the phrase, stations generally avoided using “Black Power” to promote new Black programs, yet hosts like Don Warden, of Vibrations for a New People, and guests whose names were closely associated with the Black Power movement—such as Julius Lester, author of Look Out Whitey, Black Power’s Gonna Get Your Mama, and Kathleen Cleaver, of the Black Panther Party—spoke on many of the Black public-­affairs shows. In addition to offering a space to advance new Black Power ideologies, Black public-­affairs programs also offered a space for articulating rhetorical self-­defense against discourses and theories culled from “ghetto ethnography,” which were influential in academic and policy discourse of the time. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s infamous report The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (1965) blamed many of the challenges Black people experienced on controlling Black mothers and absent Black fathers, instead of on pervasive racism.25 Designations such as the “culture of poverty” thesis had a significant influence over policy-­making in this era, affecting 12  I ntro d u cti o n

approaches to media funding and media regulation.26 Defending themselves against the racist and sexist Moynihan report, Black feminists such as Angela Davis defended Black women from the “illegitimacy, crime and delinquency” that the report implied.27 Black public-­affairs programs like Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant frequently showed alternatives to the Black family imagined by Moynihan, by featuring well-­behaved children, bright and ambitious teenagers, caring parents, and beautiful public spaces. On Soul! Black women and men challenged the insult to their families and mental health directly in interviews, poems, and songs. Simply having a Black host on a public-­affairs program was transformative, both for the station to mark the program as Black and for audiences and guests who found this to be an important intervention. Discussing how guests spoke more openly with a Black interviewer than they would or could with a white interviewer, Jim Tilmon, host of Chicago’s Our People, describes the way Black activists felt comfortable on his show and performed differently than they did on mainstream television: “Many such people have never been interviewed by a Black man on the air before. You can end up with a totally different conversation than they usually give. I know because I’ve done it—they don’t talk to me the way they’d talk with a white interviewer.” A reviewer from Variety describes an episode in which Tilmon brought on a Black student leader from Northwestern University during a major student uprising there. “Largely portrayed in the local press as some sort of terrorist, the student gave a cool and insightful statement of what he thought the relationship between the school and the black students should be. . . . It’s the sort of dialog too often lacking on the subject.”28 The article shows how the leader’s role was repositioned by Our People, which did not edit Black guests and situations down to incendiary sound bites, as so often happened on mainstream news in that era. Picturing a Black World, Authorizing Black Expertise

Productions like New York’s Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant and Boston’s Say Brother may have originated from a desire to contain Black discontent, but they were reenvisioned by their African American producers—often through intense struggles with station managers or white executive producers—as venues for expressing Black critique of mainstream discourse, disseminating Black culture, and modeling Black empowerment. These programs rhetorically and visually constructed their own visions of local African American communities, bringing unprecedented visibility to comReverberati o ns o f th e Ki n g Assassi nati o n 13

munities such as Bedford-­Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. These local programs highlighted the specificity and achievements of each community, and while they shared characteristics, each show’s philosophical, pedagogical, and aesthetic direction was influenced by its location and the individuals who created it. At the national level, Black Journal and Soul! allowed for the imagining of a Black nation and a distinctly African American consciousness. National Black programs represented and facilitated different aspects of what the historian Adam Green calls “a Black world,” produced by “collective interest—and politics.”29 Green argues that national Black magazines like Ebony built the psychic idea of the Black world, reinforcing the idea that Black national media coalesced the Black nation, challenging African Americans to move past regional affiliations to consider themselves part of a Black nation. Expanding on the notion of imagined communities, advanced by the social theorist Benedict Anderson, Green theorizes that in the case of Black media, collective interests of that community can be recognized and actualized when the community is successfully imagined. Furthermore, electronic media have some advantages over print media in nurturing a sense of community, because of the sense of shared time and space they imply. In addition to the Black press, a long history of African American participation in and activism around access to radio was an important precursor to television programs like Black Journal and For Blacks Only.30 Black-­themed radio programming, such as Chicago’s Destination Freedom, inserted an assertive Black view into the airwaves during the “Double V for Victory” campaign during the Second World War, when civil rights leaders called for victory against fascism abroad and victory against racism at home. In the 1960s and 1970s African American activists and leaders were far from monolithic in their ideological approaches and tactics. Television shows such as Say Brother and Black Journal remind us that there was a serious effort to engage across the Black political spectrum. As the poet Nikki Giovanni said of the diversity of Black political and artistic voices that were invited to appear on Soul!: “It also allowed the opposite to come in. So you had everybody. You had Roger Wilkins on the show. People that you would disagree with fundamentally. That’s not the point. The point is that you are a service vehicle. . . . You bring all voices in.”31 For example, Louis Farrakhan and a gay television host bantered on Soul!, and older civil rights leaders engaged with younger activists on Say Brother. These 14  I ntro d u cti o n

television programs created both local and national “Black public squares” on the air. Speaking from a present-­day context, staff members recall with some nostalgia how societal upheaval brought about a cultural moment in which Black authority was urgently sought after and in which Black staff members could speak their minds. Recalling their experiences at Black Journal and Say Brother, staff members recount that white colleagues at their producing organizations seemed a bit frightened of them. “I think at some level there was a sense that . . . these people can get militant if you will— not violent but militant,” recollected Angela Fontanez of her time at Black Journal.32 Stan Lathan, a veteran of numerous Black programs, recalled his time at Boston’s Say Brother: “We had absolute freedom for the first year; I think there was a tolerance that came about because at that time we were able to say ‘You don’t get it because you’re not Black.’ These supposedly ultraliberal broadcasters allowed us to do our thing.”33 The workplace culture of these programs and stations profoundly shaped the content and impact of each program. For a generation of African American media workers, the lived experience of being Black and the cultural literacy in Black history and culture that they possessed became sought-­after expertise. Black media workers were able to mobilize this cultural literacy at a time when it was suddenly valued. Stations valued Black phenotypes for riot coverage; they valued Black ontological and cultural authority for Black public-­affairs programs. White colleagues at the producing organizations were sometimes intimidated, but they knew that African Americans were, after all, experts on Black perspectives and tended to give them a wide berth. This redefinition of expertise typifies the genre of Black public-­affairs television, and differentiates it from programs like Meet the Press. Funding Black Power TV

The funding climate of the late sixties explains how institutional resources coalesced to foster, for a time, a climate in which Black media makers could use the medium of television to circulate ideas that were critical of white corporate and political organizations, including the broadcast industry itself. Programs like Black Journal, ibs, Say Brother, and Soul! were funded directly and indirectly by foundations and corporations. The Ford Foundation was especially involved in directly and indirectly funding the Reverberati o ns o f th e Ki n g Assassi nati o n 15

television programs explored in this book, as well as many others. The project of televising Black perspectives united the two central priorities for the Ford Foundation in this era: civil rights and public television.34 From 1968 to 1974, under the direction of the outspoken McGeorge Bundy, the Ford Foundation spent $32 million on public television stations. According to Bundy’s biographer, “Public television was Bundy’s creation.”35 In fact, Bundy maintained that civil rights and public television were his two largest priorities. Defending his decision to work with Black nationalist and militant groups, Bundy said during the riots in 1967 that “the Ford Foundation [would] work with Negro leaders of good will and peaceful purpose without any anguished measurement of their position on the issue of a separated power of blackness as against the continuing claim to integration,” a controversial position that set Bundy apart from most other whites in powerful philanthropic positions.36 The Ford Foundation was also a key funder of the urban-­restoration corporations—nonprofit urban-­development organizations that provided a myriad of services in central cities. While these corporations were criticized by some African Americans for their role in urban renewal, which displaced many African Americans, they also funded numerous initiatives in collaboration with Black community activists and Black business owners. The first restoration corporation, established in Bedford-­Stuyvesant, became the sponsor of the television show Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant, which was intended to showcase the work of the restoration corporation— a savvy effort at public relations for the Ford Foundation, initially suggested by a restoration-­corporation board member who owned a large advertising firm. While the program transcended this initial intention, the flow of funding that created both the restoration corporation and its television program demonstrates how Black public-­affairs tv was a kind of apex of the Ford Foundation’s (that is, Bundy’s) priorities. The question of whether to take “white money” from foundations was complex for Black organizations. In her critique White Money/Black Power, Noliwe Rooks points to some of the hazards and compromises that arose when African American Studies departments and Black activist groups accepted funds from foundations like the Ford Foundation, which, in addition to playing a key role in seeding African American Studies departments, played a significant role in the early years of public television.37 Ford funds were essential to the emergence and survival of shows like Black Journal and Soul! and their local counterparts. Staff members’ ambivalence about this situation, and their awareness of the vulnerability it caused, is reflected, 16  I ntro d u cti o n

especially on Black Journal, in self-­reflexive documentary segments that interrogate Black roles in powerful, white-­dominated institutions. These new Black television programs had what the media scholar Chon Noriega calls a “highly contingent practice within the nation state.”38 Despite this contingency, staff members could and did choose to bite the hand that fed them, by challenging station hegemony, criticizing corporate funders and government officials, and generally inserting a Black rebellion into the belly of white media. This book considers Black public-­affairs programs as an intervention in television representation and a site for contesting the very meanings and logics of both race and television apparatus. Arguing that television has a central place in our understanding of the meaning of race in America, the author Herman Gray conceives of television as “a dense site or a place of struggle over the symbolic meanings and uses of Blackness in the production of the nation that admittedly gives television a central role in cultural politics.”39 Building on recent scholarship about Black television representations that focuses on specific texts, this book engages the intersections of texts, performances, production politics, and reception.40 This work considers how a diverse array of Black public-­affairs programs intervened in both the history of television and in the project of rearticulating racial formations that occurred in the Black Power era. Locating Hidden Archives: Erased Tapes, Oral Histories

The history of Black public-­affairs television highlights how regulatory, activist, and textual histories are inextricably linked. No single book could represent the entire spectrum of the dozens of Black public-­affairs programs from this era. The case studies of the four diverse programs included in this book illuminate the range of politics, production values, and aesthetics that these programs enacted. To address this multifaceted history, my research included scripts, press releases, photos, oral histories, news media articles written about the programs, and of course the content of the programs themselves. To begin my investigation, I searched local television listings and identified Black programs through their often unmistakable titles, locating tapes of these programs in public archives and personal collections. As a media scholar interested in the visual language of television as well as the shows’ historical and labor contexts, I had to focus on programs that I could view myself. Analyzing a number of episodes of each program opened opportunities to consider the genre’s aesthetics and Reverberati o ns o f th e Ki n g Assassi nati o n 17

to analyze the program’s changes over time. Unfortunately, because television stations viewed videotape as a renewable resource, episodes were often taped over rather than saved: most programs are archived sparsely or not at all, and even those archives that do survive are frequently incomplete. Some programs are available in archives today only because of unlikely rescues, like the discovery of many episodes of Inside Bedford-­ Stuyvesant by the program’s producers, twenty-­five years after the program was canceled. Say Brother, produced by wgbh Boston, is a well-­archived program, but a few highly controversial episodes have disappeared. Detroit’s Colored People’s Time is archived, but only later episodes survive. My decision to investigate Soul!, Black Journal, Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant, and Say Brother was based on the archival availability of at least fifteen episodes of each of these programs from the late 1960s and early 1970s. The possibility of examining other programs from this time period, in this kind of depth, simply did not exist, though there are some rich archives from the 1980s of Colored People’s Time, for example.41 My insights about the genre as whole also draw from viewing and reading about other programs: Like It Is, For the People, Our People, For Blacks Only, Colored People’s Time, Positively Black, and Black Perspective on the News. Examining local as well as national programs recuperates neglected Black audiences from invisibility and complicates the notion of Black viewers as a “minority,” since African American viewers made up significant portions of viewing audiences in many cities. Black viewers were often totally ignored by traditional ratings measures and marginalized by commercial television’s dependence on ratings systems that offered little incentive to appeal to specific groups. Local Black viewers’ immense response to Black public-­affairs programs offered measurable evidence that Black audiences were far from complacent. Many were very invested in a transformed public image and the possibilities of speaking of Black art and Black liberation in the public space of television. Thus, for Black audiences, local television was of vital importance. Black viewers could and did march down to wgbh in Boston. They wrote to local programs with their suggestions and appeared on the programs themselves. This kind of access to producing organizations made it possible for Black views to have an impact on a medium that could seem very inaccessible to the home viewer. I found that locating media makers who worked on these programs was straightforward, as many are still working in the industry. Many were eager to share stories of an extremely rewarding and exciting time, despite the challenges they faced as pioneers in a medium that had been almost totally 18  I ntro d u cti o n

closed to, and hostile toward, African Americans. Each of the producers explained details about the production process, including topic selection, hiring, and so forth, that would have been impossible to discern from studying the television programs alone. These discussions illuminated the behind-­the-­scenes struggles that shaped the broadcast content of the programs. In addition to interviewing African American staff members, a veritable who’s who of twentieth-­century Black media artists, including St. Clair Bourne, Madeline Anderson, William Greaves, Charles Hobson, Dighton Spooner, and Stan Lathan, I spoke with white producers like Christopher Lukas and Al Perlmutter. Jewelle Gomez, now a well-­known writer and activist for gay and lesbian rights, spoke to me about her participation as a staff member in the early years of Say Brother, when she was eighteen to twenty years old, a part of her history that is not often noted. Jim Lowry is a prominent business leader and consultant, but had not frequently been interviewed about his work on Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant. The poet Nikki Giovanni and the actress Anna Horsford shared details of working with Ellis Haizlip on Soul!, details that helped me to understand the program’s internal culture. Some individuals, like Elombe Brath, who advised Gil Noble at Like It Is and continues to work in radio, have worn so many hats in both Black liberation groups and media work that it is difficult to place him in a particular category. Individuals like Marion Watson and Kent Garrett have had long careers in news reporting, after working on these programs. This combination of archival research with oral history facilitates an understanding of the ways activists and media makers attempted to reframe Blackness in America in the years after 1968 by creating a new public forum for addressing racial justice and by rebuilding television from the inside out. Of all of these programs, only Black Journal has received substantial scholarly attention. In her critique of public television, the media scholar Laurie Ouellette situates Black Journal and a few of the local Black programs as part of public television’s contradictory grappling with civil rights in relation to its mission. Questioning the idea of public tv as inherently politically progressive, Ouellette explores the condescension toward Black audiences that predominated on employment-­oriented programs like Job Man Caravan, in South Carolina, which proposed a solution to high unemployment in central cities by showcasing employment advertisements for mostly menial positions, interspersed with live musical performances. These condescending programs predated Black public-­affairs programs by a matter of months. In Revolution Televised, the author Christine Acham Reverberati o ns o f th e Ki n g Assassi nati o n 19

considers Black Journal in relation to mainstream network news and compares it to news programming in general, as well as to a special from 1965 on the Watts riots, which revealed the increasing paranoia and distance network news was expressing toward Black issues.42 Acham also considers how Black Journal relates to the changes to the Black image in entertainment television and the emerging Black images coming out of 227, Good Times, and Sanford and Son. The author Tommy Lee Lott sees Black Journal, especially during the tenure of Executive Producer William Greaves, as part of the history of Black experimental documentary film.43 Indeed, Black filmmaking in this period did find important outlets on television, including on Black Journal.44 My own examination of Black Journal builds on all these perspectives: as the show being part of the history of public tv, as part of documentary film history, and as an intervention in Black television of the 1960s and 1970s. Rather than centering on Black Journal, I see the program as one of the better-­known examples of a much wider movement. Case Studies

In chapters 1 and 2, I discuss two local programs that emerged under different circumstances. Brooklyn’s Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant had the lowest budget of any show addressed here and is the only program profiled here that aired on a commercial station. Chapter 1 focuses on it and it is the only program in this volume created prior to the King assassination. Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant was initiated by a community-­development corporation in the Bedford-­Stuyvesant community in Brooklyn, New York, with the dual goal of showcasing the area’s attractive buildings and public spaces and of highlighting both the possibilities and challenges faced by the predominantly Black community. “Welcome to Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant, Your Community Program!” outlines the history of the program, focusing on its unique relationship to the neighborhood. Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant asserted a counternarrative to “ghettoizing discourses” such as the Moynihan report. On the program, the hosts themselves transform with the times, starting as members of the civil rights generation who have “made it.” As audiences watched Roxie Roker and Jim Lowry try on dashikis and afros, and seem to engage more and more with prevailing moods of Black Power over the course of the broadcast, they too could get accustomed to, and possibly engage with, new ideas in their communities. The program insisted that Bedford-­Stuyvesant’s ghettoization was structural and that 20  I ntro d u cti o n

the neighborhood was a community where culture was made and families were functional. Of the four programs considered here, this program was the most accessible for community members to appear on, with “regular people” who were not leaders or celebrities on the program every week, along with prominent artists, activists, and community leaders. Chapter 2 examines how wgbh Boston’s Say Brother represented Blackness on local public television, offering new possibilities for Black identity with its emphasis on resistance and cultural innovation, reports on self-­defense in the face of police brutality, new approaches to celebrating life-­cycle rituals such as marriage, and coverage of Black women’s liberation. These performances demonstrated a range of possibilities for the self-­determination of individuals and communities at a time when African Americans were reassessing their relationship with mainstream cultural and political practices. Say Brother documented this exploration with close attention, while mainstream media typically sensationalized, depoliticized, misunderstood, or ignored these emerging cultural practices. Say Brother’s staff members modeled a progressive Black Power pedagogy for African American television viewers. The staff endeavored to portray Black Boston as it was, while striving to claim a revolutionary vision to which members of the community might aspire. Boston’s image as a diverse and racially progressive community was challenged by the critiques of institutionalized racism keenly leveled by Say Brother’s staff. This is one instance where a Black public-­affairs show was not just catalyzed by a riot but eventually covered one, from a Black perspective. The chapter reviews history of their coverage and the subsequent censure they experienced. The program’s youthful hosts offer a perspective especially in line with Black Power activists, and the context of Boston, with its sense of itself as a racially liberal city, despite the reality of intense segregation, offers an important case study. This program was especially aesthetically daring as compared to many other local programs and had the advantage of coming out of one of the premier local educational stations, which had superior production resources compared to many of the other local public television stations. While the hosts of Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant were oriented to civil rights and initially focused on a strategy of uplift, Say Brother was hosted by a youthful staff sympathetic to the Black Power movement who seem to have made Black Power the default position of the program. The third and fourth chapters examine the Black world pictured through two national Black television programs, the newsmagazine-­style Black Journal and the arts-­focused Soul! By demanding Black editorial conReverberati o ns o f th e Ki n g Assassi nati o n 21

trol and limiting white commentary on Black issues, Black Journal was able to represent a Black world that spoke to both Black and white viewers. By situating the topics it explored as common to Black people in many regions and nations, the program proposed that Black viewers should consider themselves part of an emerging Black world wherein Africa and the Black diaspora were vitally relevant. Chapter 3 examines how Black Journal evolved through several important transitions—the transition from premiering as the first national Black program, while still under white editorial control, to a very public strike by Black staff members, to the program’s emergence as an experimental documentary newsmagazine under the African American filmmaker William Greaves. The program explores how it worked in its early years to imagine a national Black public that would transcend regional differences, while celebrating Black America’s diversity. The chapter explores the program’s focus on Africa and diaspora and the program’s considering of the groundbreaking step of opening a bureau in Ethiopia. While the chapter closes with an analysis of the program’s transition to Tony Brown’s leadership, in 1970, the program’s early years under Brown are addressed in the next chapter. Chapter 4 examines how Soul!, which took a cultural-­nationalist perspective toward Black arts and music, centered artists as experts on the Black condition and Black liberation. Deeply influenced by its host and producer, Ellis Haizlip, as well as several influential friends of the program, notably Nikki Giovanni, Soul! demonstrated the intersections of art and politics, especially Black arts and Black Power. The program’s aesthetic innovations, especially when produced by Stan Lathan, set it apart, both from other, mostly staid-­looking pbs programs, and from television in general. Always filmed with an in-­studio “live” audience, this program was like a salon for the Black Arts Movement. Soul! unabashedly posited musicians, actors, and poets as experts on the state of Black people, of Black liberation, and of the political and aesthetic contribution of new cultural forms to Black identity and to the world at large. In some sense the show transcends the genre of public affairs, but it is nonetheless part of the explosion of Black cultural and political television programs in this era. The program is notable for surprisingly progressive gender politics, given the masculine approach of many Black Power organizations and the public sphere in the late sixties and early seventies. Soul! was a key location of Black feminist artwork and was also very progressive in its approach to discussing sexuality. Soul! became a place to address Black women’s liberation 22  I ntro d u cti o n

and to critique the “intersectional disempowerment” of Black women.45 In this chapter, I also compare Black Journal’s approach to gender issues in 1970, under Tony Brown, with Soul!’s treatment of gender issues and relationships between men and women. In the wake of the King assassination, station managers and program directors at both educational and commercial stations decided to set these new Black television programs in motion almost simultaneously, so that numerous staff members of different programs could honestly tell me that they had been the first Black public-­affairs program. As pressures on Black liberation and progressive social movements mounted in the late seventies and the eighties, Black public-­affairs programs declined. As Black Journal and Soul! were canceled, local programs were slowly defunded. The era of the proliferation of Black public affairs was over, but some stalwart producers continue with the genre even today. This book’s conclusion considers how these programs redefined what was possible for Black representations in ways that continue to reverberate in television and other media.

Reverberati o ns o f th e Ki n g Assassi nati o n 23

one

Welcome to   Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant,  Your Community Program! Visualizing Black Brooklyn, 1968–1971

I happened to come from the pool hall and turned the television set on, to my surprise I got my first look at your program. It is great! Primarily because it helps bring the need for identification which in the past has been missing in Bed Stuy. Furthermore, I’m quite sure it helps in other ways, such as showing the residents and all concerned people a true and positive picture of what this community is all about. —Letter to Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant

■■ A tired night-­shift worker coming home to his or her New York City

apartment in 1968 and turning on the television would undoubtedly have been surprised to find a group of Black students from Boys High School in Bedford-­Stuyvesant earnestly discussing their community activism and their plans to return to their Brooklyn neighborhood after college. The shaky cinematography and poor sound quality would have been less surprising to this viewer than the simple fact of seeing actual Black people on television. That these young men—a valedictorian, a captain of the football team, and a student-­body president—were also articulate and politically outspoken would have made the image that much more notable. In a television landscape in which Black faces were rare, Brooklyn’s Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant portrayed a Black world that featured citizens making art, contributing to their community, offering political critique, and maintaining their families in spite of difficult conditions. In doing so, the program offered a distinct contrast to news images of African American pro-

testers being arrested during urban uprisings, images that tended to depict inchoate rage, and to fictional images of Blacks that minimized American racism, such as the prime-­time programs I Spy and Julia. Broadcast on New York’s leading independent commercial station, wnew, Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant was one of the first of what would become a national genre of Black public-­affairs television. It was the only Black public-­affairs program to focus intensively on a single neighborhood, albeit one of the largest African American communities in the country, with at least 400,000 residents in 1967.1 This chapter examines the implications of both the aesthetics and the content of Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant’s first two years of production. Building on my analysis of twenty-­three archived episodes of the program, letters to the program, and oral history interviews with three of the program’s producers and one former host, I explore how this low-­budget television show articulated a positive picture of Brooklyn’s Bedford-­Stuyvesant that intentionally emphasized the community’s divergence from outside impressions of the community. The program initially aimed to challenge negative stereotypes while demonstrating that the community’s problems were deserving of state financial support. Ultimately, it did much more: with its personable and even-­handed hosts acting as ambassadors, Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant offered political and cultural visibility, claimed spaces, and depicted and supported a lively Black public sphere. In doing so, it transformed television from a site of oppression and exclusion to a site for liberation, by providing a mode of rhetorical self-­defense to racist discourses circulating in the culture, documenting and encouraging activism, and celebrating Black artistic and political achievements. The program’s history illustrates how a television show that focused so intimately on a single community could articulate alternative visions for Black life and Black community that were relevant to many situations beyond the neighborhood’s boundaries. Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant centered the neighborhood it documented in two important ways. First, the program, by its existence and focus on homegrown talent and political organizing, declared Bedford-­Stuyvesant to be an important discursive and cultural center. This was a significant claim in a city where Harlem, with its nationally known cultural output and outspoken political leadership, dominated claims to iconic status as a Black metropolis. Bedford-­Stuyvesant was seldom considered in cultural terms or as a political powerhouse. Second, the program actively centered Bedford-­Stuyvesant by drawing neighbors together, interconnecting disWelco m e to I nsi d e Bed fo rd-­Stuyvesant 25

parate elements while allowing participants to rebut arguments with which they disagreed. On the program, the neighborhood was shown to be not simply a physical space but a vibrant Black public sphere. In the Black Power era, greater independent media resources and distribution channels facilitated African Americans’ speaking both within their own communities and to a wider public—a “counterpublic strategy,” in Catherine Squires’s terms. Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant employed this strategy, but it also mobilized an enclave strategy: its hosts spoke to Black audiences with insider references, fully aware that Black audiences might have different understandings than other audience members. The simultaneous mobilization of these two strategies for Black publics created a program on which, as letters from viewers demonstrate, multiple interpretations were possible, yet the critique of present conditions in Black America was universally apparent. The Origins of Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant: Bedford-­Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation

In the summer of 1964, unrest turned into an uprising in Brooklyn’s Bedford-­ Stuyvesant. An incident between young people and police sparked a riot by residents, who were angered by housing conditions and a lack of city services in the neighborhood. Journalists later labeled this and a nearly simultaneous uprising in Harlem the beginnings of “the long hot summers” of civil unrest.2 Despite the unrest and the substantial size of the community, media coverage of Bedford-­Stuyvesant was minimal, even in comparison to other maligned and misrepresented Black communities, Harlem included. The only media attention the neighborhood received commented on the abysmal living conditions of some residents. In 1966, in an attempt to address these conditions, activists from the Central Brooklyn Coordinating Council invited U.S. senator Robert F. Kennedy, a Democrat from New York, to tour Bedford-­Stuyvesant.3 At the end of the tour, the activists—among them the coordinating council leader Elsie Richardson and the prominent local judge Thomas Jones—challenged Kennedy to help the community.4 When Kennedy proposed to study the area, Richardson responded emphatically, “No more surveys. We’ve been surveyed to death.”5 As recently as the 1950s, Bedford-­Stuyvesant had been a racially and economically mixed community with a comfortable standard of living and a solid residential core of brownstone row houses. Between 1940 and 1960, the neighborhood shifted from being 75 percent white to 85 percent Afri26  Chapter O n e

can American and Latino, and by the summer of 1964 it had a reputation among many outsiders as “one of the largest ghettoes in the United States.”6 Because of conditions created by redlining—a practice in which banks refused to grant loans or mortgages to African American businesses and homeowners—many African Americans in Bedford-­Stuyvesant in the 1960s paid high rents for substandard housing.7 Redlining and real estate speculation intensified the demographic shift set in motion by suburban homeownership and highway expansion. Yet Bedford-­Stuyvesant retained a substantial middle class of African American and Caribbean American homeowners and a large number of beautiful brownstones, despite its economic decline. In 1967, Kennedy’s collaboration with activists in Brooklyn launched Bedford-­ Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation (bsrc), the country’s first community-­development corporation. The concept of community-­ development corporations came into being as part of the Special Impact Program, a piece of War on Poverty legislation from 1967 that amended the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964. Community-­development corporations intended to address critical problems by attracting private investment into under-­resourced neighborhoods. Johnson’s idea was that through these government-­funded corporations, community action would replace cumbersome state bureaucracy and provide direct service to the poor.8 This mission appealed to some local activists, as well as to liberals who wanted to contribute to improving life in “the ghetto.” The emphasis on private, nongovernmental response appealed to conservatives. Kennedy did not choose Bedford-­Stuyvesant for his experiment with community development by chance: he described himself as being “impressed with civic life” in the area.9 Another possible reason for the choice was that Bedford-­Stuyvesant did not have a powerful and media-­savvy Black elected official comparable to Harlem’s congressman Adam Clayton Powell.10 The community was sufficiently poor to justify the corporation’s necessity, yet it also had a middle-­class base and a strong set of institutions, including the Pratt Institute, with a vested interest in working to improve conditions. Furthermore, the community had beautiful homes that could be restored.11 It was on these homes that the bsrc focused its initial efforts, sponsoring employment and neighborhood improvement programs that trained unemployed local people to rehabilitate the area’s ailing housing stock. An enthusiastic article about the corporation appeared in an issue of Life magazine from March 8, 1968. Calling the corporation a “ray of hope,” Welco m e to I nsi d e Bed fo rd-­Stuyvesant 27

the article’s writer, a white journalist named Jack Newfield, took a positive, even promotional view of the promise of community-­development corporations for poor neighborhoods.12 Newfield, who had grown up in Bedford-­Stuyvesant, acknowledged that the bsrc had thus far produced mixed results. Many of the program’s graduates, even those with demonstrable skills, were nonetheless shut out of jobs by racist unions and employers. Despite this discouraging result, Newfield still described the corporation in idealistic terms: “The project is a holistic, systematic attack on urban poverty starting with the idea of convincing private enterprise to invest massively in the ghetto. ‘Because of Vietnam there just isn’t enough federal money available to do the job’ says Senator Kennedy who developed the project with his staff, ‘so we must convince the private sector that it is their responsibility too. They can create dignifying jobs—not welfare handouts—for the poor.’”13 Recognizing the potential power of such media exposure to improve the image of Bedford-­Stuyvesant, Fred Papert, a bsrc board member, proposed that the bsrc start a television show of its own. Papert’s suggestion, made shortly after the release of the Kerner report, also came in response to the report’s criticism of the media for ignoring Black issues while sensationalizing riots. Papert suggested that the bsrc could organize a program illustrating the achievements of individuals and groups from the neighborhood. Initially, bsrc staff members asked Leslie Lacey, an African American children’s author, to produce the program. According to Charles Hobson, Lacey found the “Kennedy people” difficult to work with and passed the job on to him. Hobson worked at the time for wbai, an independent, progressive radio station in New York City affiliated with the Pacifica Network. Now a well-­known documentary filmmaker, he had grown up in Bedford-­Stuyvesant, and he prepared a proposal for the program describing the beauty, character, and vitality of the neighborhood as he hoped to represent it.14 The bsrc approached wnew (Channel 5, in New York City) and worked out an agreement to air the show. Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant relied on both foundation sponsors and corporate sponsors to subsidize its appearance on commercial television. The mixture of sponsors it attracted reveals that both corporations and foundations were aware of and responsive to a changing racial atmosphere in the years after the uprisings. First National City Bank, Commonwealth Edison, and New York Telephone all funded the initial episodes. In subsequent seasons, the program also received funding from Coca-­Cola. Each of Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant’s funders had its own interest in African American rep28  Chapter O n e

resentations or in Bedford-­Stuyvesant as a community. Banks and utilities most likely gave to the program to display their generosity at a time when they were the targets of criticism and protest by community residents, for both their poor services to neighborhood residents and their employment practices. Dating back to the 1930s, civil rights groups had targeted both Consolidated Edison and New York Telephone for employment discrimination against African Americans and other groups.15 According to the former bsrc staff member Ben Gelascoe, companies like Consolidated Edison had many African American consumers in Bedford-­Stuyvesant; contributing to the program was an effort to represent the company’s ostensible goodwill toward the Black community.16 These companies used the advertising space in Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant’s first season to attempt to broadcast their changing employment practices, undoubtedly in response both to new legislation and to the urban uprisings of the previous summers. The show’s broadcasts also included advertisements that directly solicited African American applicants for employment with the utilities, a practice no doubt influenced by a rising tide of support for affirmative action and greater enforcement of equal-­opportunity ­regulations. The Ford Foundation and the Stearns Foundation, both of which helped fund Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant, also funded antipoverty organizations and efforts more broadly. In the case of Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant, foundation support for a program on commercial television that was clearly not commercial in the conventional sense suggests that the distinction between public and commercial television remained somewhat fuzzy. Indeed, Black public-­affairs television itself blurred the distinction between commercial and public television in this era, as both kinds of broadcast outlets responded to the pressures to create Black programming. At the premiere of Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant, in April 1968, Fred Papert spoke of the paucity of media resources available in the community: “The series is a perfect example of television being as good for the audience as it is for the sponsors. It’s responsive to the basic communications needs of the nearly half million people who live in this community who up to now have boasted no radio, television or daily newspaper of their own.”17 Showing the Good Side of the Ghetto

Newsweek quoted the producers of Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant, saying that the show focused on the “‘good side of the ghetto,” and the New York Times described the show as “a mixture of neighborhood news, interviews, and Welco m e to I nsi d e Bed fo rd-­Stuyvesant 29

entertainment television.”18 The windblown hosts Roxie Roker and Jim Lowry (see figures 1.1 and 1.2) linked the program’s seemingly incongruous elements, including outdoor performances, news segments, and community forums. The pair interviewed Black Panthers and Black congressional hopefuls, introduced performances by musicians such as the Persuasions and Max Roach, and gave a platform to local activists. The thirteen episodes of Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant’s first season were created with a low budget of $45,000.19 This resulted in hastily filmed and edited footage that appeared sloppy by television conventions of the time. It was clearly the content that attracted the audience, not the style. In an interview, Charles Hobson recalled: “Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant was a very minuscule production . . . minimal production values. . . . In a way, if the content weren’t so interesting and historic it would almost be like an embarrassment. . . . We worked with what we had.”20 The decision to film outdoors, likely made due to budget limitations, nonetheless created a distinctive aesthetic. This style emphasized the accessibility of the program and created a significantly different feel than that of a studio-­based program. The hosts and crew became a familiar sight in the neighborhood, increasing the comfort level of Bedford-­Stuyvesant residents with the program. The program’s accessibility, unusual for television of this era, made it porous: individuals could and did walk on camera during the filming and as a result were featured in the broadcast. Most local news coverage of African American communities, by contrast, consisted of a breathless, get-­in-­and-­get-­out-­with-­a-­story style of journalism, eschewing the sustained engagement of Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant. Filming the program throughout the neighborhood invited viewers from many parts of the community and showcased the diversity of the area’s architecture, public spaces, and institutions. By naming these locations “inside,” as the title suggests, the program claimed them as being part of Bedford-­ Stuyvesant and proudly marked it as a beloved and thriving community, a strategy that helped to improve the community’s image in the minds of both residents and nonresidents. Defining Bedford-­Stuyvesant’s boundaries in a positive way also addressed the notion that the community was, as the Life article on the bsrc described it, a “growing slum with amoeba-­like boundaries that render its exact geographical limits uncertain.”21 Pointing to this amorphousness, the bsrc’s own Thomas R. Jones said, “Bedford-­Stuyvesant is wherever Negroes live.”22 Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant’s strategy of claiming spaces within the neighborhood recontextualized this designation of amorphous30  Chapter O n e

Figure 1.1. Roxie Roker (right) and Jim Lowry (left) on

episode 1, season 1, of Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant.

Figure 1.2. Roxie Roker on Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant.

ness, which in the context of the Life article is layered with thinly veiled fears about New York’s growing African American population. The program asserts that being located in the Bedford-­Stuyvesant area is a positive attribute and that the neighborhood is not a festering, amorphous space but a vibrant community. The choices of location emphasized attractive public spaces, such as Brower Park and Fulton Park, and educational establishments, such as the Pratt Institute. The program was able to document buildings and infrastructure, in keeping with the bsrc’s mission of architectural renovation and preservation. The program’s mission to convey both the decay of the community’s infrastructure and Bedford-­Stuyvesant’s beauty is evident in its first press release: “The scenes of Bedford-­Stuyvesant . . . will show beauty and squalor side by side—brilliant people in the midst of decaying homes. Restoration Corporation intends to make Bedford-­Stuyvesant once again the garden spot of Brooklyn through the wonderful people who live here.”23 Airing images of decay had the potential to catalyze reform, justifying the private and government funds channeled into the community. Nonetheless, the show chose to emphasize beauty more than decay. This choice suggests that the makers of Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant felt that that the need to offer images that countered dominant depictions of ghetto pathology was as great as the need to demonstrate dilapidation in order to obtain greater investment in the community. Several audiences and their needs competed for the program’s focus: community members and the potential audience of government officials, foundations, and corporate funders. The opening theme of Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant conveyed that the neighborhood itself would play a starring role in the program, but the theme clearly suffered in the production process, due to time and budget constraints. Many of the shots included text that appeared onscreen too briefly to be legible. In a series of very quick, consecutive shots, the viewer sees the neighborhood. The first image is the Brooklyn Bridge, the next shows the street sign at Fulton and Nostrand, at the heart of Bedford-­ Stuyvesant and very close to the bsrc office. Several shots pan down from tall, ornate buildings to street level. A final series of images shows neighborhood residents coming out of the subway and getting on the bus. The casual nature of some of the cinematography and editing added to the program’s spontaneous and improvisational style—a style that was explored by some of the musicians who appeared on the show. The music in the opening, an instrumental version of Aretha Franklin’s “Respect,” aptly summarizes the attitude the program’s hosts displayed for neighborhood 32  Chapter O n e

residents as well as the show’s audience. Yet the broadcast time contrasted with the ideal of respect, markedly demonstrating the minimal resources devoted to Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant. Its 1:00 a.m. and 7:00 a.m. time slots created cognitive dissonance when contrasted to the program’s feeling of immediacy: the show was always shot in bright sunshine with many people milling about, and thus 1:00 a.m. viewers could be absolutely certain they were not watching a live broadcast. Naturally, the patently marginal time slot was criticized by guests on the program and by audience members. Audience members refused to accept their status as second-­class viewers, regularly writing to ask that the program be moved to a more convenient viewing time. The most notable on-­air critique of the time slot came from Harry Belafonte, who asked, “Is this the best they can do for us?” Officials with the bsrc were more circumspect in their criticism of the program’s marginal time slot. Franklin Thomas, the director of the bsrc, interviewed by the New York Times the day before the show’s premiere, acknowledged that the time was far from ideal but called it “a start.”24 The station offered the bsrc a discount on airtime, but apparently it was not enough to buy a better time slot.25 Hosts as Ambassadors: Mediating a Counterpublic

The warm and casual banter between Jim Lowry and Roxie Roker, the hosts of Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant for its first two seasons, attracted loyal viewers despite the inconvenient airtime and led to a run that was longer than expected. The following exchange was typical of the program’s opening minutes: Lowry: Welcome to Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant, your community program. . . . I love to say that, I feel good. . . . You gonna billboard us, Roxie? Roker: Oh yes, I’d like to say the program was brought to us by Con Ed, New York Telephone, and Coca-­Cola. Lowry: Right, and I understand you are going to have a very interesting guest. Roker: Yes, her name is Ms. Jordan, and she has her own dress manufacturing company in New York City, but she’s right from this community, here in Bedford-­Stuyvesant, in fact just a stone’s throw away. Lowry: You gonna model? Welco m e to I nsi d e Bed fo rd-­Stuyvesant 33

Roker: Oh no, no . . . I don’t think I’ll model. Maybe some day, our producer will work it out so I can wear Ms. Jordan’s clothes on our show. Lowry: Very smooth, Roxie! Very smooth. . . . Another thing, I think we’re going to have a forum, a new thing on the show, we have invited civic-­minded people from the community. Roker, an actress with some television experience, worked at nbc, where her husband, Sy Kravitz, was an executive. She had recently appeared Off Broadway in Genet’s The Blacks.26 Her recognizability and respectability attracted viewers, and her role launched her television career, which later included a starring in The Jeffersons. Numerous journalists applied for the job as Roker’s cohost, but ultimately James Lowry auditioned and was selected. An African American Chicagoan and Grinnell College graduate, Lowry had been a prominent worker at the bsrc for the prior two years. Lowry was serving as the associate director of the Peace Corps in Peru when he met Robert Kennedy. He was asked to give Kennedy a tour of the area. They talked extensively, and Kennedy prevailed upon Lowry to return to the United States to help “his own people” in a development model that was not unlike the Peace Corps.27 Eventually, Lowry acquiesced and joined the small but growing staff of the bsrc, soon becoming very committed to the organization’s work. While hosting Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant, Lowry continued to hold a full-­time, salaried position at the bsrc, thus forming the most substantial link between the program and the sponsoring organization. Roker also continued her work at nbc while hosting the show. The choice of Roker and Lowry to host the program, with their middle-­class linguistic styles and appearance, was a subtle nod at “uplift,” a strategy invoked by elite African Americans to counter racism by “calling attention to class distinctions among African Americans as a sign of evolutionary race progress.”28 Lowry’s looks probably did not hurt his chances of being selected. According to viewer mail, both hosts were very popular, with the twenty-­nine-­year-­old Lowry garnering special attention from viewers for being “tall and handsome” or “charming, personable, and handsome.”29 Hosting Bedford-­Stuyvesant was challenging but invigorating for both Lowry and Roker, though the working conditions on the program were far from glamorous. Lowry recollected that he and Roker would bring three changes of their own clothes to work with them so that three episodes of the half-­hour program could be shot in a single afternoon.30 Furthermore, 34  Chapter O n e

the white, unionized camera crews were often openly hostile or nervous about being in a Black community. Lowry observed that as afternoons turned to evenings, the camera crews “couldn’t wait” to leave the area.31 Lowry and Roker were the glue that held the disparate and sometimes incongruous elements of the program together in its first two seasons.32 The show’s inclusion of dissident voices was crucial to building a Black public sphere, and Roker and Lowry demonstrated this inclusion in every episode. According to grant applications, one of the program’s early generic models was the Today Show, and the hosts’ sunny and warm demeanor bears out that resemblance.33 The hosts functioned both as community members and as ambassadors, promoting a positive consciousness of a Bedford-­Stuyvesant identity and projecting a new representation of the community to those beyond its boundaries. This brought unprecedented media representation to the people of Bedford-­Stuyvesant. Roker and Lowry were often surrounded by residents milling around and mugging for the camera as they filmed at attractive locations. They modeled inquisitive attitudes toward different voices and points of view by being warm and responsive to children, local activists, and artists on the show. They mediated a diverse Black public sphere that was porous, responsive, and vibrant. When they interviewed activists or politicians, their questions were open-­ended, allowing guests a chance to speak for themselves. They did not try to represent consensus about what was best for the community—there was no consensus. Instead, when introducing particularly radical artists or activists, Roker and Lowry acted as ambassadors while representing the ultimate in respectable familiarity. Both Lowry and Roker were relative newcomers to television, and Lowry had no previous performance experience; his on-­air persona grew visibly more comfortable over the course of the first two seasons. In the second season, he experimented with a new look: while he had worn a suit throughout the first season, in some second-­season episodes he wore a dashiki, self-­consciously modeling his openness to new ideas. On the days Lowry wore the dashiki, he typically commented on it. In one of the first dashiki episodes, Lowry commented to Roker that the female activists he had interviewed had been “all over him,” and he attributed it to the new look. “It must be the dashiki. I’m coming home, Roxie,” he said. Roker smiled in response and said, “You never left, Jim. You never left.” Many in the audience might have taken pleasure from seeing Lowry’s fashion experiments. His self-­consciousness about it likely reflected at least some viewers’ own experience with the evolving Black look. Roker’s appearance Welco m e to I nsi d e Bed fo rd-­Stuyvesant 35

also changed: in the first episodes her hair is in a curled perm, while in later episodes she wore an afro. While Lowry and Roker welcomed guests warmly and with enthusiasm, Roker was especially gracious with personal friends. Educated at Howard University and coming from a civil rights milieu, she clearly enjoyed having some of her personal heroes, such as Harry Belafonte, on the program. “Let me introduce you to my dear friend,” she would say when introducing guests such as the actress Vinie Burroughs, with whom she had performed in The Blacks, or Hal Johnson, a friend from Howard. In addition, the hosts’ flirtatiousness with both guests and each other created another mode of interaction with the audience. During its first year, the program opened with Roker and Lowry walking toward the camera, often arm in arm or holding hands. In combination with this opening, their warm banter and Lowry’s flirtatious jokes created a couple dynamic, despite the fact that Roker was older than Lowry and her marriage to Sy Kravitz was well known. This couple dynamic created added interest and gave personality to the program, even though the difference in their ages and complexions made them an “unthinkable couple” for that era, according to Charles Hobson. The importance of the hosts’ role as ambassadors was especially clear when they practiced explicit framing in introducing guests. Roker and Lowry attempted to represent openness and objectivity, and their approach to each guest anticipated a range of viewer responses. In cases of the most outspoken, Black Power–oriented guests, they took what one staff member later called an “almost apologetic tone.”34 This tone can also be read as a plea for audience members to keep watching and keep an open mind, even if the points of view on the air were quite radical. Immediately prior to the performance of the Spirit House Young Players, described below, Roxie Roker stated, “What you are about to see you may not agree with, but I think you will agree with me that it needs to be said.” Lowry made a similar framing statement when introducing the Black nationalist activist Sonny Carson: “Today we have a very special guest on Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant, someone I’ve known for some time and have a great deal of respect for, a person who always speaks his mind out. Sometimes you might not agree with what he says, but you cannot deny the fact that Bob Sonny Carson speaks his mind out, he tells you what he thinks . . . and that’s why I’m glad to have Sonny Carson with us today on Inside Bedford-­ Stuyvesant. I’m glad you can make it this time.” Carson’s appearance is very much in the tradition of soapbox or street-­corner declamation: he casti36  Chapter O n e

gates Pratt for ignoring minority applicants while holding up a painting by a young Black painter whom he maintains was unfairly rejected for financial aid. Lowry gives Carson plenty of time to make his point. Yet another example of the hosts’ dialogue shows that they anticipated a strong audience response (both positive and negative) to their guests. In an episode featuring the Brooklyn Black Panthers, Lowry’s and Roker’s conversation anticipated a strong negative reaction and demonstrated that the idea of telling “both sides” of an issue had permeated the culture of television so thoroughly that everyone felt they had to claim they were presenting “many sides” at all times: Roker: We have an interesting program, don’t we? Lowry: Gonna shake a lot of people up, I think. Roker: Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant is always an interesting and versatile program presenting many sides. In this episode, Lowry discussed the possibilities for a Black revolution with a radical guest, the Brooklyn Panthers’ lieutenant Aponte. Lowry’s questions to Aponte reflect his own distance from the Panthers’ methods and aims. Yet the interview does provide an entry point to the discussion with Black radicals for nonradical viewers. Lowry asks, in essence, “What about someone like me . . . a middle-­class, successful Black man?” He spoke for some African Americans who, having achieved material success under capitalism despite the pressures of racism, were doubtless concerned about the impact of a Black Marxist revolution on their own lives. Lieutenant Aponte responded by saying that “after the revolution,” the backlash against all African Americans would be so severe that even middle-­class people would be affected and therefore unable to maintain neutrality. The earnestness of Lowry’s attempt to connect with Aponte across their different positions created a range of identification possibilities for viewers, without offering an easy resolution to their significant differences of opinion. In a program that featured women as dancers, housing activists, and welfare activists, Lowry again frames the guests in relation to his own interactions with them and his relationship with their political perspectives. Introducing this episode, Lowry says he is about to interview “some strong women” and laughs about his fears that “they’re going to eat me alive.” In the conclusion to this episode, Lowry returns to calling his guests strong women and joking about how he is irresistible to them in his dashiki. The episode’s segment on the Agroma dancers showcases the flexibility of the Welco m e to I nsi d e Bed fo rd-­Stuyvesant 37

program’s genre: as the dancers, who appear to be talented amateurs, perform a children’s dance and a rain dance in the park, Roker describes their movement and narrates the dances’ origins. For a moment, Inside Bedford-­ Stuyvesant is an ethnographic documentary—albeit one with far more respect for African traditions than was typical in documentaries of this period. This performance, like several others on Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant, is invested in recuperating African history and traditions. The larger narrative of Lowry’s somewhat nervous feelings about the “strong women,” evident in his interaction with the guests, show how much the hosts’ own political awakening was in process as they worked on the program. For viewers, watching this process—a shared experience in an era of rapid social change—facilitated identification with the hosts. Visualizing Community in Public Spaces

While the hosts were central figures and mediators of diverse opinions, in many ways the community itself was the star of the show. Many episodes of Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant showcased a live audience of community members watching the hosts and other performers; these onlookers became a central part of the program text. In an episode in which Max Roach performed outdoors on the Pratt campus, young people surround Roach, rapt with attention when he plays. In this particular episode, the credits roll over images of people who were performing and smiling for the camera, some continuing to dance, apparently to music still playing on the campus. In the final shot, a woman leans over her young child in a carriage and turns the child’s head toward the camera. This gesture of offering the child to the camera, at a time when so many negative ideas circulated about Bedford-­Stuyvesant, evokes residents’ comfort with the presence of the program and their desire to be represented. While liberal journalists, such as Jack Newfield in Life magazine, sensationalized conditions in Bedford-­Stuyvesant with descriptions of violent youth, stench, and filth, one sees a different side of the community in the hopeful gesture of the onscreen mother. Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant featured a space for debate, with several segments in which community members could speak directly to issues. These were called the “speak out” and “community forum” segments. In these portions of the program, individuals from the community could offer a critique directly to the audience—an unprecedented opportunity for residents of this maligned community to give voice to their opinions, both 38  Chapter O n e

within and beyond the immediate community. Sensitive to the importance of young people in the changing mood of the late 1960s, the staff of Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant also generated a myriad of opportunities for young people to appear on the show as enthusiastic participants in society who actively worked on community issues. In the episode featuring Belafonte, several students from Boys High School conduct the interview. Another episode featured a number of Boys High seniors describing the problems facing the neighborhood and discussing their college plans. The seniors speak eloquently and forcefully about their desire to return to the community after they finish at Harvard and of their struggle to get a Black principal for Boys High. In this episode and others, the show replaces an image of dangerous youth with an image of heroism, intelligence, and mature leadership. The recasting of youth in this context is a notable departure from the pervasive negative stereotyping of Black youth in most other media at this time. By citing indigenous experts on the community, while critiquing or pointedly ignoring dominant discourses from governmental and academic “experts,” the program introduced progressive notions of experts and expertise. In one episode from 1968, a community forum features a group of adults from the community, standing by a sculpture on the Pratt campus. Jim Lowry introduces the guests, citing their names, professions, and community involvements, validating their volunteer work and community leadership in addition to their paid positions. When he presents Mr. Charles Thomas as an art teacher, he mentions Thomas’s degree, emphasizing that local people were highly qualified experts in their fields. Lowry introduces Mr. Von King as a contractor, past member of the school board, and former pta president. He introduces Mrs. Lee Brown as “active with an adoptive parents’ agency.” Finally, Lowry presents Mrs. Hortense Beveret as an expert on Bedford-­Stuyvesant history, validating her expertise whether or not she held a formal degree. His introduction also values volunteer work in addition to paid positions. The segment validates both formal education, such as a master’s degree, and community-­based knowledge, situating Bedford-­Stuyvesant residents as experts on their own community at a time when outside experts were studying “ghetto communities” and drawing their own conclusions.35 The show offered a forum for this kind of communication: the program both foregrounded nonelites and documented “ordinary circumstances of black life.” In this forum, Lowry asks participants for their feelings about youth in the community and Richard M. Nixon’s bid for the presidency. One Welco m e to I nsi d e Bed fo rd-­Stuyvesant 39

respondent, addressing the question of youth, spoke of her admiration for what she termed the “new African identification,” a shift in hairstyles, fashions, and attitudes. She praised this change, calling it “wonderful” and saying that she hopes the new generation will be blessed with “wholeness as a person.” This positive intergenerational attitude, coupled with fervent praise for African American young people, markedly contrasted with prevailing portrayals of African American youth. In this case, television provided a venue for these individuals to assert their critiques of government, fostering Bedford-­Stuyvesant’s transition from an enclave public, in which dissent is discussed internally, to a counterpublic, in which dissent is publicly voiced.36 For example, in response to Lowry’s questions about the recent nomination of Nixon and Agnew, one participant says, “I am not surprised that Nixon wants to cut funding to Bed-­Stuy and Watts, et cetera. No matter what the platform is, we are not benefited.” Another guest describes Nixon’s attitude toward African Americans in the city as senselessly abusive, “like a mother spanking a hungry baby to keep it from crying.” Airing these political critiques by individuals who would not ordinarily be interviewed on television repositioned the kind of private political talk that circulates in communities and made it available to the public. This validated African American points of view while also presenting mystified outsiders with a deeper understanding of the Black counterpublic, which the political scientist Melissa Harris-­ Lacewell calls “life behind the veil.”37 Making Culture in the Ghetto: Black Arts

In addition to putting community members in front of the camera, Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant showcased local artists, demonstrating that “ghetto” residents were far from passive recipients of mass culture. Indeed, the Black Arts Movement was an important source of art and artists featured on the program, though the program also invited as guests artists associated with the mainstream, such as Harry Belafonte. Artists from diasporic cultural traditions, such as the Agroma African Dancers and the Calypso musician Lord Inventor, were also featured, as were undiscovered artists, such as local, amateur “finger poppers” bands that sang original and well-­known music. Nearly all the artists who appeared on the show had their roots in the neighborhood, and many were current residents. Because television, unlike theatrical events and many visual arts spaces, did not charge admission, appearances on Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant exposed Black 40  Chapter O n e

artists to audiences that were larger than the artists were accustomed to. Furthermore, television could reach people outside the immediate urban areas where Black arts events took place. Significantly, television presented an accessible venue to viewers who would not have sought out a Black or avant-­garde art space and who might have been unaware of the aesthetic innovations of the Black Arts Movement. Television also offered people who were not African American the opportunity to witness Black arts performance without needing to enter a Black space, which would have undoubtedly presented a barrier for some whites. In 1972, Lisbeth Grant, writing in The Drama Review’s Black theater issue, noted that Harlem’s New Lafayette Theatre “has never actually kicked whites out of their theater, but in the past they did actively discourage white reviews, and with a theater located smack dab in the middle of the ghetto, they didn’t really have to worry about a bombardment of whites.” Of course, Grant and others have pointed out that Black arts performances also frequently took place in front of mixed-­race audiences in downtown theaters “where whites (and some blacks!) felt more comfortable about coming.”38 Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant’s suburban viewers were probably as unlikely to come to Greenwich Village as they were to come to Harlem to sample such a performance. While much of the Black Arts Movement’s work circulated in independent, autonomous, or semiautonomous venues such as Black theaters or Black presses, television appearances by artists in the movement provided an important alternative showcase for this work, and archived television provides one of the few audiovisual records of it. Youth was a powerful symbol for Black artists of this era, as two performances by young people on the program demonstrate. The first, a performance of a text by LeRoi Jones (later known as Amiri Baraka), a central figure of the Black arts avant-­garde, was featured in an atypical episode in which Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant was filmed indoors. Because of the outspoken content of the Baraka-­written children’s performance in this episode, Roker prefaces it with a framing statement, “You may not agree with what they are about to say, but you will agree that it needs to be said” (see figure 1.3). Labeled by journalists “powerful” and a “wild ride” since its rediscovery, the performance features the “LeRoi Jones Young Spirit House Players and Movers of Bedford-­Stuyvesant and Bronzeville.”39 The players, a troupe of children who appear to be between the ages of eight and twelve (see figure 1.4), proclaim a strongly worded critique of American apartheid, emphasizing both physical and psychic resistance to Welco m e to I nsi d e Bed fo rd-­Stuyvesant 41

Figure 1.3. Roxie Roker introducing the Spirit House Players. Figure 1.4. A member of the Young Players performs with passion.

racism. A small stage with a carpeted floor is the platform for a group of children. The boys wear dashiki-­style tops in a simple abstract pattern, and the girls wear dresses made from matching material. The children stand in close formation, with the tallest in the back. The performance begins with the children shouting in unison: “We are young Black people of fine blood!” The chorus is “love and envy” and “America, America, why did you bring us here? America!” “Rape your mother, lynch your father!” shouts one girl, and then the chorus replies, “America, America, why did you bring us here?” Each child save one has a solo part, while the others serve as an ongoing movement and speaking chorus. The children describe a litany of physical, economic, and psychological abuses while calling for teachers to teach Black history in new ways. As each soloist shouts his or her part into the microphone, the other children gesture and proclaim verbal responses in unison. One section of the performance comments on Black history and pedagogy: Girl: Hey you and you and you too, teacher! Why do they only teach Black children about George Washington Carver and Booker T? What about the great Black leaders of the African past? Can’t you see—all these people are Black and a part of history? So why do they only teach black children about George Washington Carver and Booker T? Sojourner Truth! Yeah! Nat Turner! Yeah! Malcolm X! Yeah! Harriet Tubman—leader of the underground railroad! Yeah! H Rap Brown Be proud, proud, proud Boy: Are you proud, proud, proud? Do you like integration? Or would you like your own nation? Are you proud, proud, proud? Cause if you’re scared, scared, scared, you’ll end up dead, dead, dead. The children stomp at each utterance of “dead.” Baraka’s poem also critiques children’s fairy tales, examining the insidiousness of racism embedded in American culture. In response to one description of fairy tales and education as white, the chorus responds, “No wonder Black people hate themselves.” The text quickly moves from the culture of racism to its devastating effects on Blacks: Welco m e to I nsi d e Bed fo rd-­Stuyvesant 43

Mary had a little lamb . . . But Mary was white, the lamb was white, and what about old Snow White? Old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard to fetch her poor dog a bone. I lied, she gave the dog a steak and gave the bones to Ne-­groes. Neck bones, chitlins, made us gut eaters, whiskey drinkers. Baraka’s engagement with popular culture and folk culture is evident in the many references to Snow White and other fairy tales. This engagement with and critique of popular culture was common to poetry of the Black Arts Movement. The historian James Smethurst argues that artists such as Baraka were defining a new cultural space that mediated between an African American and an African space and identity.40 By having children vocalize his critiques, and by focusing on fairy tales and elementary school history lessons, Baraka highlights the deeply embedded racism of American culture, and the children, by rejecting the tales, are shown to be harbingers of a revolution in Black consciousness.41 Many Black arts texts similarly emphasize a proud and heroic past. The Black Arts Movement’s attempt at a “theorization of usable cultural past” was relevant to the children’s voicing of the critique of the Eurocentric history that they learned in school.42 Baraka’s poem resonates with Smethurst’s description of the movement’s focus on an “Edenic past,” a focus that considered contemporary Black life to exist “after the fall” in a culturally polluted world, the United States.43 Another episode of Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant showcases a conventionally trained school choir singing “Negro spirituals,” a performance that at first seems the exact opposite of the one just described. Yet the performances contained important elements in common. In both, children perform texts by adults, and they never speak with their own voices; the desires and influence of their teachers are central. In the performances by the ps 9 children’s chorus, the children sing what their white teachers call “African folk songs.” Many of the children appear to be African American, while others are apparently white or Puerto Rican. The freshly scrubbed children wear their best clothes, the girls in cardigans and short dresses and the boys in pressed pants. Some of the soloists are quite talented, and it is clear that the children rehearsed thoroughly. The footage of their performance was shot so that it could be used on different episodes; though 44  Chapter O n e

the children were only filmed on one day, at one point Roker welcomed them “back” to the show, a television fiction belied by the fact that the children are arranged in the same formation and wearing the exact same outfits as on the earlier episode. While the Young Spirit House Players signified the wisdom imputed to children and carried the burden of the next generation, the children in the performance by the ps 9 choir represent the “innocence” of children. Images of children were frequently used by civil rights proponents to represent the ideals of integration. The ps 9 group, which is at least nominally integrated, exemplified this ideal. In a more radical context, children were typically represented as little adults, small soldiers of revolution. The children in the Spirit House performance fit this latter description, speaking from an adult-­informed perspective to address and critique adults who purported to teach them history based on a Eurocentric model of the world. The ps 9 teachers and pianist appeared onscreen during the choral performance. One teacher comments revealingly: “We’re working with all the schools in the district with programs of other heritages [emphasis added]. And we are participating with music of Negro heritage.” “Are the majority of students at Public School Number Nine Negro students?” asks Roker. “Yes,” says the teacher. The teacher says that they have sung during Christmas at Abraham and Strauss, a children’s hospital, and at “some of the banks.” This discussion highlights the differences between the two performances: one that considers the students at the school the “other,” inviting them to explore their heritage as exotic, and the other criticizing the centrality of white tropes in literary culture that serve to marginalize Black expression. It is difficult to imagine the Spirit House kids performing “America” in front of a bank or at a department store. That both of these performances appeared on the same program is a marker of just how diverse a Black public sphere could be. The space created by Inside Bedford-­ Stuyvesant had room for both. Producing an Audience across Racial and Spatial Divides

Attracted by the opportunity to encounter a televised Black public sphere unlike anything else on the airwaves, viewers immediately found and watched Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant, despite the inconvenient hours of its broadcast and its placement on a network not in the “big three”—though many viewers complained about the broadcast time in their letters to the program.44 Some of the letters were angry in tone, others cautiously Welco m e to I nsi d e Bed fo rd-­Stuyvesant 45

optimistic but modest in their expectations. One letter asked, “Is it at all possible to have a show such as this broadcasted in prime time?” reflecting frustration and also understanding that the station was willing to risk airing it only as far from prime time as possible. An examination of the letters received by the program demonstrates that residents of Bedford-­ Stuyvesant found watching it to be a profoundly gratifying experience, one that inspired feelings of pride and ownership. Viewers offered support and proposed topics for the show. Letters often promoted their writers themselves as potential guests. For example, a letter from a singing group of twelve- and thirteen-­year-­old girls enthusiastically praised the show and volunteered the group’s talents. Another writer, who called himself a “concerned Bedford-­Stuyventian,” wrote with numerous programming suggestions, including a show on “ghetto schools” and a documentary on Black music schools. He also sent his own poetry for consideration.45 This same individual later wrote a very conversational essay to Jim Lowry, entitled “suggest-­o log,” asking Lowry to “dig these suggestions.” He proposed an episode about “young students of the lively arts classic rock group” and suggested they invite “Richie Havens, the black Bob Dylan,” onto the show, or “Milt Edwards, a talented community artist who sketches all manner and size.” Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant’s hosts solicited such audience interaction by frequently reciting the show’s address on the air. In addition to seeking letters, the staff created an audience survey with a return postcard. Undoubtedly, one of the aims of the survey was to justify a move to a better time slot: one question asked the respondents to check whether the broadcast times were “a good time for a program like this.” None of the few extant completed surveys indicate that audience members thought the program aired at a good time. Indeed, while the time may have made the show accessible for some second- or third-­shift workers, no one affiliated with the program wished to keep the program airing only at 1 a.m. and 7 a.m. Despite the audience demand that Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant be shifted to a more convenient time slot, such a move never occurred. Some of the letters and postcards show that viewers saw Inside Bedford-­ Stuyvesant as an alternative to and critique of other media representations of African Americans. One short postcard says, “The image was great, the clarity of faces good!” Here, “clarity of faces” likely refers to the way that film stocks, designed to give detailed representation of white faces, often did a poor job of representing Black faces. This well-­documented phenomenon cut across film and television, and it was an oft-­repeated excuse 46  Chapter O n e

for the exclusion of African Americans from both. This same writer goes on to praise the people on the show for having “no beards” or “stockings on the heads,” referring to the kind of respectable self-­presentation embraced by Lowry, Roker, and some of the program’s guests. The writer was pleased that “everyone was neat and well behaved.”46 Viewers also expressed their appreciation for the way Roker and Lowry, as college-­educated, middle-­class people, represented an image of African Americans that was seldom seen in the media.47 This “respectability” was a conscious strategy that aimed to appeal to African Americans who were tired of being represented as impoverished people who spoke differently, dressed differently, or groomed themselves differently—and it aimed to appeal to non-­Black viewers as well. The importance of “correct” diction in Black representations was hardly new: African American radio announcers had been praised as far back as 1947 for not being readily identifiable as Black over the airwaves.48 White viewers who chanced upon the program found it to be educational. Letters from people outside the neighborhood demonstrated how these viewers found answers to some of their questions about race issues on Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant. One suburban viewer wrote that seeing the show made him want to walk around Bedford-­Stuyvesant and see its residents face to face, despite his fears: “Many of us are tempted to take a weeknight or a day on the weekend to come to Bedford-­Stuyvesant to see for ourselves the world you are putting on tv. However, the ‘fear’ which keeps Negroes and white people apart makes many people look upon such as trip as not quite possible.”49 That a television program could even begin to bridge this considerable divide is evidence that television has significant civic potential. A few letter writers mentioned that they were white, that is, the “white, middle class Jew” or the aforementioned “suburban writer.” One white writer displayed both liberal support of the program and its ideals and some of the vestiges of white patronization of African Americans in building “race relations.” Addressing his letter to “Dear Insiders,” Russell Locasia, a resident of Astoria, Queens, praised the program but saw it more as positive civil rights propaganda than as entertainment or art: “Yours is one of the most constructive, down to earth, most alive and refreshing social programs I was so truly happy to watch.” He identified himself as a working- or middle-­class person who felt that the program reiterated a theme common to both Bedford-­Stuyvesant residents and outsiders: it expanded narrow conceptions of ghetto life. Locasia’s outsider status is evident in his Welco m e to I nsi d e Bed fo rd-­Stuyvesant 47

comments, however. He was grateful to the show: as he put it, the show “demonstrate[d] to an unknowing public just what goes on in a ghetto besides degeneration.” Familiar with ghettoizing discourses that predominated, Locasia appreciated the alternative presented by the program’s upbeat and comprehensive look at the neighborhood. Locasia expressed strong distaste for some kinds of Black liberation discourse, however. While he praised the show for eschewing the use of what he termed an “irritating phraseology . . . Black power,” he would certainly have heard the phrase “Black Power” had he continued to watch the show. Locasia also lauded the program for not exhibiting “helplessness” and for abjuring communism. In another vein, he noted with satisfaction the hosts’ middle-­class, accent-­neutral speech patterns. Praising “the fact that [the hosts] have no southern drawl,” he argued that although there is nothing “wrong” with a drawl, it represents “the unfortunate situation of the south,” which for Locasia set up a “psychological block immediately.” Locasia mixed admiration for the hosts’ “fluid” speech with pleasure in what they had to say. He praised the hosts and, seemingly, other African Americans, whom he referred to as “you people,” for their abilities to speak the “American Language . . . without strain, without ghetto traces, without fanatical reproaches, without tyrannical demands, without persecution complexions, without sympathy gimmicks, in brief, without vinegar.” In this description, Locasia referred both to the accessibility of the hosts’ middle-­class speech and his comfort with what they were (and were not) saying. Calling the hosts “heroes,” he closed the letter with praise: “The dignified humility you so beautifully reflect is evidence that you are not looking for laurels, but rather harmony in people and love.”50 In his excessive praise for the program’s appeal to “acceptable” civil rights discourse, Locasia does not reference Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whose assassination a week earlier had prompted a “national spasm of remorse,” yet the letter displays a clear nostalgia for the nonviolent approach that Dr. King represented to many Americans.51 By calling the phrase “Black Power” “irritating,” Locasia makes clear that his sympathies lie with a particular brand of civil rights ideology. Yet Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant rode the line between these differing approaches, and it demonstrates that they are not incompatible. The fact that the program could appeal to an anxious white New Yorker like Locasia, yet also attract audiences interested in hearing from Sonny Carson, Julius Lester, the Black Panthers, and the LeRoi Jones Spirit House performers demonstrates the complexity of Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant’s programming. 48  Chapter O n e

Far from rendering the program irrelevant to outsiders, the local nature of Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant modeled a community that individuals in other locales could relate to in profound ways. Black viewers beyond Bedford-­Stuyvesant clearly engaged with the program: letters came from African Americans outside Brooklyn. A letter from Newark praised the program for its documentation of a Black bookstore in Bedford-­Stuyvesant and proclaimed the writer’s desire that such a bookstore might open in Newark. In addition to the letters the program received, segments such as the interview with Hal Jackson demonstrate that viewers in neighboring Newark, New Jersey, which also had a large Black population, avidly watched Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant. Other evidence of the show’s impact both within and beyond Bedford-­Stuyvesant came from references guests made on air to the program’s devoted audience. Many of the guests praised the program but few spent as much time lauding it as did the radio personality Hal Jackson. Despite Roker encouraging him to speak about his own work, he complimented Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant at length on the air: You know, so often when you are as close to the scene as you and Jim are and bring people out, you can’t really know how much reaction you’re getting from all over. Now in New Jersey and also in New York where I do a lot of “stay-­in-­school” programs, I have found that this is the byword for all of the students, and, well, all of the areas in the community centers, everybody talks and everybody educates the children to look at Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant. It’s really not only a swinging hope and a swinging show for young people . . . it’s become the kind of thing that all of the young people are looking forward to it—I wanted you to know that everybody’s talking about it—not only talk about, everybody’s making everybody else look at it. Jackson’s perspective makes clear the dissemination of Inside Bedford-­ Stuyvesant beyond the borders of New York City and emphasizes that people made an effort to view the program despite the inconvenient broadcast time. A Mirror of a Community

Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant’s sponsorship by the bsrc, with its mission to rehabilitate housing and stimulate economic development, did not prevent the show from hosting guests who were critical of some of the effects and methods of redevelopment in Bedford-­Stuyvesant. In one episode, host Welco m e to I nsi d e Bed fo rd-­Stuyvesant 49

Jim Lowry sits on a stoop with three women from the Ad Hoc Refugee Committee, in Brooklyn, a group of housing activists led by Ruth Shannon, who argued that housing initiatives such as Model Cities were turning some community residents into refugees. The three women were on the air at the invitation of Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant to offer their critical response to the statements of Horace Marantzi, of the Model Cities program, who had appeared on the program previously.52 Shannon criticized the terms by which some officials deemed certain buildings unsafe. She spoke of planners who said one thing to residents and another to government funders about the viability of local housing. Shannon described her refusal to be bought off with a paid position on the Better Housing Committee, which was aligned with the housing rehabilitators. She was especially critical of churches and business owners in Bedford-­Stuyvesant whom she considered to have been co-­opted and to have colluded with developers to evict residents, thereby “selling out” the neighborhood. The appearance of Shannon’s group on the program, to refute statements made on a previous episode, offered a strong contrast to the prevailing logic of television, despite the so-­called fairness doctrine. Exchanges like this made Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant a model for Black public-­sphere formation and one of the most interactive media spaces of its time, offering unmatched airtime to poor people. The ultralocal focus of much of Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant’s content differentiated the program from the other Black programs that followed it onto the air after the King assassination. By offering a platform to a range of politicians, activists, and artists, most with direct ties to Bedford-­ Stuyvesant, the program showcased the achievements of individuals and organizations from the community and in this way presented a contrast to media and social-­science representations of “ghetto life” and “ghetto dwellers.” Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant offered Black residents of New York’s Bedford-­Stuyvesant a sense of belonging—visibility and membership in a community that demonstrated to residents and outsiders that, in the words of one viewer, more “goes on in a ghetto besides degeneration.” And the show gave voice to critiques of federal and local policies, critiques rarely seen in the media. The program countered the notion that Bedford-­Stuyvesant was trapped in a “culture of poverty,” by documenting the structural causes of poverty and by offering examples of community members’ cultural innovation and achievement. The middle-­class presentation style of the hosts mediated stereotypes, enabling the program to ex50  Chapter O n e

amine the problems of the community without reifying negative impressions and expectations. While some cultural critics in this period and afterward considered television to be privatizing and a destructive force to civic space and community, this program provides a counterexample in its conscious attempt to foster a Black public sphere. In this era of multiple and contested ideas about Black liberation, the show portrayed Bedford-­Stuyvesant as a place where Black nationalist ideas had taken hold and were debated, as well as a place where housewives, welfare mothers, and high school students all held and articulated strong political beliefs. Finally, because the program’s hosts were known figures in the neighborhood who embodied respectability, and because the show regularly featured Black nationalist ideas, a subtext of the program was that Black nationalist ideas were not mutually exclusive of respectability. Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant aimed to document and showcase aspects of the community that were neglected by the mainstream media. The program is unique among the wave of Black public-­ affairs programs in the Black Power era as an intimately local document of a specific community. One of the program’s central strategies involved claiming specific locales within the community and furthering the mission of the bsrc. Ultimately, the show exceeded initial expectations that it would simply counter negative stereotypes and run for a single season. Instead, Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant remained in production until 1971, launching the careers of its hosts, producers, and several of its guests, while offering Bedford-­Stuyvesant unprecedented visibility. Furthermore, despite its marginal time slot, the program’s producers took advantage of the opportunity to feature critiques of housing and welfare policy that, had they run in prime time, might have been censored. The program offered validation and a sense of belonging to Bedford-­Stuyvesant residents while offering outsiders a bridge to a seemingly alien world. For the contemporary viewer, it gives a rare perspective into a moment in the history of broadcasting and the history of the Black Power era. Perhaps most important, it offers a portrait of a community of families, activists, and citizens asking hard questions that, for the most part, remain unanswered. The archived episodes of the program provide a window into an emerging Black public sphere in one of the largest African American neighborhoods in the United States, a community that had previously only been visible to itself and outsiders through the marginalizing lens of media racism and Welco m e to I nsi d e Bed fo rd-­Stuyvesant 51

the pathologizing lens of social-­scientific discourse on “the ghetto.” The idea behind Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant was not to contain unrest by providing an outlet. Instead, the initial strategy of the show was to document and showcase other aspects of the community. In the process of showcasing what was going on in and around Bedford-­Stuyvesant, the program aired a multiplicity of viewpoints but was more understated in presenting its own politics, choosing instead to let its guests make the more overtly political statements. This approach differentiated Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant from the “outlet” programs such as Boston’s Say Brother, which is the subject of the next chapter.

52  Chapter O n e

two

Say Brother and   Boston’s New Principles  of Blackness ■■ In the week following Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, on

April 4, 1968, the streets of Boston saw little of the violence that raged elsewhere. City officials ascribed Boston’s relative peace to a James Brown concert broadcast live on wgbh, the local educational television station. Months before the assassination, Brown had been booked to play a concert on April 5, at a downtown Boston venue, before a projected audience of fifteen thousand fans. After the news of King’s murder touched off major unrest in other cities and some skirmishes in Boston, Boston’s mayor, Kevin White, considered canceling the concert to avoid providing a gathering place for a mass of grieving and angry African Americans.1 City officials decided to allow the concert to go forward but negotiated with wgbh to broadcast it live on television, encouraging fans to watch the broadcast rather than attend the concert. The vast majority of fans complied, and the turnout was low. During the concert, Brown called upon the small audience to keep calm, declaring the city’s mayor “a real swinging cat.”2 This approach succeeded, as Boston escaped the large-­scale public demonstrations and violence that plagued other cities. The recognition wgbh received for televising the concert was a critical factor in the decision to create an ongoing, weekly Black public-­affairs television program, Say Brother.3 In a speech delivered three weeks after the concert, wgbh’s director, Hartford Gunn, took credit for the station’s role in pacifying Boston.4 He stressed the uniqueness of public television’s freedom from commercial sponsorship, which enabled wgbh to preempt scheduled programming during a civic emergency. Characterizing James

Brown as a “soul singer and a dancer of the most frenzied sort,” Gunn claimed that Brown could “whip a crowd into lather in no time at all.” Positioning himself as a risk taker who had made the right choice, Gunn claimed to his receptive audience that “to have Brown perform before 15,000 Negro kids the night after Dr. King’s death seemed like an invitation to disaster.”5 He emphasized the station’s mandate to serve all Boston’s communities, emphasizing the station’s investment in being recognized for community involvement. Creating a Black television show allowed a publicly funded station like wgbh to counter charges of elitism and to tout its civic involvement, responding to the criticism educational stations faced as they consolidated in this era and became part of the national public television “network,” pbs. The station made no public statements regarding what it hoped to achieve with Say Brother, but in interviews, former staff members describe their interpretation of the impetus for this program and others like it: in exchange for giving African Americans their own tv presence and a few jobs in the broadcasting industry, station executives and government officials hoped that African Americans would express their discontent on the airwaves instead of engaging in street protest and uprisings. In the case of Say Brother, the staff’s articulation of their vision for Black empowerment differed from what wgbh executives had anticipated. Say Brother’s history illustrates how a television program created to contain Black anger was reenvisioned by staff members to express the Black critique and articulate alternative visions for Black life and Black empowerment. Say Brother’s youthful and politically active creators embodied a generational shift to Black Power and a lively interest in new Black cultural and political formulations. The staff at Say Brother, like the staff at many other Black public-­affairs programs, engaged in constant negotiations for power with the station. Indeed, in the first two seasons, Say Brother articulated a new vision for Black televisual representation that was bold enough to bite the hand that fed it, by criticizing the station that sponsored the program on the air. Ultimately, Say Brother’s staff faced and successfully fought the show’s cancellation. In doing so, the staff exhibited and disseminated to their audience an “oppositional consciousness,” an “empowering mental state that [prepared] members of an oppressed group to act to undermine, reform, or overthrow a system of human domination.”6 Like other local shows, such as Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant and For Blacks Only, Say Brother offered a forum for the struggles of local activists by 54  Chapter Two

offering them the opportunity to contest official points of view in a very accessible public venue. Unlike their Brooklyn counterparts, however, the program’s youthful hosts were of the same political persuasions as many of their most radical guests. Furthermore, Say Brother had a much larger staff and had the resources of wgbh, one of the best-­funded and respected educational stations in the country, facilitating an aesthetically as well as politically engaging program. The program alternated between studio and documentary segments, giving the show an entirely different feel from Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant. As in Brooklyn, Chicago, Detroit, and other cities with pioneering Black programs, local television offered a unique opportunity for an activist intervention, as audiences could and did demand accountability from stations in their own communities. The show openly encouraged African American viewers to see themselves as part of a Black community, one that was actively and successfully struggling for change and recognition. The title and the content of Say Brother constituted a call to action. Say Brother and its eponymous theme song were named for a salutation used by some African Americans in this era, encouraging African Americans to “Say ‘brother’!” The weekly program moved between acting as a direct outlet for community protest and for disseminating new cultural and political practices. A typical episode featured dance or musical performances in the wgbh studio, a talk segment on an issue such as racism in Boston’s schools, a reading of news about Boston’s African American citizens by a newscaster, and an experimental documentary on a topic such as “the Black elderly.” Say Brother’s journalists strove to make the varied communities that made up Black Boston visible, calling attention to poor conditions in neighborhoods such as Roxbury, while simultaneously offering a revolutionary vision to which members of the community might aspire. They used fliers to advertise the program in Roxbury and other Black communities(see figure 2.1). This approach represented a type of progressive empowerment through awareness, as opposed to edifying, that contrasted with the majority of other wgbh programs. While Say Brother was an educational show, it had a completely different style than more typical wgbh programs like The French Chef, which assumed a white, middle-­class audience with aspiring tastes.7 Employing both enclave and counterpublic strategies, Say Brother staffers used the medium of television to criticize racist hierarchies in Boston, in a forum recognized by people in power. Say Broth er  55

Figure 2.1. One of the promotional fliers produced by Say Brother

staff in the first season. Courtesy of Jewelle Gomez.

Staffing Say Brother

The young African American staff members’ urgent vision of Black Power shaped the program’s message and style. Say Brother’s leadership was entirely African American from the first episode, as was the staff, with the exception of a white production assistant and some technicians. While it might seem logical for a program touting a “Black perspective” to have Black leadership, the make-­up of the Say Brother staff would have been unthinkable to other stations, most of which initiated their Black programs in 1968 with white executive producers, white directors, and sometimes other whites in positions of power. Say Brother is unique among Black public-­ affairs television programs because it was Black-­produced from the outset by Jim Boyd, the original executive producer, and Stan Lathan, the original director. As Lathan mentioned in an interview, there was at least one Black sound technician working on the program from the outset, which was even more unusual as below-­the-­line positions were jealously guarded by overwhelmingly white unions in this era. The staff of Say Brother was also young: in the first season, all the on-­air staff members, the writers, and off-­air staff, including the director, were in their teens or twenties, which was atypical in the world of public television (see figure 2.2). Moreover, this staff was offered a significant amount of autonomy. While the overarching hierarchy of white bureaucracy at wgbh placed limitations on Say Brother’s outspoken criticism of racism in Boston, the initial environment allowed the staff substantial editorial freedom.8 They were able to choose their own topics for exploration with no input from the station. Stan Lathan was a young man from Philadelphia who had moved to Boston in 1967 to attend graduate school in theater at Boston University. During his brief tenure at the university, Lathan was a work-­study student at wgbh. He had previously worked at public television stations at Pennsylvania State University, as an undergraduate in the mid-­1960s.9 During his Pennsylvania internships, Lathan had been the only African American. As a student worker at wgbh, his talent, diligence, and outgoing personality endeared him to a number of people on the staff, paving the way for his return. By 1968, Lathan had left bu and his co-­op job at wgbh to pursue work as an actor and director with a politically oriented, multiracial theater company in Boston. He had significant success, but when wgbh contacted him, after the King assassination, about working on a Black-­ oriented television program, he immediately saw the program’s potential. As Lathan recounted: “They [wgbh] were smart enough to know they Say Broth er  57

Figure 2.2. The producer Ray Richardson (left) and the sound designer Richie Lee

(right) on the set of Say Brother, 1969. Courtesy of Jewelle Gomez.

should have African Americans running it [a Black show], producing it, so the closest thing they could find to any African Americans with television experience was me. . . . So they actually had to ask me to come back to the station.”10 After securing Lathan, the station hired Ray Richardson as the first permanent producer. Like Lathan, Richardson came to wgbh from Boston University’s cooperative work-­study program.11 In addition, the station recruited college students from Northeastern, a cooperative work-­study university in Boston with a large working-­class population. When Say Brother was still in the planning stages, wgbh brought in Northeastern students to work as production assistants on the program.12 Many of these students became very committed to the program and returned for multiple work periods. They were important contributors to Say Brother throughout the program’s first decade and came to be considered full staff members. Initially, the new program’s mandate was so vague that one of wgbh’s earliest recruits, Jewelle Gomez, a Northeastern University student, could not discern the nature of the proposed work from her job interview. She thought from the open-­ended language of the interviewers that wgbh had planned some sort of community outreach program and wanted to 58  Chapter Two

Figure 2.3. Jewelle Gomez on the set of Say Brother, 1969.

Courtesy of Jewelle Gomez.

hire Black students: “When ’gbh came to interview me about working on Say Brother, it wasn’t clear that they were talking about a television program. . . . I mean, I knew it was a tv station . . . but from the way they talked about it, I thought we would be giving out cheese, or teaching reading . . . at a community center in Roxbury.”13 The most likely cause for Gomez’s misunderstanding is that the station presented the opportunity to applicants with the somewhat patronizing descriptors used to describe many sixties-­era social programs. Furthermore, Gomez, a nineteen-­year-­ old woman of Native American and African American heritage who had grown up in Boston’s racially mixed South End, would have had a hard time envisioning a television show expressing a Black perspective on art and politics, because that endeavor was such a radical break from television as she knew it (see figure 2.3).14 In fact, no one had any idea what the program would look like: it would be up to staff members to make it up. Their vision for the program was Say Broth er  59

Figure 2.4. Hazel Bright evaluates a shot with a wbgh technician.

Courtesy of Jewelle Gomez.

far ahead of the infrastructure at wgbh. The station had no place to put the new recruits when they arrived, and the staff initially met in a trailer in the parking lot. At a loss to find African Americans with media experience, wgbh took Lathan’s suggestion to recruit from the ranks of Boston’s vibrant Black theater scene, where they found the talented playwright and journalist Hazel Bright, who was responsible for much of the news writing as well as the aesthetic innovations in the program’s first year. Because of the small size of the staff, Bright and other writers had opportunities to learn about the production side of Say Brother, as well. In figure 2.4, Hazel Bright is pictured evaluating a shot with a wgbh staff member. Other workers were drawn from filmmaking and the Black press. Henry Hampton, whose production company, Blackside Productions, later created the landmark civil rights documentary television series Eyes on the Prize, appeared regularly in the early years as a commentator. Describing the atmosphere at wgbh during Say Brother’s first broadcast year, Lathan said: We had absolute freedom for the first year; I think there was a tolerance that came about because of the time. At that time, we were able to say, “You don’t get it because you’re not Black.” These supposedly ultra-­ liberal broadcasters allowed us to do our thing. They started to tighten 60  Chapter Two

up the controls a little later when we were not the most . . . responsible journalists in terms of showing a balanced point of view. . . . We got away with a lot of shit that wouldn’t fly anywhere today.15 Lathan surmised that white fears of Black militancy and liberal hopes about the potential for Black self-­expression were behind the station’s decision to give the staff free rein. By 1968, after years of racial tumult, many whites, including the self-­described liberals at wgbh, were willing to believe that they didn’t “get it” and that Blacks should be given a wide berth for self-­expression. Black Power’s What We’re Talking ’Bout

As Lathan suggests, the young staff members at Say Brother created an outspoken and genre-­bending program in the first year. Staff members recall getting positive letters from audience members reflecting their hunger for the blend of art, talk, politics, and music that Say Brother offered. Through advocacy and risk taking, Say Brother rapidly became a fixture in Boston’s African American community. In one case, when a student was expelled from a Boston high school for wearing a dashiki, a large group of young people took their protest directly to wgbh’s offices, knowing they would have an audience with Say Brother’s staff. Say Brother covered the protest in the next episode. Historic reports on school integration, interviews with Muhammad Ali, performances by Gladys Knight, dramatic renditions of poetry by Gwendolyn Brooks, and creative dramas examining alternative perspectives on the African American vote in the 1968 presidential election are just a few examples of the content of Say Brother in its first two seasons. Unfortunately, all of these segments have been lost, as the show was archived only sporadically in its early years.16 The earliest extant archived episode, episode 7, offers a microcosm of Say Brother’s first year, which embodied many of the political and cultural transitions of Black liberation politics in the late sixties, such as shifts toward cultural nationalism and a move toward more radical organizing. The episode has a variety format, including an original theme song, performances by a musician, film documentaries, and several in-­studio discussions. Hazel Bright described the exhilaration of working on a show that defied categorization: “Say Brother, during the year that I was there at any rate, never was boxed into being any type of a show. One week we were a musical show; another week we were a political show. We might be draSay Broth er  61

matic, we might be filmic, anything we wanted to be, or we’d be a mixture of it all, or we’d be a talk show . . . whatever we wanted. It was thrilling.”17 The project of making Boston’s Black citizens visible and articulating Black empowerment was especially vital on Say Brother: this was an audience whose members felt invisible in their own city. The theme hailed Black viewers and created a unique televisual location by featuring local Black people and recognizable sites. Boston was a city without an iconic, nationally known Black community analogous to New York City’s Harlem. The film montages in Say Brother’s theme showcased ordinary African Americans, previewing a central goal of the program: countering the invisibility of Black people, communities, and life. The visual portion of the theme features a montage of images of African Americans in Boston with no diegetic sound. Episode 7 began with an opening theme featuring an original theme song, “Say Brother,” and a film montage that tied the program together visually and aurally and offers a clear view of the program’s ideology. The first image depicts two African American men shaking hands and then making Black Power fists, each with elbows bent. This salute obscures their faces; the viewer sees only their arms. This powerful opening gesture provides a forceful greeting to the program. It emphasizes Black communication with other Blacks and a dialogic relationship. It also highlights a young, masculine image. The visual design of the theme presents a photomontage of the hidden face of Black Boston: literally a montage of i­ mages of African Americans. The images, which show African Americans in Boston working, commuting, eating, socializing, and playing, attempted to portray diversity within Boston’s Black community, showing religious diversity, for example, with images of women wearing headscarves, possibly members of the Nation of Islam. The opening montage was a frontal assault on the prevailing invisibility of African Americans, especially ordinary people who were not celebrities or criminals. Furthermore, the use of the close-­up when depicting African Americans in both the theme and throughout the program was an ideological as well as aesthetic decision. Stan Lathan had been told by a white director that he avoided close-­ups of African American faces because he felt that white audiences would find their features grotesque. “I’ve been taking extreme close-­ups ever since,” said Lathan.18 The theme song “Say Brother” staked out the show’s position as culturally and politically Black-­identified in strident, upbeat terms. Created by the multiracial, experimental jazz band the Stark Reality, headed by a white musician, Monty Stark, the song was one of the few theme songs 62  Chapter Two

written for a Black public-­affairs program. Choosing the music for such a program created an opportunity for the staff to identify the program as Black. Not surprisingly, these choices were often contested by the white station leadership. Gil Noble, for example, the producer and host of New York’s Like It Is, struggled with wabc to get a jazz theme for his program instead of a rock theme. Vernon Jarrett used the spiritual “Wade in the Water” for a theme song to Chicago’s For Blacks Only. Not only did having an original song make Say Brother unique, but the song is far more explicit in its politics than other theme songs for similar programs, using the term “Black Power”: Men: Women: Men: Women: Together: Women: Men: Women: Men: Together: Women: Women: Men: Women: Men: Women: Together: Women: Men: Together:

I’m shouting loud . . . . . . and clear. I’m feeling proud . . . . . . you hear. Black is beautiful, you know. The waiting years . . . . . . are gone. It’s time to run . . . . . . along. Black Power’s what we’re talking ’bout. Say Brother! The Black man sings . . . . . . a soulful song. He sings for freedom . . . . . . loud and strong. ’Cause freedom’s beautiful, you know . . . . . . you know. You’re looking outta site. Your natural looks are tight. And Black is beautiful, you know. . . . Say Brother!

The song addresses the transition in African American politics from civil rights themes to a new militancy, reflecting the sense of urgency many felt at the time. It describes a transition in thinking from the “waiting years,” centuries during which Blacks struggled for full human rights in the United States, to the Black Power era. By 1968, many African Americans felt, based on their experiences, that the legislative changes of the fifties and sixties had little potency to alter their day-­to-­day existence for the better.19 The lyrics proclaimed that African Americans no longer had Say Broth er  63

the patience to “wait” while rights were “granted” but instead would “run along” to move forward on their own, using the strength internal to their own communities. From its opening line, in which men sing “I’m shouting loud” and women respond “and clear,” the song constructs both a division of labor and interdependence between men and women. The women are recognizing the men’s strength, and the men, in turn, are recognizing the women’s strength. They also both recognize each other’s new look, a move away from straightened hair and Western attire toward afros and new Black styles. The song portrays men and women in a mutually appreciative mode. The women praise the men, saying, “You’re looking outta site!” When the male singers respond with “your natural looks are tight,” they are praising women’s beauty and encouraging them to wear their hair and other aspects of their visage “natural.” Together, the men and women sing the line “and Black is beautiful, you know.” Both men’s and women’s voices are heard distinctly, as opposed to blending together; by keeping the voices distinct, the song’s producers signify the joint work of men and women in creating a world in which Black beauty is encouraged to blossom. With this theme, Say Brother boldly proclaimed itself as a beacon of pride: “I’m feeling proud, you hear!” The program situates itself in a Black revolutionary mode in which both men and women have a role, at times separate and at times collaborative. On the other hand, the division of labor on the program sometimes adhered to traditional gender roles, with men predominating in the directing, executive producing, and technical roles for the program’s first decade.20 Making the News Black

The performances of the on-­air talent in the remainder of the episode offer glimpses of Say Brother’s egalitarian vision of Black Power and of the staff’s employment of advocacy journalism.21 At the opening of one typical episode, as the theme song fades, Jim Spruill, the host of the program, appears on the screen. Spruill makes two Black Power fists, echoing the theme, before introducing the show. Spruill’s repetition of the gesture takes the symbolism of the two men shaking hands in the theme and incorporates the symbolic gesture into his introduction. In the news segment that follows, the young reporter Jacqueline Banks performs a reading of the news that reveals both the counterpublic strategy of speaking truth to power and an enclave strategy of including insider references. Banks reads a news seg64  Chapter Two

ment on the upcoming Black Power convention in Philadelphia and calls the audience to action, encouraging viewers to take advantage of buses provided by various Black organizations in Boston to attend the conference. While Banks’s reading is overtly polished and follows some of the conventions of television news, the news she reads does not pretend to objectivity: Say Brother takes a position on the events she recounts. In addition, Banks offers an immediate way to get involved, practically commanding viewers to get on the bus and go to the conference. Banks describes the bus that had been purchased by core to carry “brothers and sisters” to the conference and says, “It’s still not too late to attend. The conference is for us, and we must lend our support and all available help.” Her delivery of a number of asides, along with selective emphasis of certain words and phrases, further emphasizes the critique. Her script offers both exciting events for Black Boston and a series of damning critiques of Boston police and other members of the city’s mostly white establishment. Banks’s report captures well the social changes and transformations that Black Boston underwent in this era. Say Brother’s location, in Boston, home to numerous colleges and universities, meant that campus-­related stories recurred with relative frequency. In this late August episode, Banks also reports on a number of orientation events for Black students at Boston’s colleges and universities, giving dates for events at Northeastern University and mentioning others at Harvard and Tufts. Mainstream news programs would not have reported such events, especially at that length. To Say Brother’s audience, however, the upward swing in Black college enrollment and the activism of Black students on campus was relevant news, indeed. During the community news segment, Banks describes two encounters with white power structures that ended in successful Black resistance, providing a counterpoint to mainstream news accounts that presented African Americans as victims. She describes an instance of the Black community’s coming out to physically defend Black activists and an effective strike against the builders of a substandard public housing project. In both cases, Say Brother’s position is unmistakable and markedly different from that of other media. Banks describes a scene in which an activist group called Mothers for Adequate Welfare was en route to the main building of Boston’s welfare department to hold a protest. When they arrived, some with children in tow, they were assaulted by construction workers, who threw rocks, tomatoes, and “other debris” at them. Banks reports: “The alarm went out through the Black community agencies, and within a few minSay Broth er  65

utes members of Youth Alliance, core, the Black Panthers, negro, and Puro Afro had converged on the scene. When the construction workers saw the turnout from the community, they immediately went back to their building project.” Banks critiques the actions of Boston’s police, pointing out that although police claimed they could not identify the attackers, the entire incident had been filmed by another television station. She says, with heavy incredulity, “Even though a local television station had taken pictures through the entire demonstration, there was still not enough evidence for the police. To date no one has been taken in to custody.” Banks follows the critique with an open-­ended summary thought: “The question still remains whether members of the Black community should be forced to respect a police department that offers us no protection.” She reads this line matter-­of-­factly, yet she is posing one of the profound questions of the moment. As she offers this question for her audience to consider, Banks further underlines her disapproval of police negligence by setting her jaw slightly and following the question with a slight dramatic pause. The final story read by Banks presents a searing critique of urban renewal. Bundled with the critique, as in the previous story, the Banks script demonstrates the effectiveness of activism and solidarity in the Black community, countering representations of African Americans as victims that had predominated during the mainstream news coverage of the civil rights movement. Banks details the struggle over the Warren Gardens Apartments, a housing project built by the Beacon Hill Redevelopment Corporation. According to her account, the Boston United Front presented the corporation with a list of demands for better safety and sanitation in the buildings, demanding fire escapes, fire exits, metal stripping to keep out rats, and adequate maintenance. When the corporation took no action, local people, whom Banks refers to as “the community,” marched on the apartment complex, closing it and sending the builders home until arbitration could occur. In arbitration, the community demanded that new construction workers be hired from the ranks of Black “hard core” unemployed people. Furthermore, they called for training for workers who lacked the skills to participate in the project. Again, Banks openly advocates for the people of Warren Gardens and directly criticizes the redevelopment corporation. As in the previous example, however, some of her strongest criticism comes when she shifts into her polished, reading-­the-­ news-­as-­usual mode, pointing out that the “ostensibly nonprofit” Beacon Hill Redevelopment Corporation received a $4.5 million grant from the U.S. government “to build in Roxbury.” 66  Chapter Two

After Banks reads the news, Spruill interjects a piece of late-­breaking news. He reads a letter received “just before airtime,” lending an even greater immediacy to the news segment of the program. The letter is urgent in tone and benefits from the gravity of Spruill’s slow and deep-­ voiced reading of it. It begins, “Again this Black community has been violated” and narrates the story of a Black student who was shot by “young white boys” just days before the program aired. The student was reputedly “closely associated with the Black Panther Party” but is not otherwise identified. The letter describes how the student survived the shooting and was helped by other African Americans to get to the hospital. Say Brother’s inclusion of the letter, another example of advocacy journalism, indicates how connected the show’s staff members were to Black Power activists in the Black Panther Party and other organizations. Spruill reads: “There is a contradiction to the fact that a man is subject to the violence of an outsider in his own community—but then this condition has always existed in the ghetto. It is the essence of racism. A unique aspect of this incident lies in the fact that all the contradictions of racism have been heightened to the point that a Black man is not truly safe on the streets of his own community at any time, whether during a rebellion or during periods of relative peace. One is forced to ask the question of himself: Is revolution really possible inside the melting pot?” By voicing this question on the air, Spruill validates African American efforts to increase community control over policing in this era and some Blacks’ willingness to consider alternative models of self-­defense. He does not provide even minimal interpretation of the letter, allowing viewers to draw their own conclusions. Both the intentional activist pedagogy of the program and its youthful outlook are evident in Say Brother’s “teen reporter” segment. This portion of the program, which follows a short documentary about the blues, highlights Say Brother’s refusal to create a hierarchy between “hard news” and reporting on cultural and political transformation. Stewart Thomas, Say Brother’s “teen reporter,” was a regular feature in 1968, offering insights and disseminating information on new cultural practices in Boston’s Black community. In episode 7, following the news report by Banks, Thomas introduces a young woman, Nazalim Smith, a friend he invited onto the program to discuss an African-­themed ceremonial wedding that they had recently attended together (see figure 2.5). He explains that he invited Smith so she could share a “young African woman’s point of view on the wedding.” They narrate the ways they were emotionally and politically stirred by witnessing their friends’ vowing their intention to conduct their Say Broth er  67

Figure 2.5. From left to right: James Spruill, Nazalim Smith, and Steward Thomas. Courtesy of wbgh Media Library and Archives.

relationship and bring their children up in accordance with “new principles of Blackness.” Thomas describes in rich detail the Nehru jackets of the ushers, the African headdress of the bride, and the music of Hugh Masekela that served as the wedding march. Thomas’s performance is assured: he looks at the camera when he speaks, he does not rush, and he is highly descriptive. While Smith offers similarly rich observations, she is clearly less experienced at appearing on television. Though relatively poised, she appears slightly nervous as well as excited to be on the air. Nazalim Smith’s appearance suggests how Say Brother, like Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant and other Black public-­affairs programs, positioned Black people as experts on their own communities. In an era when social scientists and government officials rushed to judge and pathologize African American families, it is striking that on Say Brother the expert is a young Black woman offering a perspective on her friend’s wedding. This creative transformation of a life-­cycle ritual demonstrated a commitment to an emergent cultural nationalism. The bride and groom had used their wedding ceremony to exclaim their political and spiritual commitments to challenging Western practices that they disdained. By discussing their friends’ wedding in a public forum, Thomas and Smith continue this blurring of public and private, personal and political, extending the message of 68  Chapter Two

the wedding to the entire Say Brother audience. Just as the marrying couple promised to live in a way that reflected their pride, so too did Say Brother’s staff attempt to represent and teach their viewers to “live in accordance with new principles of Blackness.” After an in-­studio discussion on education in Boston and performances by the vocalist Gwen Michaels, episode 7 offers a poem performed by Linda Hull. The final moments of the show are a collage of images and sepia-­toned photographs, including images of children, raised fists, and uprisings. A closing image of a young girl touching an adult woman’s pregnant abdomen addresses fears of genocide that some African Americans felt in this era and also may reflect a nationalist emphasis on raising the next generation for revolution. Indeed, nationalist and Black feminist perspectives on maternal roles and child-­raising were debated on the show in subsequent seasons by Black feminists such as Flo Kennedy. In the eclectic and ambitious first season of Say Brother (1968–69), the program established its multigenre format and its collaborative work environment as well at its assertiveness and willingness to be critical—even of the station executives. The staff took on police brutality, “urban renewal,” the overwhelming obstacles preventing Black children from getting a good education in Boston’s segregated public schools, and other controversial topics. The second season saw this air of critique intensify. A Harder Political and Socially Conscious Vision

An article from 1969 in Boston’s Black newspaper, the Bay State Banner, declared, “The first two Say Brother shows of this season have taken a decided turn toward a harder political and socially-­conscious vision.” The author quotes the producer Ray Richardson, who described the aims of the show in no uncertain terms: “We want to direct ourselves to the masses of people, the people who are fighting off landlords in Roxbury and the South End and the people who are supplying troops for the war in Vietnam. We want programming which makes Black people aware of ourselves, not only to ourselves but in relation to other people . . . in relation to other poor people, Black, brown and white.” Richardson’s idealistic words demonstrate that the subtle pedagogy of the first season had become more overt by the second season. His stated goal of “making Black people aware of ourselves” demonstrates an explicit intention to use the program to teach the audience, to show them new angles on the age-­old problems of racism, and to offer solutions in the form of direct action. In the second season, the Say Broth er  69

Figure 2.6. Ray Richardson on camera. Courtesy of

wbgh Media Library and Archives.

program’s staff followed up on this mission by focusing on both local and national issues, in a directly critical way that squarely laid blame for some of the problems they explored. Say Brother’s staff did not limit their biting criticism to the outside world: they also challenged wgbh directly over what the staff considered to be their token status. Early in the second season, Richardson directly critiqued wgbh at the end of one episode. Hazel Bright recalls: “I remember Ray did a show . . . I remember he was advised against it, but we went on camera at the end of the show and I can remember Stan [Lathan] going in for this like, real close-­up of Ray criticizing harshly the management of wgbh . . . and I was so scared for him . . . but nobody said anything to us. He was very, very harsh, it was true; he didn’t say anything that wasn’t true. . . . He said that they [wgbh] don’t support the show, they don’t support Black issues, they don’t have a [Black] show but this one, and they have no interest in developing anything. He was just sort of telling them about themselves” (see figure 2.6).22 To Bright’s surprise, Richardson’s critique did not get him into trouble with the station, at least not initially. There were hints of controversies in the first two years that foreshadowed a major confrontation between wgbh and the Say Brother staff. Despite concern from wgbh and fcc that the show did not do enough to feature 70  Chapter Two

the opposing viewpoints reflecting that era’s understanding of the broadcasting fairness doctrine, the staff felt that they did not need to yield their hour to oppositional points of view, as the entire program consisted of an oppositional point of view to the rest of what aired on wgbh and other stations. The escalating assertiveness at Say Brother peaked when the staff produced a ninety-­minute special covering a weeklong uprising in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Given Say Brother’s reputation for getting the Black side of the story, it is not surprising that when uprisings began in July 1970 in New Bedford, the Say Brother crew went there immediately to cover the points of view of the city’s Black residents. With their recognizable van and reputation for representing Black concerns, they felt relatively safe going into New Bedford, despite the fact that the city was under police siege and violence was ongoing. New Bedford, a small city about sixty miles from Boston, was in Say Brother’s viewing area; the staff members had credibility in the minds of New Bedford residents, as representatives of a Black television program. The city had an African American community that dated back to the antebellum period, as well as a community of Black residents from Cape Verde who were largely employed in the fishing industry. Dependent on fishing and manufacturing, New Bedford was economically depressed in the late sixties, with a high rate of unemployment. On the program, Ray Richardson cites the New Bedford unemployment rate at 8 percent and the Black rate of unemployment in New Bedford at 35 percent. In this poor city where African Americans made up 12,000 of a population of 100,000, the African American and Cape Verdian community occupied the bottom rung of the economy. The entire Black community was confined to two segregated areas of the city.23 Say Brother’s special episode on the New Bedford events, which aired in July 1970, began with an account of how the rebellions began. Richardson critiques the news media for focusing on “incidents” instead of probing deeper to explore “the real issues” behind the riots, saying sarcastically, “We all know how it sounded—Black folks have gone wild again, you know, like we do every summer?” An arrest of an African American man in New Bedford on Thursday, July 8, for “disorderly conduct” had escalated into a rock-­and-­bottle-­throwing incident with Black youths and police. By the next day, tensions had escalated. Early Saturday morning, the situation was severe enough that the New Bedford City Council sent a message to community leaders on the West Side that the National Guard would be summoned if things did not calm down. During the uprisings, Say Broth er  71

a young African American teenager, Lester Lima, was shot and killed by white vigilantes. Two other teenagers were also shot but survived. A U.S. senator, Edward Brooke, came to talk with the community, and there was a simultaneous police raid on a youth center.24 These events were similar to those that sparked many of the uprisings that occurred in the sixties—­ except that in 1970, in New Bedford, some African Americans had the opportunity to have their say on television. On July 10, after the situation had moved unmistakably toward violence and both government officials and the press were labeling the situation rioting, the Say Brother staff arrived in New Bedford. They spent six days filming numerous interviews with residents. Jewelle Gomez recalled the tense atmosphere that Say Brother staffers found when they arrived in New Bedford. Groups of people were clustered on the streets of the segregated Black neighborhoods. While New Bedford had received substantial federal subsidy to combat its unemployment and physical decay, Richardson charged that urban renewal had actually made things worse for Black people, frequently displacing them from their homes. Over the course of several days of interviewing, teenagers and adults angrily recounted tales of joblessness, substandard housing, and jobs programs that did little more than keep young people off the street and provide false hopes to youth and adults alike. Gomez recalled, “Everyone felt totally disrespected. What people were being given . . . the attitude of the authorities was just . . . pathetic.”25 While the small Say Brother staff was overwhelmed and at times frightened, they were galvanized by the extent of the economic and social oppression that they had witnessed. The Black residents of New Bedford, who had never had an audience for their experiences before, were articulate and had a lot to say. Gomez remembered: “I think people felt enormously grateful to Say Brother. For the first time they were seeing themselves reflected, having a conversation where people actually listened to what they had to say. They felt a certain confidence that what they had to say would not be manipulated against them. . . . People in New Bedford really appreciated that Say Brother was going to tell the story.”26 The ninety-­minute episode was packed with forceful critiques of racial conditions in New Bedford (see figures 2.7, 2.8, 2.9, and 2.10). Say Brother’s staff spoke with groups of men, women, and young people in the street. Everywhere they went, people gathered around the cameras to share their perspectives. The overwhelming lack of employment opportunities was a 72  Chapter Two

common theme. Many of the adult men interviewed told stories of training for a trade that had been eliminated and of bureaucrats lying to keep them out of jobs. One man recounted a story of going to the carpenters’ union with a note from the mayor, after which the union representative claimed that he had never showed up. Many recounted being trained in the army for trades that did not convert to paying civilian jobs. Others described experiences of being told to travel long distances to get to work and then finding no available jobs, or of only finding poorly paid work as common laborers, despite their having more experience and training. One man said, “I have a trade, and it’s specified in the handbook of the Department of Employment Security . . . and they’re gonna put me down as a common laborer. And when you’re Black and you’re a common laborer you gonna get any shit job that they got out there.” Other men, gathered around listening to the man quoted above, chimed in, saying, “They always say ‘I’ll call you.’” Some described the irony of having served the United States in Vietnam but returning to little or nothing. One speaker brought up a history of workers in rebellion, demonstrating his understanding of the conditions of his oppression: When we talk about the white man going to war and not wanting to go to war because he’s in college, would you think about the fact that the average Black cat that ever went to college did it because he had to first risk his damn life to do it. This is what happens you know. Most of our college graduates are gi Bill veterans. Alright? We served, and we came out, and we got our problems in these cities and we think we know how to solve them. Man, postal workers in 1914 know how to solve some of the problems . . . before the riots first started. We’re out here now, and we can’t solve it. While the men spoke about unemployment, women spoke of the hypocrisy of welfare-­office social workers who refused to help the women find child care that would allow them to attend college or work. Young people articulated harsh critiques of social programs with Orwellian names like “Learning to Learn.” One young man said of such programs, “You could shit in the street for all they care.” The consensus was that these programs were little more than efforts to keep Black youth off the street. Over the course of the ninety-­minute special, the African American citizens of New Bedford emphatically detailed wasted federal aid money, overt employment discrimination, and Third World living conditions. This Say Broth er  73

Figures 2.7, 2.8, 2.9, and 2.10. Images from the

ninety-­minute special on the New Bedford uprisings. Courtesy of wbgh Media Library and Archives.

kind of analysis offered by “rioters” was atypical of news representations of civil unrest. Indeed, by offering African American points of view during civil unrest, Say Brother’s special episode did just what the Kerner Commission report had called for in the wake of the mid-­sixties uprisings. For those living in the abysmal conditions of Black New Bedford, the episode offered their first public hearing. For those claiming to be mystified by Black frustration and despair in this era, Say Brother’s New Bedford documentary provided some very compelling evidence. While some New Bedford residents tried to speak to Say Brother’s staff without using profanity, most were unable to contain their rage into language “appropriate” for television. In light of the extensive, articulate, and vehement critiques, Ray Richardson felt strongly that the people’s voices had to be heard unexpurgated. He refused to edit out the rampant profanity from the comments, choosing instead to air the program unedited despite direct instruction from wgbh not to do so. Richardson felt that the language of those interviewed in New Bedford might be the appropriate language to express their situation and point of view; conditions were profane, so their profane language seemed justified in his perspective. Furthermore, the objectionable terms were so prevalent that it would have been quite difficult to edit them out of the broadcast. Richardson’s decision flouted fcc regulations designed to keep this kind of language off the air. After the episode was broadcast, the program director of the station, Michael Rice, and the general manager, Stanford Calderwood, decided to cancel Say Brother. Rice said that Richardson, by airing the program, had “willfully defied the routes of fairness that govern public affairs programs.” Beyond the profanity, one of the chief objections to the program was that it aired charges of personal corruption against named individuals. Rice cited statements from Say Brother’s second season, including the statement during an episode from July 23, 1970, that “the United States killed both Dr. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.”27 He called such remarks unsubstantiated and one-­sided. Some staff members speculated years later that the station officials may have known that the episode contained the profanity but that they allowed it to be aired precisely in order to have a chance to cancel the show. Immediately after the cancellation was announced, sixty protesters converged on wgbh. The station subsequently held an open meeting with members of the Black community, drawing at least two hundred people. On August 12, 1970, Say Brother staff members released an open protest letter criticizing the cancellation.28 In the letter, the staff members charged Say Broth er  75

the station with using the profanity in the New Bedford special as an excuse. They were certain that the program was canceled because of its content. They critiqued the station’s proposal to start a community news series with a single Black reporter and a small training program for Black employees as an insignificant replacement for Say Brother. Acknowledging their role as a pedagogical force, Say Brother’s staff wrote, “By dropping Say Brother, which is the only Black-­oriented and Black produced television program in the area, wgbh has deprived our community of an important forum for airing issues, a powerful educational tool, and a wide audience for young, Black talent.” The letter called for the firing of Michael Rice in light of what the staff considered his “consistent racist attitude toward the Black community.” It also cited the civic mandate of public television, saying that the station had failed to serve low-­income people of all colors and called for the station to immediately implement an affirmative-­action policy to address “past discrimination.” Concerned about the possibility of their work’s being (literally) erased, staff members also demanded that the show’s tapes be archived at a local community center. They included information in their release directing concerned viewers to target wgbh’s Stan Calderwood in a letter-­writing campaign. After continuous and vocal protest from prominent community groups, the program was reinstated—without Richardson.29 Most of the original staff chose not to return, and the program took on a more national approach to covering African American issues. The new producer, John Slade, was not from Boston, and some of the original staff members perceived wgbh’s choice to hire Slade as a way of diluting the penetrating critique of racism in Boston that had made the show so vital to its audience. In an archived interview, Sarah Ann Shaw, a journalist from Boston who was involved with numerous Black media outlets, including Say Brother, criticized this new emphasis, underscoring the political promise of Say Brother’s local focus: “John liked national stuff, it gave him more prominence, local issues were important, but he preferred to be more global, but he wasn’t tying global or national issues to local issues.”30 However, Slade’s tenure was relatively short and later directors, such as Topper Carew and Barbara Barrow, did lead the program to cover controversial local issues again. Comments like Shaw’s suggest that both activists and media makers theorized that local media could be more specific in its critique, and therefore a more effective tool for grassroots struggle.

76  Chapter Two

“Say Sister”

Initially, Say Brother addressed Black women’s issues sporadically as it covered women artists and activists. Sometimes, art depicting Black women stood in for Black women’s perspectives. By the late 1970s, however, the coverage of women’s issues on Say Brother had expanded into discussions in which women provided their own expertise and expressed Black feminist perspectives. The move from cultural representations about Black women to cultural and political ideas by Black women closely paralleled discussions in the Black community that emphasized self-­determination and self-­representation. This increasing responsiveness to Black feminist agendas led Say Brother to present episodes addressing the struggles of incarcerated women and women’s health care, topics that were underrepresented in mainstream media’s coverage of the women’s liberation and Black liberation movements. Despite its masculine title, Say Brother created a rich set of documents about the activism of Black women in Boston in the 1970s. There was much to document, as Boston was a center for feminist activism, with organizations that included the Combahee Collective, the Our Bodies Ourselves Women’s Health Collective, and a strong reproductive-­rights community. Say Brother’s first special episode to focus on women, titled “Say Sister,” gives images of women and perspectives held by women equal weight: a discussion with the photographer Chester Higgins about his photographs of Black women are accorded the same importance as women speaking for themselves. The conversation with Higgins makes clear that his new book of photographs, Black Woman, offered a refreshing perspective on Black women’s beauty and that Higgins took seriously the idea of reverence that Abby Lincoln had famously called for. Nonetheless, the inclusion of a lengthy profile of a male artist in a special episode devoted to women reflects some of the contradictions of the era. In addition to the interview with Higgins, the program offered a discussion, conducted by the associate producer Vicky Jones, about the possibilities and problems of monogamy versus polygamous marriage. Also featured were performances by a female vocalist, a modern dancer, and a poet. The episode included a brief segment on Elma Lewis, the director of the National Center of Afro-­American Artists, and short segments on Doris Bunte, the Massachusetts state representative, and Josephine Holley, founder of La Parisienne Beauty Salon. Two short films, one of Malcolm X talking about women, Say Broth er  77

and one of interviews with Rebecca Lewis and Imogene Roundtree, also aired. The final segment featured two elderly African American women who described how education and employment opportunities had expanded for Black women since they were in their twenties. This patchwork of representation interspersed scenes of women speaking for themselves with scenes featuring men’s perspectives on women, reflecting an ambivalent response to women’s calls for self-­determination. Three years later, in April 1976, the show’s conventions for representing women had changed, doubtless influenced by the growth of feminist demands for self-­determination.31 Say Brother’s “woman-­focused” episode of that year, which focused on the Equal Rights Amendment (era), did not feature any male artists. All the guests, with one exception, were women. By 1976, Say Brother had become a talk show. The program still had a vibrant and large staff, but the on-­air talent was more conservative in their presentation style, and it is clear that the program had fewer resources and less freedom, at least aesthetically, than it had in its first two years. The transition to an interior-­only program that infrequently filmed documentaries on location, combined with long, static shots of “talking heads” created a stagnating effect despite the still vital content. This pattern of decline in budget and aesthetic innovation was typical for Black public-­affairs programs in this era. Stations had prioritized these programs when open, militant protest and demands were common, but they felt less of a need to do so as these demands became less vocal and uprisings declined. Thus, by 1976, the program was far more subdued aesthetically, and much of the production seemed less accomplished. Long, static takes, some including potted plants on the set, suggest that wgbh was no longer assigning their most accomplished technicians to the program. Furthermore, video stock, which replaced film stock in this era, offered far less saturated color and resolution. Despite these aesthetic shortcomings, the content of the woman-­ focused episode is riveting, speaking to both contemporary and historic concerns of the women’s movement. The highlight of the episode is a dynamic interview with the feminist activist Flo Kennedy, always an irreverent voice. Kennedy was a well-­known feminist speaker who, by that time, was popular on the lecture circuit. She was reputedly such a sharp wit and inspiring speaker that Gloria Steinem would not speak after her on the same bill. Kennedy responds to an opening question about the value of both the State of Massachusetts era and the national era by pointing out that the victory, if achieved in Massachusetts, would be largely sym78  Chapter Two

bolic. “Well, I think it will be a victory over right-­wing racist sexism . . . the right-­wing, church-­documented pigocracy. You will see people falling on balls: it will be triumph over a pathological society. It’s a symbolic victory, like winning a hill in Vietnam. It is a victory as it is their territory, and we took it away.” Kennedy refuses to get caught up with the era as a single issue, preferring the broad-­based critique for which she was known. Sparing no one in her response to her interviewer’s questions about the era, she alludes to divisions within the women’s movement, referring to the factions as “Madonnas, whores, housewives, and lesbians.” Yet she argues that these groups shared a common oppression, and therefore a common cause. Kennedy uses the strong language that she was well known for, calling oppressed groups “niggerized groups” and the government the “pigocracy.” Kennedy was particularly savvy about media. She had been engaged in media activism since 1966 and would later have her own television show, The Flo Kennedy Show, on New York’s thriving cable access network mnn. She also addressed the challenge of getting media coverage for feminists. In the 1970s, many broadcasters interpreted the Fairness Act as necessitating that any representation of feminism be bookended by the views of virulent antifeminists such as Phyllis Schlafly.32 Say Brother offered Flo Kennedy uncensored airtime, and she took the opportunity to describe the intersections of antiracist and feminist activism. She goes on to say, with evident disdain, that the “antiabortion groups” had Black women in their membership, which she criticized, saying, “[Pregnancy] is the largest reason for dropouts among high school Black youngsters. I am less concerned about the fight between prostitutes and lesbians. We need a coalition among niggerized groups. The right wing have it together—we do not have it together.” While Kennedy agrees with other presenters on the program that there is racism in the women’s movement, she argues that women should not let themselves forget the bigger enemy. Following Kennedy’s speech, other Black female organizers describe their feelings about the racism of white women, including white feminists. Kay Gibbs, a Boston-­based activist, maintains that white women will continue to pursue their own interests. Gibbs explains that affirmative-­action policies brought about by the era might pit Black men and women against one another for jobs and position white women against all African Americans. She voices the concern that “third-­world people” and white women would be placed in competition following the passage of the era and that employers could consider Black women a “double minority,” allowing Say Broth er  79

businesses to “check two boxes” by hiring Black women, which would exacerbate tensions between Black women and Black men. Interspersed between these powerful discussions with studio guests are short performances by a variety of actresses and two longer poetry recitals. The poetry presents a surprising and somewhat distracting counterpoint to the discussion. The first poem is a particularly racy account of a sexual encounter between a man and a woman in their bathroom at home, spoken from a woman’s viewpoint by an actress. This claiming of sexuality with women’s agency offered an important counterpoint to the desexualized images of Black women that circulated, as well as a counterpoint to more objectifying images. Another edited-­in program insert features a shot of an actress saying, “The women’s libbers want to ‘get out’ [of ] their kitchens—you know, I want to ‘get out’ [of ] their kitchens too!” This class critique pointedly exposes why some Black women, angry at years of abuse in the role of domestic servitude, felt distrust for declarations of sisterhood by the women’s movement. Nonetheless, the insertion of these and other scenes into the conversation with Kennedy and other female organizers, whether an example of poorly considered editing or an avant-­garde technique that fell short, somewhat undermines the discussion. Between 1976 and 1980, Say Brother offered a “tribute to third-­world women,” featuring Michele Wallace; an episode about Black women’s health care needs and activism; an episode about women in prison; and an episode about violence against women. One of the final episodes of the 1970s offered an hour with Marcia Gillespie, the editor of Essence, who was also a regular guest on other Black public-­affairs programs. In many ways, the prevalence in the late 1970s of women-­focused episodes, and the discussion of Black women’s issues, reflected the mainstreaming of Black feminism and the elevation of Black women to the status of experts on themselves and their own issues. While these episodes focus on the perspective that Black women are under siege, they also display optimism about possibilities for new roles and cultural change. These episodes from the late 1970s demonstrate increasingly sophisticated analyses of the intersection of race, class, and gender oppression. One episode features a documentary film called Inside Women Inside, created by the Third World Newsreel, a radical film collective. This documentary on incarcerated women features several incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women, as well as commentary by three women with relevant expertise on women in prison. The documentary provides a searing look at appalling conditions in three women’s prisons, along with extensive discussions with women prisoners. 80  Chapter Two

The program explores issues of physical and mental health for incarcerated women, such as a woman who lost a pregnancy to miscarriage due to inadequate medical care. It also addresses the destructive effect on families that comes from incarcerating women, particularly when they are the sole support for their children. After watching the film, a former prisoner in Framingham said that the prisons in the film (which were not in Massachusetts) resonated with her experience of minimal mental-­health support, unsanitary living conditions, terrible and nonnutritious food, and a sense of futility. This focus on female prisoners is a clear example of Say Brother’s taking up an issue all but ignored by mainstream media and exploring it thoughtfully and intensively, reflecting the persistence of the program’s early mission to serve as a forum for activist intervention. ■■ Say Brother’s local nature gave it the potential to be controversial in

the extreme while for the most part flying under the radar of the national regulators, particularly in airing episodes like the one on New Bedford. Furthermore, it made the program physically accessible and psychically accountable to viewers, who could and did march right to the station. After the New Bedford episode, it was the strength of community response that brought about the reinstatement of the program. In 1969, Black audiences could still accomplish this, in no small part because governments and business owners remained terrified of Black rebellion. The workers who created the show were aware that the license they had been given to represent Black interests was a unique window of opportunity. New to the medium, they made it up as they went along, always with an ear toward the community. Audience letters and protest show that their viewers understood that local television could address their interests when national networks ignored them. Say Brother’s localness was precisely what made the program accountable to its viewers, who could and did come directly to the station to demand that an issue be covered or protest the program’s cancellation. Yet this localness was also what made the program vulnerable, for example, to local politicians who were criticized on the air, to local businesses whose practices were investigated, or to Boston’s police force, who were frequently criticized on the program. In its first two years on the air, Say Brother sought to create an entirely new representation of Black Boston, a city with a white, liberal self-­image that would shortly become known for its violent resistance to school integration. Although 35 percent of Boston’s elementary school students were Say Broth er  81

African American in 1969, the city had a very white self-­image, making African Americans feel marginalized and invisible. As Say Brother reflected Black Boston to itself and to the region, the program represented new cultural practices in order to reify and disseminate them. It also provided a forum where African Americans who had been wronged could find an arbiter more open to their concerns than courts or police. Say Brother immediately departed from its creators’ initial urges to contain potential Black rebellion to become a program that could examine Black discontent and showcase Black critique, even documenting in New Bedford the very kind of social unrest that wgbh had intended to quell with the James Brown broadcast. Attempting to teach audiences how to live “according to new principles of Blackness,” Say Brother aimed not to pacify its audience but to electrify it. By documenting community members’ struggles for school desegregation, cultural recognition, welfare reform, political self-­determinations, and Black women’s fights for equal rights and adequate health care, Say Brother countered the invisibility of Boston’s African Americans. What Say Brother accomplished for Boston and what Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant achieved for Bedford-­Stuyvesant was a result of these programs’ responsiveness and accessibility to the local Black communities they were created to serve.

82  Chapter Two

three

No Thanks for Tokenism Telling Stories from a Black Nation, Black Journal, 1968–1970

■■ A veteran editor, Madeline Anderson had been working for National

Educational Television (net) for seven years when she first heard of the station’s plans for a new Black public-­affairs program. Throughout her tenure, she had been the only Black member of the production staff at net, the organization funded by the Ford Foundation and based in New York City that produced programming for public television stations around the country. As Anderson moved up the ranks at net, she began to exert more editorial control over the programs she worked on, but she recalls, “There wasn’t anything about Black people.”1 In the late 1960s, the absence of Black faces on net’s programs and of Black workers behind the scenes had drawn the attention of Emma L. Bowen, the grassroots organizer from Harlem who founded New York City’s Black Citizens for a Fair Media in 1971. Even before formally establishing her organization, Bowen put pressure on net by demonstrating and organizing letter-­writing campaigns, demanding that the producing organization expand Black staff at its office in New York and increase Black visibility on the programs it created. In response, the organization asked Anderson to speak to the protesters. She refused, saying, “Uh-­uh, no. Black people don’t work here. One Black person works here. And I’m not going to go out there and say that Black people work here because it’s one. It’s me.” Anderson refused to defend the organization because she shared the protesters’ point of view: “Let’s be truthful. There were not Black people at net . . . Why should someone always be interpreting our experience, and not correctly? . . . You know, ‘This is how they are.’”

The station shook off its reluctance to give African Americans their own voice on the air in 1968, after Martin Luther King was assassinated. “That was the real impetus,” Anderson recalls. The white producer Al Perlmutter had come to net from nbc, in order to do a documentary about the summer riots; motivated by learning more about Black frustration, and by the King assassination, he remembers that he “wanted to put together a program about Black interests” that incorporated Black talent for net. Ultimately, he was able to persuade station officials to transfer the funding for the planned documentary to the first three “pilot” episodes of Black Journal, a monthly Black public-­affairs program.2 As a producing organization, net already had tensions with its affiliated stations over its progressive weekly documentary series, net Journal, begun in 1963, which had aired controversial documentaries on racism and poverty that some affiliates thought were too progressive for their socially and racially conservative markets. Given these stations’ already-­ established opposition to white, liberal perspectives, it is not surprising that they were not eager to show a program oriented toward Black liberation. At a meeting of net affiliates in Manhattan, net’s program director, William Kobin, fielded a complaint about the network’s decision to create Black Journal. A program manager at one station told him, “You are going too fast for our primarily white middle-­class audience. After all, tv is still largely an escapist medium. They don’t want to be reminded of all that stuff.” Kobin replied, “You’re wrong. We’re not going fast enough.”3 This exchange suggests the conflicting currents of motivation in this formative period for public television: on the one hand, Kobin’s words demonstrate public broadcasting’s tendency to consider itself a free disseminator of educational, uplifting material to quench the cultural lack assumed of poor people (the “quest to cultivate”).4 On the other hand, the interchange shows that the affiliate’s program manager is comfortable with public television’s exclusivity and the whiteness and class status of its audience.5 Both the liberal idea of noble service and the more conservative impulse toward elitist exclusion, emphasizing public television’s status as an “oasis” in the “wasteland” of popular media, ignored the possibility of a multifaceted news program that could also be entertaining and engaging viewing.

84  Chapter Th ree

Speaking to a Black National Community: Strategies of Black Publics

Black Journal’s claim to advocacy and community was openly stated from the first episode, in June 1968: in his introduction, the host, Lou House, said, “It is our aim in the next hour and in the coming months to report and review the events, the dreams, the dilemmas of Black America and Black Americans.” The program editor Lou Potter told a journalist later that year, “Our challenge was to do something truly new and meaningful: Not just black faces bearing a white message, but black ideals, black achievements—a black world.”6 Black Journal was designed to foster a shared vision of a national Black community by transcending regional, generational, and class differences in its coverage. Black Journal had the potential to present its audience with a vision of common ground. As the program evolved, the staff had to work out what it meant to be a national Black television show. Black Journal was continually self-­reflexive about what it meant to be a national Black television show, asking questions about geography and local and regional issues, reconciling dichotomies of urban versus rural, north versus south. “We had to get out of New York, we took that very seriously that we had to represent the nation and Blacks throughout the whole country,” recalls the former Black Journal producer Kent Garrett of the program’s mission.7 Black Journal’s crew shot documentary segments in Los Angeles, Boston, New York, Chicago, the Mississippi Delta, Georgia, Detroit, and other locations as part of an effort to envision a Black nation and a Black cultural and political vanguard that moved beyond regionalism. This approach resulted in coverage of multiple locations, coverage that had the pedagogical function of demonstrating innovations in one place to individuals who shared the same problems in other locales. The program also reinforced the ideology of diasporic Blackness by relating issues in Black America to the diaspora, by comparing living conditions in famine-­filled Biafra to the conditions of near starvation that Blacks still faced in some parts of the South. Furthermore, Black Journal investigated the concerns of African Americans in a transnational context, even starting a bureau in Africa. By situating the topics it explored as common to Black people in many regions and nations, the program proposed that Black viewers should consider themselves part of an emerging Black world wherein Africa and the Black diaspora were vitally relevant. What did it mean to be a Black program, inserted into the very white N o Than ks fo r To ken ism 85

flow of public television, and television in general? After starting out under the white executive producer Al Perlmutter, most of the original Black staff went on strike so that the program could truly be a Black television show in its editorial decision-­making. The African American filmmaker William Greaves became the show’s executive producer as a result of the Black staffers’ conviction that Black Journal could only be authentic under Black leadership. Greaves urged the show’s young producers to “capture Black reality.” “Always try to make films about black people with the interior voice,” Greaves told them. “Don’t be like white people and just say, ‘This is what so and so say.’ Try to get the Black people to say it.” St. Claire Bourne commented, “That’s what made Black Journal different than 60 Minutes.”8 Black Journal alternately cited, critiqued, and celebrated other media representations, showing that the staff was keenly knowledgeable about the contributions of other media, especially the Black press, and aware of the implications of Black Journal’s location within a television flow that was often racist. Black Journal’s on-­air media criticism and satire offered a constant reminder that the staff were aware that they were producing a national Black television show with media commentary ranging from a sketch about the idealized images of African Americans on television, in episode 1, to a series of interviews with Black media makers in later episodes. Public television’s status as a beggar at the table for production funding forced Black Journal to internally confront the question of how a Black show could be simultaneously authentic yet created and distributed through a white-­dominated technology, funded by the Ford Foundation, and later by corporate funds. The staff’s self-­reflexivity about this paradox is evident in their attention to Black exclusions and misrepresentations elsewhere on the dial, highlighting discrimination in the media industry on the air. This self-­ reflexivity was most evident in the first several years of Black Journal, when its funding was at its height and audience was largest. The inclusion of self-­ examination as part of the program’s content was heightened during the transition from white editorial control under Al Perlmutter through the William Greaves era (episodes 3 to 25), to the first few episodes with Tony Brown at the helm. Tracing the program’s formation, from the strike to achieve Black control through the evolution of the program’s style and content under Greaves, offers a sense of the program’s ambition. Three early Black Journal documentaries highlight the program’s engagement with the questions of 86  Chapter Th ree

what constituted a national Black identity, and what role African Americans might play in the powerful structures that shape American life. These three documentaries examined Black relationships to powerful American institutions: the school system, the police force, and the army. Black Journal defined their project of representing a Black nation with respect to different regions of the United States, as well as in relation to decolonizing nations in Africa. Finally, this chapter examines the reasons for Black Journal’s decline in funding and influence. Black Journal under White Control

In the first episode of Black Journal, before the opening credits roll, the comedian Godfrey Cambridge appears dressed in overalls and a painter’s cap, with a paint roller in hand, and methodically paints the television frame. To the viewer, it appears that his or her television is being painted black from the inside—a potent visual metaphor that the program did not quite embody in its initial staff; whites held significant editorial control. Initially, net put together a team that included eleven Black staff members and nine white staff members under the editorial direction of the white executive producer, Al Perlmutter. Surprisingly, despite the dearth of Black employees at net, Madeline Anderson was not tapped to work on Black Journal; she requested to work on the program and was assigned to it (see figure 3.1). As was the case for the local programs, the network recruited the remaining Black staff members from outside public television’s lily-­white ranks, drawing from radio talent and the arts community. Perlmutter was surprised to encounter resistance to the racial imbalance of the program’s staff from the very first episode. When he sent a group headed by a white producer to interview the proprietor of the Black-­identified Harlem clothing line New Breed, the proprietor refused to participate unless the segment had a Black producer (see figure 3.2). Perlmutter granted the request, promoting Kent Garrett to associate producer, and the segment was included in the premier episode. Most net workers had little experience working with Black producers and talent, and fault lines between the intention to challenge racial boundaries and unexamined prejudices surfaced right away. A party thrown for the Black Journal staff after the release of the first episode featured watermelon and fried chicken, foods the white assistant who planned the reception thought were universally loved by African Americans. This provoked significant frustration among the African American staff members. InciN o Than ks fo r To ken ism 87

Figure 3.1. Madeline Anderson (right) and William Greaves (left) in

the editing room. Courtesy of William and Louise Greaves.

Figure 3.2. Black Journal crew shooting in Harlem with William Greaves (center).

Courtesy of William and Louise Greaves.

dents like this demonstrate that despite Perlmutter’s intentions to foster an alternative Black perspective at net, some of the organization’s staff were, as Madeline Anderson put it, thoroughly “clueless about Black people, about how [they] feel about stereotypes like that.”9 After the first episode aired, an interoffice memo to Perlmutter criticized a number of technical problems in the episode, including with Godfrey Cambridge’s wardrobe: “You will recall that Godfrey Cambridge wore highly reflective blue and yellow shirts, which restricted the color tv system in its ability to bring out the most important aspect of the scene, i.e. the actors’ facial features and characteristics. On a white person, these shirts would have worked fine. For a Negro, more subdued clothing tones work much better.”10 This note, from one white, public-­broadcasting official to a white executive producer, speaks to the extent of Black Americans’ underrepresentation on television, the newness of having Black faces on public television, and the station leadership’s discomfort with the changes to the status quo. The style and approach of Black Journal would evolve, but the categories of content in Black Journal’s first episode—which included stories on school control struggles, Black culture, updates on Black activism, coverage of events in Africa, reports on Black politics, both mainstream and radical, reports on Black economic initiatives, and critiques of the Black absence from mainstream media—typified the program in its first several years. Episodes were structured as a mix of in-­studio discussions, often featuring Lou House framed by dramatic black-and-white images from the stories he was reporting, alternating with short- and long-­form documentaries shot in the field. The cinematography and editing of these documentaries more closely resemble underground and experimental cinema and documentary cinema from this era, and contrasts stylistically with the staid, subdued, and monotonous style of much of pbs’s other news and public-­affairs programming. Black Journal’s initial budget of at least $500,000 per season, though small for television, was considerably larger than those of local programs like Say Brother and made the production values, though not the content, of Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant look “almost embarrassing,” according to Charles Hobson, who worked on both programs.11 The kinds of expressive images that predominated on Black Journal were more dynamic than those dominating typical public-­affairs programs on noncommercial television, where poor people were discussed by “experts” but rarely spoke for themselves. Madeline Anderson remembers that “people used to always ridicule net projects as ‘talking heads,’” but “no one did anything about it.” At N o Than ks fo r To ken ism 89

Black Journal, by contrast, there were “people who were not of the ‘talking head’ tradition.” Anderson recalls, “These guys wanted to be filmmakers, and that’s what was so good about it. So you could try things. . . . If you look at it, you see some artistic vision, richness of production, which the other writers and producers I worked with, they were not willing [to do].”12 Framing Desegregation, Representing Children

Black Journal’s long-­form documentaries in the first four episodes demonstrate the limitations imposed by white editorial control while also showcasing the talents of the staff and the potential for the program. The second episode features two separate documentaries focused on African American children: the first was a very traditionally structured documentary on school reform, and the other was a more experimental documentary about children’s folk culture. The “experts” chosen for inclusion in the school reform documentary and the narrative omissions in the “ethnographic” documentary are evidence of the challenges Black staff members faced in airing pointed, critical programming. In the first episode, despite Cambridge’s painting the screen black, the white producers’ sense of “balance” is evident as the views of white police are covered extensively in a story about Huey Newton, of the Black Panther Party. The second episode highlights the contradictory impulses between white ideas of balance and Black advocacy. While resisting the narrative of “desegregation” and emphasizing Black control, the school segment nonetheless gives significant airtime to a number of white “experts.” The documentary employs innovative cinematography and poetic editing to showcase the poignancy of the children’s situations. It opens with several sequences of long duration featuring the trash-­filled alleys and dilapidated conditions of sections of Roxbury, one of Boston’s main Black communities, with a spare mix of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” playing over the images. This exposé of the troubled condition of the community is followed by an introduction to the issues at hand by Ruth Batson, a local, African American school-­reform activist who offers a critique of the powers that be, saying that she “holds them accountable.” Her depiction of Black children as outsiders in their own school system is underscored by the setting of the interview, which features Batson outside a school in her winter coat. “We just can’t accept this,” states Batson, of the deplorable test scores and reading level of Boston’s Black children. Batson’s interview frames the segments that follow, which document different approaches 90  Chapter Th ree

to solving the problems of Boston’s troubled schools. The first of these focuses on a young girl of about seven, Kathy B., who is bussed from Roxbury to the Boston suburbs. This segment epitomizes the contradictions between liberal thinking about race and the lived experience of crossing racial barriers. Images of Kathy playing happily with other African American children on the bus are intercut with a long take of the bus’s winding its way through gray Boston streets during winter, to underscore that although she is traveling only eleven miles, Kathy is moving between two starkly different worlds. Next, Kathy is shown surrounded by her white classmates at an affluent public school, and the soundtrack features a long interview with her teacher over the classroom footage that captures the teacher’s white, liberal perspective. She points out that Kathy’s reading has “advanced” several grade levels since she began attending the school but that the Black children who arrived at the beginning of the school year “were all just barely reading.” Kathy’s teacher also discusses the changes in Kathy’s self-­image. “When she first came she would not draw herself as brown,” the teacher comments, but “she has begun to draw herself as brown . . . I think Kathy is the most aware of anyone that she is Negro,” the teacher says, in a tone that suggests she is encouraged by Kathy’s progress in this regard. The teacher feels that Kathy gets her sense of identity from “the home” and that her parents encourage her to be proud “that she is a Negro.” The teacher seems to convey ambivalence about this messaging from Kathy’s parents, as if Kathy’s best hope might be to forget “that she is a Negro,” although the teacher is clearly proud of Kathy and her achievements. Contradictions between the teacher’s liberal rhetoric and aspects of Kathy’s experience become evident in the documentary. While Kathy’s teacher speaks, a series of images of Kathy at school are shown in sequence, including one in which Kathy is painting a classmate’s face with black paint. Only after viewing this image repeatedly did I realize that Kathy was not painting her schoolmate in blackface but rather painting a beard on the other child, presumably in the context of a school theater production. The choice to include this moment that so strongly highlights the differences in the children’s phenotypes underscores Kathy’s presence as a racial outsider and something of a curiosity at the school. Similarly, we see several poignant shots of Kathy in a sea of white students, shots in which she appears connected to them but not necessarily as playful as she was in the earlier scenes riding the bus with her neighbors. The program subtly argues that this particular kind of desegregation has high stakes for N o Than ks fo r To ken ism 91

the identity of Black children, by stitching together the voiceover of the teacher’s observation that Kathy has moved from invisibilty to an identification with Blackness, with images that highlight Kathy’s difference. While Kathy’s teacher indicates that the risks of Kathy losing her identity can be mitigated by strong messaging from the home, the remainder of the documentary suggests that Black Journal is critical of this kind of integration. The next segment features school reformers’ preferred alternative to busing children out of Roxbury: building excellent schools in the Black community, schools so desirable that white parents might choose to send their children to them. Jonathan Kozol, a school reformer who is white, persuasively argues that white parents oppose bussing “because white parents know, in their shame, that the schools in black neighborhoods are bad, but if you build excellent schools they will come.” He introduces as an alternative a school within Roxbury that is privately funded. Shots of the school building attest to its relative lack of affluence—compared to the school in Brookline, the Roxbury school has barer features, and the building is more run down. Yet Kozol describes children engaged in close relationships with their teachers, and the viewer sees that these children are comfortable and happy on the playground. None of the parents, teachers, or administrators at the school Kozol uses as a model appear on camera, nor does the viewer hear from Kathy or either of her parents. Ruth Batson’s fully formed and expert analysis of the schooling situation offers a critical and much-­needed Black, grassroots perspective in this episode. The fate and significance of Black children at this key moment of transformation is a critical issue, and Black Journal’s documentary leaves the viewer with a poignant final image to consider: a long take of a wide shot of Kathy playing violin, a little Black girl at school in Brookline, surrounded by a sea of white students playing “Hot Cross Buns.” The kind of national analysis this episode offers, comparing events in one city with those in another, distinguished the possibilities of a national program—possibilities that would be enhanced once greater Black control of Black Journal was achieved. The preponderance of white experts in the segment offers a sharp contrast to the authorization of Black expertise by local, Black public-­affairs programs—it is difficult to imagine either Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant or Say Brother taking this approach—or, for that matter, Black Journal itself, after it later achieved greater Black editorial control. Later in this same episode, the hopes and promise of African American youth are examined in a more experimental documentary about children’s 92  Chapter Th ree

folklore. More open-­ended and less editorialized than the school reform segment, the documentary muses on the roots of certain songs and games and focuses on the ways that games inspired by nature and wildlife translate into children’s play in the urban North, putting the North in dialogue with the South, and the city in dialogue with the country. Madeline Anderson later described the segment as “kind of a mish mash,” because of the struggles for editorial control. Leon Bibb, a folklorist and musician who narrates the episode, sings with the children, and appears in the documentary, evinces a strong affection for the South and for rural children’s folk traditions, repeatedly referring to the rural South as “down home.” Images of children playing circle games, clapping games, and jumping rope in a rural and isolated field by a roadside in an unidentified southern location are contrasted to those of urban children playing the same and similar games. The children themselves are what is beautiful in the urban setting, and in documenting the movement of their play—from South to North, from rural to urban— Black Journal highlights the shared heritage of children’s culture. While the documentary idealizes the rural over the urban, it indicates the continuities in Black vernacular culture, even across the temporal and spatial dislocations of migration. In this way, the piece celebrates the importance of attending to and preserving Black folk traditions as part of the project of building a national Black identity. Black Americans at Home

In the fourth episode, two contrasting domestic scenes highlight how Black Journal expanded on the styles of other media. The first, a story on gender relations, centered on the actress Val Ward and her family, in Chicago, echoes similar spreads in Ebony magazine. This segment emphasizes both the egalitarian romance of the Wards’ union and the ways Ward and her husband furnished their home to underscore their full commitment to Black identity. Images of Ward and her husband at home, surrounded by African art and walking on the beach together, are intercut with images of women and women and men discussing their roles in relationships, in consciousness-­raising groups. In contrast to the Wards’ well-­appointed home, another segment in the episode called “Urban Renewal or Black Removal” focuses on wealthy universities that have displaced poor Black people from their inner-­city homes. Showcasing the program’s national reach, the episode profiles individuals displaced in New York, PhiladelN o Than ks fo r To ken ism 93

phia, and Chicago by Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Chicago. A domestic scene on the South Side of Chicago features a shaken and enraged woman scared to sleep in her new apartment because of inadequate locks, limited space, and poor air circulation. Afraid of retribution from the University of Chicago for speaking out, she appears on Black Journal anonymously. Long takes of this woman, shown silhouetted in her dark apartment (she had no electricity) underscore the dire consequences of these displacements. While urban renewal was often equated with “Negro removal” by community activists, Black Journal showcased, in shocking detail, how far venerated institutions were willing to go to expand their campuses. Together, these vignettes of Val Ward in her home and the anonymous displaced woman in hers paint a complex picture of the role of economic class in Black life that resists simplistic characterizations. Reviewing Black Journal

The critical responses to Black Journal’s early episodes reveal the critics’ ambivalence toward Black-­focused television as a genre, even in the case of programs they determined to be “quality” Black television. One of the earliest reviews of Black Journal offered the telling headline “Regular Television Fare Put to Shame by Negro Production.” Its enthusiastic white reviewer positioned Black Journal as an antidote to the excesses of commercial television, claiming that “regular tv” suffered by comparison to Black Journal’s insightful commentary and excellent production. Operating under the mistaken assumption that the program was entirely under Black control, the reviewer argued that Black Journal was “different” for this reason: “It is not only about Negroes. It not only features Negroes. It is not only aimed at Negroes. It is actually created by Negroes, from the first ideas all the way throughout production.”13 Seeming somewhat incredulous, the reviewer points out that the program is intelligent and adult and asks sarcastically, “What kind of television is that?”—implying that most television programming lacks these qualities. This review suggests that Black Journal gained credibility in part because it fit into the emerging critical category of “quality” television, which pbs aimed to epitomize.14 Situating Black Journal as an enlightened show in the vapid television “wasteland,” the review contrasts Black Journal’s thoughtful documentaries with what the critic considers empty fare, citing programs such as Laugh In. Other critics expressed thinly veiled astonishment at Black Journal ’s 94  Chapter Th ree

achievements, apparently because they had been unable to imagine that Black people could write and create such intelligent, engaging television. In this vein, one called the show “a thoroughly professional piece of work,” suggesting that he may have expected otherwise.15 George Gent, writing in the New York Times, asked if the novelty of hearing Black voices in an overwhelmingly white medium was the main attraction of the program, whether the “unfamiliarity of much of the material” was part of the program’s “charm.” He deemed some of its content a bit “superficial” but judged it mostly “well chosen and professionally written and edited.”16 Gent and other critics applauded the program’s seriousness and dignity— implying that these qualities define only exceptional Black people.17 Some reviewers were more reserved in their responses. Ann Hodges wrote in the tellingly titled piece “Journal Illuminates Dark Racial Cavern,” “In all, it was an interesting hour, an innovation that should have more to contribute once the newness wears off. In the eagerness of this opening night, there was a tendency towards defensiveness rather than professional polish. If the producers can withstand the temptation to become a sounding board for the more vocal militants and focus attention rather on the Negro community that is so seldom illuminated in these columns, Black Journal will provide a valuable channel for racial communication in the months to come.”18 Hodges makes it clear that she believed, as did many of the managers of the stations that created Black public-­affairs programs, that programming on and inspired by the racial crisis would only be on the air for a few months. Her commentary further reveals her hope that the program would not be too radical and offend white sensibilities. Yet the show’s premiere and the first four episodes were complex and layered enough that white critics, though patronizing, were not openly intimidated by the political message of the program or the simple fact of seeing so many Black faces on national television. In January 1969, Black Journal brought together an impressive cast of Black public figures, including LeRoi Jones, Kathleen Cleaver, Ron Karenga, and Elijah Muhammad, to offer their retrospective views of 1968 and to look forward to what 1969 might bring. Larry Williams, a critic from Memphis, predicted of this episode, “I’m sure the remarks will be occasionally bitter and even threatening,” but he noted reassuringly that the executive editor, Lou Potter, “said the prevailing mood will be a desire for, and confidence in, self-­help.” Looking back at the show’s first six months, Williams remarked, “Black Journal, predictably, has been uneven. At times it fulfills its avowed goals admirably and at other times it seems to flounN o Than ks fo r To ken ism 95

der in petulance and very loud sound and fury. It is never, I must add, insignificant, and for that one can say it has succeeded.”19 This ambivalence was typical of white reviewers’ responses to Black Journal’s first season. An acknowledgment of the importance of the show coexists alongside the sense that Black Journal’s message is a bitter pill that white people must “swallow.” The Black press took notice of Black Journal, as well—not surprising, given the relationship between their missions and the reality that they competed for a share of the same audience. After a “golden age” during and immediately following the Second World War, Black newspapers saw their influence decline in the “post–civil rights” years. Meanwhile, the Johnson empire, publishers of Negro Digest, Jet, and Ebony, also grew after the Second World War and through the civil rights era but faced transitions in the post–civil rights era, as well. The numerous factors leading to this change are beyond the purview of this work, but the possibility for at least a few Black journalists to work in the “white press” was one factor. An Ebony article that appeared later in the program’s run was titled “Black Excellence in the Wasteland,” capturing the enthusiastic, even celebratory, responses of many Black critics to the program in 1969.20 The article mentions several times that unless Black Journal receives additional funding, it will shut down: “That the Journal is stopping is regrettable but even more so that many audiences won’t have seen it yet,” the writer laments.21 Even when critical, reviewers in the Black press tended to be more aware of the challenges Black Journal faced in staying on the air. Demanding Editorial Control: “Ending an Era of Thanks for Tokenism”

While most reviewers of the first episodes perceived the program to be by and for African Americans, from the outset Black staff members felt hemmed in by net’s control, frustrated that they had few Black crew members on the production side, and galled that net was allowing the world to think that the production was utterly controlled by African Americans. These frustrations were among the catalysts of the strike that prompted the Black staff to walk out in August 1968, to demand Black editorial control. The strikers complained, “net has deceived the Black Community by advertising the program series as being ‘by, for and of’ the black community.” Despite appearances, they had “no editorial control over the program’s content or production.”22 They demanded a Black 96  Chapter Th ree

executive producer, proposing the staff member Lou Potter as a candidate. St. Clair Bourne, who was also part of the initial staff of the program, said to the New York Times, “We, not only as black professionals but mainly because we are black people, feel that net has been hypocritical,” that the network’s staffing decisions represented not “tokenism” but “frontism,” in that the visibility of the Black on-­air staff was used, in the Times writer’s words, to perpetuate “the idea that Negroes controlled the program,” though in fact white net employees produced the majority of the segments.23 The station’s initial response was to say it would revise the public relations spin that suggested that the program was under Black control but not change the editorial control. The network soon offered terms, however, apparently hoping to settle the dispute relatively promptly.24 The network claimed that it had intended “all along” for the show to have a Black executive producer but was “unable to find anyone qualified.”25 Station executives argued that Potter did not yet have sufficient experience for that role and placed him in the role of executive editor instead, proposing to eliminate the executive producer role altogether. The striking staff members initially agreed with this compromise, then regrouped among themselves and demanded a Black executive producer, either Bill Branch or William Greaves. At first, net said neither were available, but eventually Greaves, who had already appeared as a cohost on the program, was hired for the position, replacing Perlmutter. Greaves, an accomplished and well-­regarded experimental filmmaker and theater artist, was, at forty-­two, somewhat older than most “young Turks” on the staff at the time.26 Acknowledging how unusual it was for Black media workers to take action against a powerful media entity, Variety reported of the strike: “Even if the series is cancelled and the group dispersed, ‘Black Journal’ has clearly signaled the end of a time when integrationist Negroes accepted the token generosities of white liberals with murmurs of gratitude. Because if net public service initiative put the show on the air, it took the independent action of black staff members to make ‘Black Journal’ black.”27 In 2010, Kent Garrett recalled that one of the most revolutionary things about the strike was that the staff went to the press with their story. “We knew we had them [network management] in the corner,” he recalls, as they had been claiming the show was “by, for, and about” Black people. The tenor of the times made the striking staffers feel “almost invincible.” Garrett said, “You didn’t care about losing your job . . . there is a bigger principle involved. You’re young, you’re talented, you feel that if they are not going to meet your demands, you’re not going to do the show.”28 N o Than ks fo r To ken ism 97

Other activists of color in the broadcast industry around the country successfully used similar tactics in the years that followed.29 The transfer of power on Black Journal was immediately signaled visually and verbally on the broadcast. At the beginning of Black Journal’s fifth episode, which aired in October 1968, Lou House tells the story, in an understated way, of the walkout and the subsequent change in control, and Greaves appears in the studio with him, demonstrating that the program is now under Black direction. The new opening theme featured a red globe with images from the program inside a black space in the shape of the African continent, signifying Black Journal’s connection to a Black world. “Black Journal surprised itself by making headlines,” said the host Wali Siddiq of the strike, seated next to the executive producer William Greaves. Siddiq smiled as he announced that the show was now truly “by for and of Black people, and that’s where it’s at.” Then Siddiq made a Black Power fist (see figures 3.3 and 3.4). Speaking with Variety after the strike, staff members reported that the show immediately gained “credibility in the black community” due to the strike. Greaves seemed to forecast a radical departure from the “rationalist” style of pbs: “Journalistic objectivity is one of the biggest lies in Western culture,” he said.30 Black Power, White Institutions: Black Journal’s Self-­Reflexivity in the Greaves Era

As Black editorial control strengthened, Black Journal’s critical lens on powerful white institutions grew sharper. What role for Black empowerment could organizations like the school system, the police, and the army offer to African Americans, the program asked. In November 1968, after a year full of brutal clashes between police and Black communities, Black Journal aired a documentary framing “the dilemma” of the Black cop. Framing the coupling of “Black” and “cop” as a dilemma suggests just how far the program had moved from what the executives at net initially planned. The critical position of the program’s staff on policing was more aligned with Black Power organizations than with the police. Kent Garrett, who produced the segment, recalls the choice to do a piece on Black cops as “obvious” in that moment: “At that time, the issue of police brutality, how police were dealing with Blacks, if I am Black cop, I am facing a real dilemma. . . . How do I deal with my people? What’s my loyalty to my partner?” Given the “issues naturally facing a Black cop at these times,” Garrett explains, “It made sense to check out a Black cop to see where his 98  Chapter Th ree

Figure 3.3. An on-­set photograph of William Greaves (left) and Wali Siddiq (left), formerly known as Lou House. Courtesy of William and Louise Greaves. Figure 3.4. Siddiq makes a fist while announcing that the program is now under

Black editorial control. Courtesy of the Yale Film Study Center.

Figure 3.5. A close-­up of a Black police officer reflecting on his experiences,

in Black Journal episode 6, 1968. Courtesy of the Yale Film Study Center.

head is at how he’s relating to this.”31 While to Garrett and his Black colleagues it may have been an obvious choice to produce this segment, the piece pushed the program toward a more complex Black perspective than the earlier segments had achieved. The documentary called The Black Cop offers a meditation on the challenges of protecting Black communities while remaining conscious of the overwhelming taint of the history of police violence against African Americans would feel. The segment features intimate discussions with police officers, interviews with a number of other cops, and discussions with community members that consider the role of the Black cop and special pressures faced by Black police. Much of the segment is taken up with the portrait of a single, thoughtful, and somewhat conflicted New York City police officer reflecting on his work (see figure 3.5). He addresses the compromises inherent in his role serving the community, as well as the problematic way white officers expect him to be an expert on Black problems. The film is shot experimentally, including long takes of New York City at night with long cross-­fades. In the tradition of experimental cinema, the segment uses long cross-­fades that linger to show doubled exposures of urban landscapes. By intentionally not editing for narrative consistency, the segment emphasizes the challenging position of the offi100  Chapter Th ree

cer caught in between allegiances. Monologues by the officer are intercut with footage of his daily encounters with the public, such as a close-­up of a person lying in the street, the subject of a “drunk and disorderly” call, and a sustained confrontation with an angry driver whose keys are being taken away after an accident. Such images, now commonplace on television due to “reality” cop shows, would have been unusual for the sensibilities of the time. The portrait-­of-­a-­cop segment of the film juxtaposes images of the neighborhood, images from the chaotic interior of an apartment that appears to be a crime scene, and images of close-­ups of the officer’s face. The editing seems designed to make the difficulties of police work more apparent to the viewer, emphasizing the difficulties of dealing with people in vulnerable and aggressive states of mind. The featured officer thoughtfully discusses other police who are trigger-­ happy, shooting nonviolent criminals during apprehension. He states that he refuses to be complicit in such violence and instead puts his faith in the rule of law. “Why should I shoot a kid?” he asks, observing, “I’m executing him at the same time.” The next shot is of the sign at 120th and 3rd Avenue, locating the scene in Harlem. The frame tilts down from the sign to the police officer at a pay phone, with jazz horns playing on the soundtrack. The odd angles and displacements underscore the complex feelings of both police and community members about encounters with one another. As the officer continues to unfold for the viewer, he clarifies his relationships with white colleagues. “I’m just as loyal as any other cop,” he says defensively, but his white peers do not necessarily trust his loyalty. “I feel them feeling for my loyalty,” he remarks perceptively. His feeling of being caught between the community and the police force comes up several times: “I am careful. I feel I am being used as a shield.” Meanwhile, he perceives that Black community members suspect he will treat them worse than white people. Painfully, he reflects, “I don’t feel completely together inside. I know I am caught in the middle.” Rather than offer a narrative about Black Power to frame the officer’s position, the producers directly ask the officer his opinions about Black Power. They do not directly reference alternative proposals about community self-­policing from Black Power organizations such as the Black Panther Party, but these discourses are implied by their question. Initially, the officer responds with ambivalence, remarking, “Anything that can help our people is good to me . . . as long as you don’t overdo it.” He is critical of what he calls “militants in the streets” who, he says, “exaggerate the point one day, and run away the next.” Calling these individuals “extortion artN o Than ks fo r To ken ism 101

ists,” he nonetheless seems to be interested in Black activism. Hearing this description and seeing the look of the crime-­scene apartments and the littered and colorful streets of Harlem traversed by this officer daily, this segment resembles Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970), a film directed by Ossie Davis and set in Harlem, in which two Black detectives pursue a huckster who has made a fortune by defrauding poor Black people. The reality, as explored on Black Journal, is more complex, however, and the cop acknowledges that some people are doing good things under the moniker “Black Power.” Ultimately, the viewer gets a portrait of a man who does not trust his white colleagues or Black Power activists fully, but relies on his own sense of right and wrong. The context of the recent trauma of the Watts riots frames a considerably shorter segment about Black police in Los Angeles, which seems to be included, in part, to showcase Black Journal’s national range. Brief interviews of police officers in their offices and on the street offer background to the situation. One officer remarks, “Don’t ask me as a Black cop to shoot looters,” possibly in response to the haunting images of looters being shot in Watts, images that must have dominated the consciousness of some of Black Journal’s viewers. At several points in the film, the filmmakers use “man or woman on the street”–style interview footage to interject critical perspectives about Black policing. A man in a barber shop insists that Black policemen have to treat the public “like the white man treats you,” in order to qualify for the force. A number of community members speak out in agreement, saying that Black police are even more repressive than white police. One woman, interviewed through the window of her car, says that it “takes a certain kind of person” to be a policeman, someone “brutal,” who enjoys “the instant authority that comes with a badge and uniform.” The commentary that closes this documentary asks a pressing question: In a community that is demanding change, which side is the Black police officer on? In structure and form, The Black Cop is quite different from the documentaries of the episodes preceding the strike. Rather than offer their own editorializing directly, the newly empowered staff uses editing to create contrasts and seeks the “expert” opinions of African Americans in the community, as opposed to featuring a journalist’s opinion at the end of the film. The segment includes a very sympathetic police officer and some very thoughtful critiques of African Americans who choose to work as police, emphasizing multiple and complex opinions. Ultimately, this piece, made just as Black Journal came under full Black editorial control, asks 102  Chapter Th ree

hard questions about whether Black people can operate ethically in white-­ dominated institutions. In creating this documentary and others like it, the staff of Black Journal raised issues central to African American concerns and also reflected their own challenging position in white-­dominated pbs. As Black Journal under Greaves progressed, the opening theme, studio setup, and camera work grew more dynamic and compositions grew more complex. In one segment about Black employment, Greaves and House are parted like curtains, and behind them appear enlarged images of Black labor protesters. As usual, Lou House speaks in the first-­person plural: “This is happening all over America—which has prevented us from getting our fair share in America.” As the documentary transitions from images of general labor struggles showing striking construction workers and other tradespeople, a short film shows a speeded-­up series of images of commuters on the subway, with scintillating electronic music. A voice-­over centers this experimental film clearly on the story of efforts to organize transit workers in New York, but its appearance is more in line with the experimental films of its era. At the end of Greaves’s tenure at Black Journal, the program raised the stakes once more on covering provocative questions about the relationships between African Americans and institutions. For episode 22, Black Journal took the ambitious step of sending Kent Garrett with a two-­man crew (sound and image) to Asia to cover Black enlisted men in Vietnam, Japan, and Okinawa. The result of the three men’s month-­long travels— often at considerable risk—was one of Black Journal’s most exciting, fully realized segments: a full-­length, hour-­long piece about the Black gis that broadcast on the net network in May 1970, when the United States was still in the thick of the Vietnam War. This path-­breaking documentary included footage that put a face on the reports of racial tension coming out of Vietnam. While newspapers at the time were reporting on the racism and dissatisfaction of Black troops, the kind of extended discussion with Black gis offered by Black Journal was a rarity. News stories on mainstream television, when they focused on Black soldiers, tended to consider individuals who had succeeded in the army despite racism. Chet Huntley reported a story on the nbc Evening News on September 17, 1968, about Frederic E. Davison, the “third Negro general” in the U.S. Army. In this piece, Davison is portrayed as a “self-­made man.” When asked about the setbacks he has faced, he replies: “Well, I’d be less than honest if I didn’t say there were obstacles. It’s been a requirement to prove my capabilities. But I can say N o Than ks fo r To ken ism 103

this, that in recent years, the opportunity has been there, you just have to do the job . . . it’s up to the individual to make the grade or not make the grade.” An nbc Evening News report from October 1969 focused on “integration in the armed forces.” “One of the problems the armed forces face is the integration of black and white fighting men,” Huntley reported. “It is something that is always on the minds of the Blacks.” The story goes on to emphasize the sense of togetherness that unites Black soldiers even in this “twenty-­four-­hour-­a-­day integrated situation.” Black Journal’s documentary examined some of the same problems as nbc’s but offered a more complex, disturbing, and painful look at the isolation and ennui experienced by Black soldiers. Garrett and his crew created a portrait that gave viewers a chance to watch Black gis work and socialize in something like “real time.” Incredibly, Garrett got permission from the Pentagon to make the documentary. Pentagon officials encouraged him to focus on officers such as Davison and to counteract the “bad press” they knew the armed forces were getting about racism and antiwar sentiment in general. Garrett and his crew were “shepherded through” Asia by public information officers, but every official data-­gathering experience was followed by Black soldiers approaching Garrett and his crew, excited to talk to Black journalists for the first time about how they felt about the racism in the service, about being displaced from home, and about the violence and terror of being at war.32 Interviews with servicemen in mess halls, uso clubs, on a riverboat in Upper Saigon, and aboard a helicopter are interspersed with footage of the men working and off-­duty in a variety of locations. The soldiers describe the way they use Black culture to resist the conformity demanded by the armed forces, and they critique both the daily racism they experience and the larger implications of racism for their military careers and future prospects. A long segment that follows a group of Black naval soldiers on a river ambush boat captures the boredom, loneliness, and terror of the job. While the images focus on mundane facets of everyday work on the boat, including long takes of the boat’s moving through the water, discussions with the men and voiceovers taken from their interviews offer a sense of the men’s subjectivity. One explains that he is “just on this boat to do a job: river ambush.” He describes feeling obligated to fight—“I feel that we’ve got to fight”—but does not mention his opinion about the mission of the war. Another man describes his resistance to simple narratives about the war— “I am not gonna be no tyrant”—yet he also talks about his wish to be back in the United States with longing in his voice, saying, “I be thinking about 104  Chapter Th ree

going home,” and he reveals his fear of being killed. “I been thinking about Charlie [enemy soldiers] . . . it’s hard.” Garrett recalls actually being able to see North Vietnam from the boat. “We were ‘embedded’ before they used that term.”33 The film’s visual language aestheticizes the men on the boat, gliding through the seemingly empty landscape, to underscore that the men are not necessarily simply victims, though they are clearly caught in circumstances beyond their control. Powerful images of the men at work highlight strong bare arms holding machine guns (see figure 3.6) and firing round after round onto the shore. Later on, the documentary includes long shots of the Vietnamese landscape taken from harbors, tanks, and helicopters. The viewer is left with a sense of the soldiers’ isolation and longing, but also of their pride in doing their work well. The closing shot in this sequence, featuring the men on the navy boat doing a Black Power salute (see figure 3.7), reinforces a sense of the community that exists among the men despite the oppression they describe. The role of Black culture, in the forms of music and fashion, in keeping the men’s spirits up and fostering a sense of individual and collective resistance to the military’s racist and dehumanizing practices is a pervasive theme of the documentary. The Black soldiers explain that army dress codes were at times more open-­ended for white servicemen, whereas Black men faced constant discrimination when officials enforced regulations against bracelets, dashikis, and afros. The men describe challenging the dress code, emphasizing that both white and Black men were using costumes in a performative way to underscore their identities and resist the conformity mandated by their positions in the armed forces. “If you are white, a ‘cowboy costume’ is allowed, but [for Black men] a dashiki is not,” said one soldier. Music in off hours was an important battleground as well. Listening to musicians such as Bobby Jenkins was a diversion and also an important way of affirming solidarity and community with other Black soldiers, a lifeline to Black culture at home, and a form of resistance to the army’s racism. One man describes being court-­martialed after a fight with white men who wanted to listen to country and western in a bar. “We had soul music [on the base] a couple of nights, and they said they didn’t dig it . . . so they put me on restriction for disobeying orders and refusing to stop dancing.” Speaking of the emergence of Black Power, the enlisted men remark that the movement gives them “a real feeling of power” from which they take heart, and this explains their strong preference for Black identity–oriented N o Than ks fo r To ken ism 105

Figure 3.6. A Navy soldier shooting a gun into the distance.

Courtesy of the Yale Film Study Center.

Figure 3.7. A Black Power salute on a Navy boat. Courtesy of the Yale Film Study Center.

clothing choices. Black and white higher officials in the army were dismissive of these everyday performative acts that men were using to constitute themselves and their identities. After this segment, one Pentagon official dismisses the cultural activism of the Black soldiers while acknowledging that they face discrimination. “Soul is a handle; behind it are not very good conditions,” said the unnamed official, slighting the cultural activism of the African American soldiers. In addition to tensions over defining themselves and their space through music and dress, the enlisted men describe encounters with imperialism and racism. They speak of the way white servicemen are teaching anti-­Black racism to the Vietnamese, of being in the painful position of becoming part of the white American army’s imperialist project and the racist American values that accompany it. They complain of discrimination in Saigon. One soldier comments, “Vietnamese girls called me a nigger—I know it’s not part of their language.” At the same time, they are aware that as American servicemen they are perceived as savage monsters, as terrifying “beasts” who act like animals toward the Vietnamese. The soldiers speak of the complex role of African Americans taking part in American foreign policy. Several of the interviewees say in no uncertain terms that Black men should not be drafted. “If they want to fight for a country where they are mistreated, fine, but don’t force them to fight. Why should I fight? When I come home I can’t even buy a house in [the Chicago suburb of ] Cicero.” Black Journal’s documentary highlights the overwhelming segregation of the military, in contrast to the emphasis on the “twenty-­four-­hour-­a-­day integrated situation” described in the nbc report. The men on the riverboat point out that the frontlines, in particular, are predominantly African American. “I’ve seen a bunch of Black guys, a whole bunch of them out there. I don’t know why they are out there. I go up there, I’ll see about forty men, half of them Black. I don’t know why the army does that. I don’t think it’s right,” says a soldier. Another man sums it up: “There are two armies.” The men also describe the drawbacks of military service as a career path for African Americans. Various officers detail the challenges they have faced with promotion, saying that when the promotion boards come, white officers engage in sabotage, intentionally blocking the progress of Black men in their careers by tampering with service records and other techniques. One remarks, “It is not a democratic club.” While many men are discouraged, some are positive. “We can’t go no way but up,” one says. Yet the dangers of speaking out are clear: “Don’t be too quick to jump out,” a solN o Than ks fo r To ken ism 107

dier says. “Furthermore, you have to fall in line.” The dangers of appearing in the documentary are addressed both directly and indirectly. After a group of men speaks with Black Journal’s reporter at some length, one acknowledges, “We might be looking for attorneys first thing tomorrow.” Describing his frustration, another soldier says, “If I got back and they tried to treat me like this, I’ll pick up a weapon and I’ll go down with them even in the world. . . . I shoot pretty good . . . they taught most of us how to shoot this weapon pretty good.” This threat hangs in the air, giving the viewer time to imagine the United States repopulated with armed, trained, and frustrated Black soldiers. The final segment of the documentary takes the viewer to a military base in Okinawa and features a group of off-­duty men walking around in hand-­decorated “Black Power” jackets in front of businesses that cater to Black fashions and hair maintenance (see figures 3.8 and 3.9). The segment closes with a long take of men giving each other a special hand shake, knocking fists, and walking off down the street together in a relaxed way, performing their sense of community for the camera. Garrett recollected that these businesses catering to Black servicemen were run by African American men who had completed their service or perhaps deserted.34 Like the school reform documentary and the episode focused on the Black cop, Black Journal’s investigation of the Black gi raised crucial questions about the possibilities for Black roles within institutions of power in the United States. Unlike these earlier programs, however, the Black gi episode showcased Black Journal’s ability to cover not only national stories but international stories, and to do so with depth, style, and nuance. Furthermore, the Black gi episode featured a chorus of radical critique and moved the program completely away from the “balanced” approach it had taken under white leadership. The program on the Black gi serves as evidence of the growing assertiveness of Black Journal’s staff and the changing times—by this point, in 1969, the remnants of an integrationist tone sounded hollow, Vietnam was falling apart, and the country’s schisms were well known. The appeal of Black Power grew in many circles, as increased militancy seemed an appropriate response to the violence met by Black activists and the intense neglect of Black communities’ needs. In the face of these changes, the episode that followed the gi documentary offered an alternative to participation in white-­controlled institutions: Black self-­help organizations. The program proposes a response to the marginalization facing urban African Americans in a documentary segment on a Los Angeles–based self-­help initiative called Operation Boot108  Chapter Th ree

Figure 3.8. African American culture in Okinawa. Courtesy of the Yale Film Study Center. Figure 3.9. A Black soldier in Okinawa. Courtesy of the Yale Film Study Center.

strap. Greaves introduces the program, stating his own positive judgment of Bootstrap’s effectiveness. “In many parts of the country, Black Americans are looking to self-­help programs as a way toward self-­realization. Operation Bootstrap in South Central Los Angeles is one of these programs. And Bootstrap seems to be working.” This documentary cuts to the heart of a question, the question regarding the role of money in the African American community. Many Black self-­help initiatives of this era explicitly rejected capitalism. Operation Bootstrap was an independent, Black Power–oriented organization, and its businesses were collectives. When a man in an encounter-­group-­style discussion asks heatedly how he can “be Black and a capitalist,” he answers his own question, saying, “Blackness says, I love my brother. Capitalism says screw your brother!” After showcasing the leader of Operation Bootstrap as he examines the theoretical foundations of the organization’s work, the program transitions into the style of a traditional documentary, complete with voice-­ overs, interviews, and long sequences showing staff members working in the various industries that Operation Bootstrap developed. The organization’s goal of “uniting Black men to function in society” motivated its nine subsidiary “self-­help” economic enterprises, including a company that produced Black dolls (Shindana Toys) and a machine shop (the Body and Thunder Shop). These enterprises provided training and wages to African Americans in South Central Los Angeles. The segment features images of men working in the machine shop and of men and women making the Black dolls. The documentary enumerates the range of services created by Operation Bootstrap, which serves as a reminder of the numerous economic and cultural arenas potentially involved in the struggle for Black empowerment. Doll-­factory workers discuss the challenge of getting manufacturers not to “whiten” the features of the dolls. A shot of a young African American girl choosing her doll in the store reminds viewers what is at stake in the production of new icons for children. A discussion of Operation Bootstrap’s funding evoked familiar concerns about Black participation in institutions, as well as concerns about being dependent on funding from outside the Black community. Operation Bootstrap’s officer explained her aversion to foundation support, because of the strings attached and the resulting vulnerability to funding cuts: We started in 1965. We don’t accept any government funds or large foundations funds—We wanted it to be a self-­help group. We know by looking at what happens to other projects and organizations, when you 110  Chapter Th ree

get that large check you run into hang-­ups. You got people telling where to do, how to do, and what to do. There have been times when the big money has come to a project, but there was always that psychological threat . . . you never knew when that money was going to go. Organization after organizations come into existence, go through that money and go out of existence in the time we have developed from nothing to about a dozen businesses. This concern about being ideologically compromised by funding organizations was extremely controversial among African American organizations, and it clearly resonated with the staff of Black Journal.35 In the same episode, a fictional and allegorical sketch asks related questions about when it is appropriate for Blacks to resist white help and practice “self-­help” instead. The short film depicts a white man wearing an “I Give a Damn” button who has observed a fire blazing in a tenement building during his commute home to an unnamed suburb. He attempts to use a pay phone to call the fire department, but it is in use when he arrives. The encounter turns into a confrontation, with the African American man who is currently using the pay phone asking the white commuter, “You are concerned about the fire, but are they your kids?” When the commuter responds, “Of course they are not my kids,” the Black man points out his hypocrisy, saying that the white man’s kids probably live far away in a fireproof house. The Black man presses on, “What are you doing about the rats and the junkies and the other problems around here? You’re the white knight and come uptown to save us Black people.” The white man counters, “You won’t help your own people.” Their conversation echoes the divide between well-­intentioned white liberals who want harmony but do not want to give up life in a racially exclusive neighborhood and Black ghetto-­dwellers tired of liberal rhetoric. In another exploration of Blacks working outside white institutions— this time mainstream American religious organizations—Black Journal traveled to the Midwest for a segment on the Nation of Islam. Lou House opens the segment on the Nation of Islam, so often the subject of mainstream media spectacle, by describing the nation’s various initiatives: an elementary school for six hundred K–12 children in Chicago, a “Muslim farm operation” in Casapolis, Michigan, and the newspaper Muhammad Speaks. Each of these initiatives is profiled in a segment with its leaders offering a televised “tour.” Next, Muhammad Ali gives his views on Malcolm X, calling him a man who “fell victim to publicity, to applause.” N o Than ks fo r To ken ism 111

For this episode, the Nation of Islam’s powerful and charismatic leader, Elijah Muhammad, granted Black Journal his first extensive interview on American television.36 Though not unsympathetic, the interview is not particularly revealing. St. Clair Bourne, who worked on that segment, later recalled that Muhammad was “a bit senile” at the time, although he had moments of lucidity that enabled Bourne to understand his charisma and vision as a leader.37 Black Journal’s episode on the Nation of Islam accentuates the scope and ambition of the nation’s project, without offering comment on its beliefs or tactics. In this way, it showcases the nation’s efforts to offer its members alternatives to participation in white-­controlled institutions, without scratching too far below the surface of the nation’s internal politics.38 Picturing a Global Black World: Looking beyond the Urban North

In its search for positive examples of Black self-­help, Black Journal frequently looked to the South. Interestingly, the program’s national inclusiveness was most pointed when it covered the American South. Whenever Lou House spoke of southern Black people, he used the words “we” and “us,” as in “We are having trouble with voter registration in the South.” Early episodes focused on business development, health care, and educational initiatives in the South, from basic literacy initiatives to student activism at Duke that led to the formation of Malcolm X University. One story features an innovative fishermen’s collective that shared a boat among a number of poor Black fishermen who had previously been unable to purchase their boats and had had to work for white boat-­owning fisherman. Black Journal’s research staff reached out to local activists and leaders with phone calls to find stories like this. While covering dynamic new initiatives in the South, Black Journal also insisted on giving airtime to the brutality and privation that many African Americans continued to face even after the southern civil rights movement, along with a focus on the ingenuity of various individuals and organizations in addressing southern injustices. In one episode, the privations of tenant farmers and their families in the Mississippi Delta and the brutal effects on the health and life chances of poor southern Blacks are exposed. Through interviews and in wide images that situate the subsistence farmers in a lonely landscape reminiscent of the Dust Bowl photos of Walker Evans, they are starving before the viewer’s eyes. A scene fea112  Chapter Th ree

tures a long conversation with a woman who has thirteen children, whose husband makes sixty-­five dollars a month tending a local farmer’s cattle. Another segment focuses on the continued challenge of Black disenfranchisement in the South even after the Voting Rights Act. Representative Robert Clark derides the attempts to divide and conquer Black publics as he drives Black Journal’s reporters from an outpost of wooden shacks back to the town where his office is located: “See, this is the age-­old thing! In the past, they have been good to the so-­call top niggas, and then they expect the top niggas to be satisfied and don’t say anything about what happens to the rest.” The next scene shows Clark in his office, helping desperately poor people whose food assistance has been cut inexplicably. Lou House angrily narrates: “The outrageous violation of our rights is an everyday occurrence in the Delta, and Representative Clark spends much of his time dealing with the criminal and discriminatory practices of most state agencies.” Far from the disinterested voice-­over of an “objective narrator,” Lou House’s voice bristles with anger as he describes, emphasizing the first-­personal plural, the “arbitrary raising of polling fees” and “redistricting to dilute our vote.” At a time when other media tended to separate the southern civil rights struggle from the experiences of northern and urban Blacks, emphasizing contrasts such as rural versus urban and southern versus northern, Black Journal purposely sought to resist those divisions, framing the national civil rights struggle as one struggle of unified African American people—despite acknowledged differences in priorities and approaches. Black Journal also continually defined and redefined its commitment to a “Black world,” by regularly including Africa and the Caribbean along with their American coverage. At the beginning of the second season, Lou House enthusiastically introduced an “exclusive” film of the Pan-­African Cultural Festival of 1969. Black Journal began to produce African coverage, bringing Black Americans into dialogue with African liberation struggles. By August 1970, the program had attained the resources to open a bureau in Addis Ababa—an ambitious move that defined the show as cutting-­ edge and peerless, underscoring the importance of Africa to African American thinking and politics.39 Reflecting in 2010 on the program’s emphasis on African coverage when other media were all but ignoring Africa, Wali Siddiq said resolutely, summing up the complicated but powerful resonance of Africa to some African Americans passionate about Black liberation: “We wanted to do more on Africa. We should do more on Africa. There should be more done on Africa. Africa is your whole soul land.”40 N o Than ks fo r To ken ism 113

The final Greaves episode, which aired in August 1970, opened with a direct interrogation of audience members’ preconceived notions of Africa. “One thinks of Africa and thinks of . . . what? Rhythms . . . Black people in the jungle dancing, naked and perhaps scarred with body marks.” Setting aside “such clichés, such Western myths about Africa,” he announces that Black Journal examines “the current situation in Kenya and Tanzania” for its viewers. Contextualizing the struggle for Kenyan independence, the narrator explains the delicate balance between Kenya’s citizens and the European colonizers, many of whom were still in residence. He explains cooperative farming in Kenya and notes its similarity to agricultural cooperatives in the American South. Over images of both urban and rural Kenya, the narrator speaks of the different economic and cultural changes occurring in the land, a place far from the center of most reporting based in the United States. The narration editorializes as it describes: “Morning in Nairobi is filled with the snarl of thousands or workers entering a city in which most cannot afford to live. And yet it is this growing mass of Black humanity on which the future of Africa depends. A combination of struggle and endurance shapes the African’s nature. His soul, his happiness. Superimposed over everything in Nairobi is a desire for American and European modernity.” At first, this opening sounds like a typical documentary, but as the narration continues, the narrator dryly acknowledges the legacies of colonialism in Africa. “The African in Kenya is prone to reassess the worth of the European from time to time.” Following this opening, Tony Batten, who ran the newly created African bureau, interviews James Muigai, the brother of President Jomo Kenyatta, as well as President Julius K. Nyerere of Tanzania. Muigai describes how the planters’ cooperative union is thriving because of new economic policies. In a long and heady discussion, Nyerere theorizes about socialism and capitalism, explains how the agrarian, communal society of Tanzania offers an indigenous base for socialism, and discusses the need for manpower to modernize his country, directly soliciting African American engineers, doctors, and architects to consider how they could contribute to Tanzania’s emergence. The episode also offers an interview with a field commander from the Mozambique Liberation Front, who speaks of the challenging conditions faced by decolonizing forces in Mozambique. While the content of the discussion was undoubtedly long-­winded for some viewers, Black Journal’s refusal to simplify the complex issues of decolonizing nations demonstrates the respect that the program had for its audience. This episode offers a clear impression that 114  Chapter Th ree

the African leaders saw Black Journal as a vital opportunity to reach out to American Blacks. Other Africa-­focused episodes stressed the connection Black Journal’s African American viewers had to their counterparts in Africa—connections that many in Black Journal’s audience eagerly sought. An episode features an interview with David Simbeok, head of mission from the Pan-­ African Congress, saying it moves him that his “brothers” are wearing their hair “natural.” While in the previous episode Nyerere had effectively invited skilled African Americans and Black Europeans to join the struggle for modernization in Tanzania, Simbeok asks for and acknowledges a more symbolic connection and support, suggesting that Black Americans were doing their part by decolonizing their minds—two very different messages to Black Americans about what kind of solidarity African nationals might have been seeking. Both episodes show how vitally important African Americans were to Africa. Black Journal’s coverage of Africa responded to an equally strong interest in Africa and African culture by Black Americans in the late 1960s. This coverage offered specific ideas to African Americans eager to think through the possibilities of a relationship with Africa. Black Journal provided in-­depth television news reporting about Africa at a time when such reporting was hard to come by. The decolonization and the emergence of new nations in Africa was inspiring, as Fanon Che Wilkins argues: “sncc activists initially identified with anti-­colonial activity in Africa as a source of moral and political inspiration for their own movement for social and political change in the United States.”41 Many American Black organizations in the Black Power era were inspired by the anticolonial struggles. A sense of the value and significance of African languages and cultures to African Americans emerged in the wider culture, as well. Reports such as Black Journal’s segments on African nations provided a much needed and much appreciated context for redefining Blackness in art, culture, and politics to American audiences. Going Too Fast for White Audiences

In spite of the greater visibility and resources Black Journal had in comparison with local Black programs, it was hampered in its efforts to be a truly national show by public television’s cumbersome system of syndication by mail. This distribution system presented real challenges to building an audience in multiple locales, since programs did not play on the same dates N o Than ks fo r To ken ism 115

or at the same times everywhere. This, in turn, made it difficult to market the programs, since an announcer could not mention on the show the next time a program would be broadcast (for example, by saying “We’ll see you next Saturday”). Audience members had to be organized and dedicated to seeking out Black Journal in each market.42 Furthermore, stations could easily censor Black Journal by taking a pass on an episode or the entire series. Unlike network affiliates for commercial television, they were not required to air a certain amount of net programming. Unsurprisingly, some stations were not eager to broadcast Black Journal. Other net programs faced this challenge; even the popular children’s television program Sesame Street (1969–present), with its representation of an integrated street, was too controversial for some educational television station managers and was censored in this way.43 Rejections came fast and furious after the premiere. For example, Fred Schmutz, the program director of an Arkansas station, wrote after the Black Journal premiere: “This letter is to confirm we do not wish any of these programs.”44 The words “do not” are circled in bold, suggesting the vehemence of Schmutz’s decision. While most students of broadcast history are familiar with the wlbt case, after years of civil rights activism, the segregationist-­owned television station wlbt, in Mississippi, lost its license to broadcast, few are familiar with a similar case involving an education station. Alabama etv lost its broadcast license because of the station’s repeated refusal to air Black programs. Black Journal was one of the key points of contention: Alabama etv was reluctant to show Black Journal (or Soul! or Sesame Street), ostensibly because it objected to the language in specific episodes. Alabama etv’s exclusion of these Black public-­affairs shows appeared to the Black Journal staff and to broadcast activists such as the members of Black Efforts for Soul in Television (best) to be an intentional, racist exclusion. A representative of Alabama etv claimed to the fcc that Black Journal contained “lewd, vulgar, obscene, profane, and repulsive materials.” Furthermore, the representative contended that Alabama etv had the right to show what they wanted: “Local blacks here in Alabama are not complaining at all—it’s just too bad we have to air our dirty linen.” A writer in the Christian Science Monitor responded: “This response begs many questions: Why would Black Alabama residents complain about not receiving a program that they had never heard of? Furthermore, was Alabama etv making a good faith effort to serve their state? In 1973 the courts decided it was not, and Alabama etv, with eight stations under their aegis, lost their license to broadcast.”45 116  Chapter Th ree

Alabama etv was far from the only station that objected to Black Journal, which became even more controversial after Tony Brown took over from William Greaves as executive producer, beginning in late 1970—in part because of Brown’s outspoken performance style. An episode from 1971 about the Angela Davis case and the plight of Black prisoners was quite controversial, and a program manager in Las Vegas wrote to Brown that “had she had an opportunity to preview the program it would not have been shown.”46 In his memoir of his career in public television, James Day recalls that the episode “reaped a bountiful harvest of protest letters from white viewers.” He also says, however, that “the affiliates’ sensitivity to audience reaction was such that this first national show for a black minority would have sent apprehensive shudders through the system had it done nothing more that recite the alphabet.”47 On the program, Davis shared her skepticism that simply seeing Black people in office would change things. “I felt that appearing on Black Journal was something extremely important because I know you are interested in serving the needs of Black people,” she stated.48 Recollecting the first two seasons, Wali Siddiq commented that when Black Journal did well in the ratings, ranking alongside 60 Minutes, the program made “a whole lot of people nervous because they’d look ahead and say, ‘Damn! We let them run this another year, they’ll run us out of here.’”49 Concerned about the local stations’ power to censor Black Journal, groups of Black Journal viewers in Washington, D.C., and other cities formed an affinity group called Friends of Black Journal that boasted some eighty chapters across the country.50 The formation of this group suggests that viewers understood both the challenges facing Black Journal and the importance of supporting a national African American television program. Members of the group organized phone trees to remind people to tune in to the program and wrote to a critic who had written a negative article about Black Journal for the New York Times to let him know that he had “done a great program a grave disservice.”51 From Black Journal to Tony Brown’s Journal

The transition from Greaves to Brown was a profound aesthetic and political shift away from the experimental look of the episodes made under Greaves. In part, the transition also reflects a move away from the idealism of late 1960s visions of Black Power and toward a more pragmatic approach to the challenges faced by African Americans at the start of the N o Than ks fo r To ken ism 117

new decade. While some staff members left the program around the time of Greaves’s departure, there was certainly not an immediate or wholesale changeover among the remainder of the staff. While the program kept the name Black Journal in the initial years under Brown’s leadership, it eventually migrated from public to commercial television with the new, more accurate title: Tony Brown’s Journal. When Brown came to Black Journal, in 1970, he retained some existing staff and hired some new staff members, and the production shifted in its aesthetic and focused more on popular culture and media criticism. For example, Brown’s first episode contains a segment about several Black directors that functions as a piece of media criticism. The segment includes Ossie Davis, among other Black filmmakers, and addresses the hardships Black filmmakers faced in gaining experience in a field where unions were notoriously racist. Davis describes the process of establishing himself before returning to America to continue his work. The segment also addresses a confrontation involving Black Journal staff, who were largely nonunion workers, and their being ousted from a news conference with Davis, because other stations complained that the space was meant for union members only. Brown maintains that “exclusion of his crews from the news conference was ‘discrimination in disguise,’ because Blacks are kept out of the union.” The situation presented a dilemma for fledging young Black artists, who were not provided secure and ample opportunities at networks and lacked the means to set up their own production studios. Such a step would be costly, and finding distribution was a key problem, since unions controlled every step of the process. The press conference that Black Journal was excluded from was, ironically enough, a conference Davis called to discuss the difficulties he had encountered while creating his most recent film, Cotton Comes to Harlem. Davis recalls that even though he was creating a “Black film” in his “own neighborhood,” he had “very few Black people” on the crew, in large part because African Americans had long been excluded from the unions that controlled access to work in the film industry. “It was one hell of an embarrassment to me working every day in a Black community,” he said, “to show up every day with only white faces.” Eventually, “some of the Black and Puerto Rican filmmakers” went on strike and “shut down” the filming. Davis sympathized with them, saying, “I was on their side. Unless we fight to get Blacks behind the camera—as cameramen, sound men, producers—we’re not getting anywhere.” In order to bring publicity to the problem, Davis organized a press con118  Chapter Th ree

ference and invited Black Journal to participate. The Black Journal camera crew, however, found themselves excluded from the press conference and forced to shoot through the window. The segment focuses on the closed door and the muffled proceedings behind it, dramatically emphasizing Black Journal’s exclusion. Tony Brown explains that Black Journal asked Davis to watch the crew’s footage. Davis seems upset by the situation, explaining that he “found that the other camera crews represent major media,” and that these crews’ members “refused to set up their cameras” to cover the conference “as long as the Black Journal crew was [there].” Davis comments, “The reason they gave is because the Black Journal crew is not union members. Now it just so happens that the Black Journal crew is Black, and the reason they are not union members, I know very well, is because they are Black.” Tony Brown follows with a history of the “lily-­ white industry” and of the expulsion of Blacks from the union. With this segment, Black Journal asks what prominent Black media figures can do to get more Black access to power in the media industry. While Tony Brown brought a vital energy to the program right away when he took the helm in 1970, the changes he made were not without their critics. A new change of lineup and set design met with mixed reviews. “He is trying for a slicker and faster moving fusion of assorted reports and occasional bridges of song,” stated the New York Times in a ­review of the show. The main target for criticism seemed to be the new format, which introduced new visual techniques as well as segments such as “fake commercials.” Critics argued that the format sacrificed the show’s usual acute and clear assertions. The New York Times review says the show now “tried to cover too many things and sacrificed clarity and substance.” In evaluating the strengths and importance of the show, Jack Gould of the Times stated, “Black Journal is frankly addressed to blacks, but its peripheral value is hardly insignificant, which is letting whites know the who, what, where and why of the black perspective.” Brown later got into a dialogue with Gould in a piece he wrote titled “A Black Critic for a Black Show,” which took Gould to task, arguing that the show should not be subjected to white critics. Interestingly enough, years later, when he attacked Ntozake Shange’s work on his show, she used a similar defense, saying that her play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Not Enuf was intended for women, and that male critics had no place bashing her work. Despite Brown’s protests, Black Journal’s staff remained aware of their dual audience in its first several seasons. Black Journal’s status as the premiere Black public-­affairs program conN o Than ks fo r To ken ism 119

tinued to erode in 1973, when it was surpassed in national public television distribution by Black Perspective on the News, which had started out as a local program in Philadelphia. Black Perspective focused on the same national issues that mainstream news covered but presented commentary from Black journalists. Many more stations chose to air Black Perspective on the News, in part because Tony Brown had become a controversial figure in public television. One industry memo noted that “many members of the black communications community” felt that Brown arbitrarily kept “all viewpoints but his own from Black Journal” in the same way that white directors and producers imposed their views on Black shows.52 A new, cooperative plan allowed individual public stations even more discretion over which programs they wanted to air, and in 1972 only a quarter of pbs’s 139 stations chose to carry Black Journal, while the vast majority carried Black Perspective on the News. Yet Brown also had ardent supporters, and was able to rally them to continue to keep the pressure on public broadcasting for several more years, delaying his need to migrate the show to commercial television, which he eventually did, in 1976. Ultimately, the program returned to public television, where it is still in production as of this writing. The political perspective of shows like Black Journal had begun to seem too radical to pbs decision-­makers by the mid-­1970s. Many Black public-­ affairs programs were canceled in this period; some of their replacements (when they were replaced) were more “interracial” in their address. As James Williams noted in Black Enterprise magazine, however, such replacement shows could “hardly be called Black programming,” since they were “not designed to present a black perspective.”53 The differences between the “interracial dialogue” programs and Black programs were significant: Black Journal focused both on nationally known issues and issues mostly discussed internally in Black communities. Black Perspective on the News, on the other hand, primarily featured Black commentators speaking on issues that were headlining in the mainstream press, such as the Vietnam War, or discussions with invited guests, such as Bella Abzug, Dorothy Height, and Shirley Chisholm. In the first half of the 1970s, a number of articles in the Black press made the argument that Black viewers’ taxes paid for pbs and that these vital programs should not be cut. Williams’s article in Black Enterprise in 1974 characterized the Corporation for Public Broadcasting as “a tax-­supported institution operated as a white-­male-­dominated plantation with a shocking lack of concern and sensitivity about racial m ­ atters.”54 Despite such protests—and despite Black Journal’s support from the 120  Chapter Th ree

fcc’s first African American commissioner, Benjamin Hooks, and sponsorship of $200,000 from the Pepsi Corporation—pbs elected not to continue airing Black Journal in 1976. The show migrated to commercial television in 1977 as Tony Brown’s Journal, with funding from Pepsi-­Cola that allowed Brown to offer the program free in syndication. By that time, the program had diminished in its ability to do anything beyond the talking heads that defined so many low-­budget public-­affairs programs on public and commercial television. Eventually, the program returned to public television but remained, in both title and focus, Tony Brown’s Journal. Over the decades, the program has become increasingly reflective of Tony Brown’s advancing conservatism. Brown joined the Republican Party in 1990. Brown has continuously produced the show since late 1970 and therefore claims, justifiably, to have the longest-­running Black public-­ affairs show in history. However, the mission of the program has shifted as his politics have turned far more conservative, with a focus on Black economic empowerment through supporting Black-­owned businesses and a perspective on politics that considers many Black political strategies too focused on “victimization.”55 As the show’s funding, aesthetic, and audience have declined, its impact has lessened. Nonetheless, Brown is a formidable presence in Black media history and continues to have a loyal fan base. He has also been influential beyond his show, notably in the 1970s as the dean of communication at Howard University. ■■ Despite positive critical response and a loyal audience, Black Journal’s

resources declined after the first few seasons. The Ford Foundation, which provided more than half of the program’s budget in each of its first three seasons, with an annual grant of $495,000, ceased funding specific television programs in 1973, leaving Black Journal with a severe budget shortfall. The program was cut from one hour to a half hour. In December 1972, when the Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced the programs that it intended to fund in 1973–74, Black Journal (along with Soul!, the only other national Black program) was conspicuously absent from the list. Following protests from the Congressional Black Caucus, the National Newspaper Publishers Association, the Urban League, Friends of Black Journal, and best, as well as picketing at its headquarters, the Corporation finally announced that Black Journal would return in 1973–74. Without its Ford Foundation grant, however, Black Journal would have only enough money to produce about a third of its customary programN o Than ks fo r To ken ism 121

ming and would be reduced to in-­studio material as opposed to documentary segments. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting did not make up the budget shortfall at Black Journal, instead setting aside $345,000 for a new program to be called Interface, which was to “explore the relationship of blacks and whites.”56 Without the pressures of the riots, Ford and other foundation and corporate sponsors became far less invested in funding these programs, initially created as “outlets” for Black discontent. While Black Journal became far more than a simple “outlet,” its cultural and artistic significance could not keep the program from losing its funding. The fact that a version of the program still airs, as Tony Brown’s Journal, is a testament to Brown’s tenacity. But the larger picture makes clear how central a strategy of containment was to Ford and other funders of educational television, in sponsoring Black Journal’s initial seasons. In its first three seasons, especially under William Greaves, Black Journal’s staff created a complex and diverse series of portraits of Black America. The program’s ambitions in this period, at the apex of its funding and critical support, pushed at and occasionally reached the limits of what could be achieved with the resources at hand. More frequently, however, it was able to do far more than the station and its audience could have foreseen. A Black show in the white-­dominated landscape of public television, Black Journal called attention to the diversity and the common interest of Black Americans in all regions of the country. By asserting themselves with the strike, the staff “ended an era of thanks for tokenism” for good and provided an example of the possibilities of this kind of action.57 Perhaps most important, Black Journal offered a Black interpretation of the Black experience in the United States. It interrogated the contradictions of Black America in the post–civil rights era, made a serious attempt to depict Black life and Black oppression throughout the United States and the world, investigated the role of Black Americans in white-­dominated institutions, and chronicled solutions to Black problems, with an emphasis on self-­help that reflected the program’s own position in the framework of National Educational Television.

122  Chapter Th ree

four

That New Black Magic Black Arts and Women’s Liberation on Soul!

■■ “Black Womaaaan,” sing the Last Poets in an early episode of Soul! from 1968. “Your deeeeeep dark eyes . . . say blackness, say color of earth. Can I talk to you? Hey evening, Hey bluish black. . . . I want to create a beautiful world . . . a world of beauty where beautiful you . . . Black woman . . . Can bathe naked and unashamed . . . I will create, create, create . . . for you, Black woman.” The men perform in a simple, colorful space, and close-­ups of their faces are intercut with images of them moving and dancing as they perform. Sitting off to one side of the performance space on the stage with Soul!’s producer, Ellis Haizlip, are the actress Loretta Long and Barbara Ann Teer, the director of New Harlem Theater. Ellis turns to these eminent Black women to ask what they think of the way they are described and addressed by the Last Poets. Teer says, “Listening to the Last Poets is a religious experience for me.” She smiles and leans back in her chair. “It’s like, you can relax now . . . There’s a new breed of Black men.” Haizlip smiles at this (see figure 4.1). Long interjects, “It’s about time you hear something other than ‘blondes have more fun!’” The frank and humorous way in which Haizlip and these guests delve directly into their exchange about gender roles in response to the cutting-­ edge music of the Last Poets typified Soul!, public television’s national Black arts and entertainment program. Almost simultaneous in its beginnings with Black Journal, Soul! was created at Channel 13, New Dimensions in Television (wndt), which in 1968 was located in New Jersey and was, at that time, a separate organization from National Educational Television (net). Like Black Journal, Soul! was initiated by a white media maker with

Figure 4.1. The Last Poets interviewed on Soul!

extensive experience in television: Christopher Lukas, a progressive television producer from a family that was deeply involved in the civil rights movement. Lukas had already been pushing boundaries about race and other topics at Channel 13. Writing in the New York Times, George Gent described Lukas’s first special on race, Talking Black, a ninety-­minute live telecast with Black artists in Pittsburgh, New York, and Boston, as “essentially an exploration of the new consciousness of blackness as a positive concept among Negroes.” Lukas, like others in the industry, felt called to action after King’s assassination and the critiques in the Kerner report. He proposed a cultural program that would offer the best African American artists to a television audience. Once the program was funded, wndt’s president, Jack Keirmeyer, was approached by the station’s lone Black board member, the eminent psychologist Kenneth Clark, who asked what the content and tone of the show would be. Clark met with Lukas and stressed the importance of respectability and reminded Lukas that he and the show would have “a responsibility not to denigrate the Black community.” “You want the Harlem Renaissance as well as the Cotton Club,” said Lukas to Clark, reassuring him without making any promises about the program’s content.1 Lukas threw the program’s curatorial reins to his friend Ellis Haizlip, a theater producer who had been producing 124  Chapter Fo u r

James Baldwin’s plays in Europe. In the fall of 1968, backed by a grant from the Ford Foundation, Soul! premiered with Haizlip as producer. It ran weekly in metropolitan New York for its first season of thirty-­nine episodes. Due to its success and popularity as a local program in its first year, Soul! was subsequently distributed nationally to many etv stations around the country. “A weekly all-­black variety talk show,” Soul! brought the country’s top Black musicians and cultural figures to New York to converse with the program’s hosts and perform before a studio audience. The program aimed to reach a wide audience and to compete with commercial television, relinquishing public television’s frequent attempts to be an elitist, inaccessible “oasis in the wasteland.” In this case, wndt embraced Soul! as an entertainment program, something that educational stations generally did not do. The initial press release stated: “The format of Soul! resembles some of the popular late night programs—segmented, lively, informative and entertaining. Appearing on the show will be top stars and up-­and-­coming young talents from the black community. There will also be pertinent features dealing with all aspects of the social, cultural and artistic life of the black population.” Responding to the first episode, a journalist called Soul! the “Black Tonight Show” and explained that Soul! was openly part of an attempt to connect Black audiences with Black television. “Channel 13 would like to keep that audience tuned to the public television outlet. The station for the first time in its history has an advertising budget for a series: 15,000 that is being spent on posters, buttons, shopping bags and adds in Negro newspapers.”2 It was an unusual departure for public television to admit that anything it created could resemble programs that were “popular,” suggesting that although its habits and formats were entrenched, they were not calcified. The station could overcome its elitism because it hoped to attract a Black audience. As it happened, Soul! was an enduring program that appealed to Blacks and many others as well, a program that proved that public television could be populist when it wasn’t afraid to be popular. Far more than just a music and arts show for minority audiences, Soul! made the connections between Black arts and Black politics explicit while documenting the explosion of Black music and Black poetry in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It celebrated both traditional arts and genres, such as jazz, blues, rock ’n’ roll, and classical dance, as well as the newer avant-­ garde art forms connected to the Black Arts Movement. For many of the artists who appeared on Soul!, culture and politics were inseparable, and thus the art and opinions presented onscreen ranged naturally from Black That N ew Black Mag i c 125

music and poetry to the guests’ visions for Black America. Even when Soul! was not in session, the staff worked year-­round, recruiting talent, seeing shows, and holding salons in the studio. Soul! became a cultural space and a nexus for Black creative life, as well as a tv show. And by making such a wide range of art accessible to its audience, Soul! claimed a treasury of cultural achievement for Black America. As the host and producer, Ellis Haizlip interviewed guests from a high-­backed leather chair in a living-­room-­styled set near the stage. Performers would appear on stage and then join Haizlip for a conversation. Guest hosts, most frequently Nikki Giovanni but also Curtis Mayfield and others, occasionally took the helm. Over the years, Soul! had several directors. Under the direction of the Say Brother and Black Journal veteran Stan Lathan, Soul! achieved a new, distinctive aesthetic using video toasters, double exposure, and other special effects that were new at the time, and this gave the program a hip or even psychedelic vibe, further setting it apart from the normally edifying fare of public television. When Stan Lathan came to Soul! he brought technical and artistic innovations. In an especially aesthetically innovative episode, Lathan telecast Stevie Wonder’s playing on the set in such a way that his image doubled, repeated, and then reformed as a single image (December 20, 1972). This type of innovation, along with an exceptional line up of guests, made Soul! one of the most acclaimed programs on public television. The program also hosted some of the most groundbreaking and controversial dialogues around Black liberation anywhere on or off the small screen. In particular, at a time when “the Black family” had become a terrain in which Black humanity was questioned and African Americans were being, in the words of a poet featured on the show, “urban planned and Moynihanned,” Soul! offered regular, thoughtful examinations of Black gender relations in a forum that was simultaneously dignified and hip, creative, and engaged. In the dialogue between the program’s guests and hosts, the show interrogated the state of Black relationships of all types, making space on the air for engaging conversations about Black heterosexuality and homosexuality, motherhood and fatherhood, and Black women’s liberation. And Soul! occupied its own encompassing position in this spectrum of approaches to gender, questioning the marginalization of women, celebrating different aesthetics of masculinity and femininity, and offering an extraordinarily open space for the discussion of sexuality, particularly homosexuality. The program’s willingness to represent a range 126  Chapter Fo u r

Figure 4.2. The associate producer Alice Hille (left) with the host and

producer Ellis Haizlip (right). Courtesy of Photofest.

of viewpoints about sexuality and gender was the product of the artists and creative intellectuals that the show authorized as experts. The culture at wndt in that era was largely autonomous, and station leadership let Soul! and other shows do their own thing for the most part. This openness was apparent both in the show’s willingness to give airtime to frank, wide-­ranging conversations—including one between Baldwin and Giovanni that explored homosexuality and Black women’s and men’s relationships—and in its attitude toward its guests. Soul! invited conservative and moderate guests on but then respectfully urged them to articulate their positions and held them up to the light. On Soul!, white staff members held significant positions of power, as they had in the initial episodes of Black Journal; nonetheless, Haizlip and guest producers like Giovanni had carte blanche to invite radical guests and let them speak their minds. Featuring the Last Poets on the inaugural episode may not have been what Kenneth Clark expected, but Haizlip was in charge, and both the station and Lukas stayed out of his way. The result was a program that modeled an interactive and diverse Black public sphere, giving Black artists an opportunity to speak meaningfully about the state of Black America and showing television audiences how serious, how beautiful, and how political art and performance could be (see figure 4.2). That N ew Black Mag i c 127

Digging Blackness: The Host and the Audience

The contacts and leadership of Soul!’s main host and producer, Ellis Haizlip, put him in a curatorial role that makes him inseparable from the program’s legacy. “Ellis was really very smart, and the man knew the culture,” recalls the producer Charles Hobson, a veteran of Black Journal, Like It Is, Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant, and Atlanta’s Ebony Journal. Christopher Lukas recalls, “I just wanted him to do his thing; he had a mind, a sensitivity that was exquisite.” Nikki Giovanni remembers that the renowned psychologist Alvin Poussaint was initially slated to host the show, but the program needed someone with a performative pizzazz—someone with some “soul” to do his thing; Loretta Long and Ellis Haizlip’s cousin Harold Haizlip also hosted for a short time, but both left, possibly because both had aims of “universal” careers and Soul! was strictly “a black thing.”3 Ellis Haizlip initially hesitated to take on the host job because of a speech impediment and because he was known to be gay, but Giovanni and others who felt he had his finger on the pulse of Black life pushed him to do it—a defining decision that made the show very much Haizlip’s own and yet very accessible. Nikki Giovanni’s description of Haizlip’s decision to host as well as produce the show is worth recounting: Ellis came up to see me, and we sat and talked, and he said he was doing a show called Soul! and he was actually at that point looking for a host. . . . To me it was very obvious. Why don’t you do it? Of course, we had an issue with his sexuality, which was always—being in the Black community, everybody’s always going to have something to say. Forget that! The reality is you’re charismatic. You look good. People like you. You can’t be intimidated by reality. Ellis, you should do this. Ellis had something about his speech, a speech impediment. He thought he couldn’t do it, but he could. Because people could identify with him, and when people are interested in you, it works. And then we come to the day where we had Louis Farrakhan on the show, who was known for being homophobic. . . . [Ellis] thought Louis wouldn’t talk to him. Yes, he will, [I said]. I had no doubt. . . . It’s gonna work. And it did.4 Although Haizlip’s identity as a gay man was known in arts and television circles, it was not made explicit on Soul!—he was known but not, in today’s parlance, “out.” Given the overwhelming homophobia of the era, this was an unsurprising choice. Despite his acceptance in some circles, Haizlip was part of an industry in which people called him “Ellis Haizlipstick” be128  Chapter Fo u r

hind his back, some affectionately, others perhaps less so. Nonetheless, it is likely that Haizlip’s lack of investment in a heterosexual public image made it possible for him to openly bring up sexuality and gender issues with guests on the program. “When you know who you are, there’s very little anybody can attack you with,” says actress Anna Horsford, who was mentored by Haizlip when she started working for him at twenty years old, fresh from New York’s High School of Performing Arts and a stint acting for Ingmar Bergman in Scandinavia. While some may have loved the show in spite of Haizlip’s homosexuality, many guests and audience members simply did not care. Haizlip’s contacts formed in years as a theater and television producer and his connections to the popular and the avant-­garde in Black music, poetry, and film earned him respect. “Walking down the street in Harlem, the biggest thugs in the world would hug him,” recollects Horsford.5 People rarely turned down opportunities to appear on Soul!—even people who were openly antigay at the time, such as Louis Farrakhan and Amiri Baraka. In fact, Haizlip, sometimes nervous about those kinds of guests and their homophobia, would joke to his staff, “He wanted me. Did you see the way he hugged me? He wanted me!”6 Haizlip occasionally displayed nervousness on the air, particularly when the show was airing live in some markets; he once remarked on air during a live broadcast, “We can go up, or we can go down.” He invited both the in-­studio audience and the home audience to share in his nervousness and hope for the best with him. Some episodes of Soul! were entirely prerecorded, while others went on the air in New York City partially or entirely live. Because wndt’s distribution system did not allow for a simultaneous feed to many other locations, most venues outside New York received tapes to air. To get episodes rapidly to places like Washington, D.C., staff members would fly and hand deliver them.7 As Soul!’s earliest press release points out, the studio audience added “excitement” to the program, differentiating it from the other Black programs examined in this book. An invitation to the taping of Soul! was “the hottest ticket in town,” and the staff never had to work hard to find an audience. Jesse Jackson appeared on the show during a snowstorm, and though the staff feared it would be hard to fill the studio when there were fourteen inches of snow outside, a lively group of spectators made it to Channel 13’s New Jersey facility to be part of the studio audience.8 Those who wished to be part of the audience could write in for tickets. There was no policy to ensure they would be hip-­looking, but many in-­the-­know people wanted to check out Soul! in person, including quite a few friends of staff That N ew Black Mag i c 129

members, and their style contributed to Soul!’s aesthetic. Horsford recollects that audience members were usually self-­selected, though the staff did occasionally pack the house with sympathetic people. For one show produced entirely in indigenous South African languages, for instance, Horsford found South Africans in New York to attend the program. And for Louis Farrakhan’s appearance, the audience was composed mostly of Nation of Islam members and fellow travelers. Soul!’s creators were quite savvy about using the audience to invoke what Jane Feuer calls the “ideology of ‘liveness.’”9 Liveness, Feuer explains, is a construction used by the television industry to perpetuate the illusion of television’s realness and immediacy.10 By filling the house with individuals who adored the artists and other guests, Soul’s staff strategically employed this approach. Creating an enthusiastic crowd of spectators inspired intimacy and immediacy by modeling enthusiastic, dignified engagement with the performances. Soul!’s audiences were always decked out in some version of the new Black look, conscious of being televised in their viewing; in this way, the audience was performing as well as spectating. Soul! thereby confirmed that “Black can be beautiful on a television screen” in part with the assistance of its audience. The Black studio audience on Soul! broke down the distance between the at-­home audience and the performers at the same time that it modeled a hip, engaged, and dignified Black public sphere for those at home. And Black audiences were always clearly the primary target of Soul! As Haizlip said in an interview at the program’s premiere, “We’re very interested in white viewers if they are going to watch it with an open mind, but we’re not interested if they tune in to watch a lot of darkies singing and strumming.”11 Soul! subtly educated white viewers on appropriate and respectful spectatorship: white viewers were always watching the performers with the Black studio audience. This experience offered training in appropriate viewing and reframed their spectatorship, as well as the Black-­white power dynamic. Furthermore, they were watching from outside the circle, with Black viewers getting the closest seats, a move that offered symbolic redress for the enforced separations that Black audiences endured for more than a century. The unspoken message of this inner circle to non-­Blacks was, You are welcome to watch this and appreciate it with us—but it’s not just for you. The at-­home viewer watched the studio audience watch the performances in person, and the studio audience offered a model for the spectatorial attitude of the home viewer. 130  Chapter Fo u r

Soul!’s audience at home was as passionate as the audience in the studio. When the program was threatened with cancellation in 1969, Haizlip received hundreds of letters from fans. One was from a prominent civil rights leader, Ralph Bunche, who wrote a telegram to the show saying it was one of the most “unique and refreshing” programs on television. “It is courageous and well done. I hope it can be continued.” Many more were from ordinary citizens. One woman wrote that she had “scrubbed hospital floors” to educate her three “Black children.”12 Insisting on the value of representing African American culture, she wrote that “Soul! is not only entertaining but inspiring and enlightening.” A long letter from Bryan Thrasher, United States Army, spoke of his strong identification with the program—“this show is part of me and represents what the people stand for—progress!” This writer speaks for enlisted soldiers, asking that his letter represent “the Black brothers in Vietnam who would love to come home and see a Soul Program.” Thrasher also appreciated how educational the show could be for white viewers, as well as Blacks who remained politically naive: “This show lets the uniformed white and Black man know what we can do if given the chance and allowed to ‘do our thing.’” Indeed, a white woman, Diane Wieneman, writes that she understands how Black culture constitutes specific and valuable knowledge after seeing the show, something she acknowledges that she previously failed to understand. Haizlip saved letters like these, as well as a collection of letters from prisoners in New Jersey, to document the diversity of Soul!’s audience, and to show the intensity of their passion for Soul!’s cutting-­edge engagement with Black liberation and Black culture. One family even claimed that the show was the only program they watched on their $500 television, because it is the only show that is “for real.” This passionate connection marked the communication that Soul! received, suggesting that it touched on a deep desire to see Black cultural producers in a highly visible position.13 The profound connection audiences formed with Soul! indicates that television can participate in and powerfully inform social change by empowering and reaffirming viewers, while pushing them to new kinds of engagement with culture and politics. Conversations with Baraka: Engaging Cultural Nationalism

In one episode that is an excellent exemplar of the personal, political, and creative terrain covered by Soul!, Haizlip’s intimate and open approach to his guests, and the influential role of the studio audience, Amiri Baraka That N ew Black Mag i c 131

appears. Baraka’s prolific political and artistic work was a perfect match for Soul!’s blend of art, performance, and politics, and his dynamic performance style made for extremely compelling television appearances. He appeared on Soul! multiple times. In this episode, Haizlip interviews Baraka in low mood lighting, with a coffee table between them that displayed Baraka’s collected works. Haizlip’s interview with Baraka proceeds in apparent “real time,” with little editing. Their conversation is interspersed with Baraka’s performing his poetry; when he does this, he simply gets up from the living-­room set, walks to the stage with its high-­key lighting, performs in a more public persona, and then returns to the set. This treatment presents two parts of Baraka’s persona: the artist in performance and the man in conversation. Baraka performs his poem in an avant-­garde, sermonic chant, calling for unity and collaboration over individuality and ego: “All these me’s together / we need to get on outside ourselves . . . / all these me’s . . . need to hook up, hook up and form a we.” This collectivity seems reaffirmed by the sense of community and connection in the room. The audience’s closeness to the stage and to the performers gives a sense of liveness and intimacy. Initially, a red light is seen behind Baraka. The audience offers its applause, and light catches their hands and their hair; they are part of the image. A high-­angle shot of Haizlip and Baraka shows the two sitting on high-­backed, black leather chairs on a round, wooden stage illuminated with a pattern of light. “Soul!” appears in big pink, yellow, green, and purple letters behind them, shiny and iridescent. As Baraka crescendos, “Don’t put us down as merely singers, we are the song,” we hear the crowd start to cheer, and the opening theme of the program begins to play in brightly toned horns, echoing the audience’s bright faces. Haizlip introduces Baraka by reading his biography off the back of his latest book. This includes his political and artistic résumé, touching on Baraka’s involvement with the Kawaida philosophy at Spirit House and his political organizing with the Committee for Unified NewArk, as well as his publications. To introduce the next segment, Haizlip pulls a book out of the shelf of Baraka’s collected works, saying, “I want to talk about Baraka the artist.” He begins, however, by talking to Baraka the man, congratulating him on the birth of his son—so new that the family has yet to name him. The two seated men on the Soul! set create a striking frame with Baraka on the right and Haizlip on the left. The lights behind them form vertical stripes that echo the spines of the books on the coffee table, between carved bookends and an African mask. 132  Chapter Fo u r

“When did you find you wanted to be a writer?” opens the conversation, and Haizlip and Baraka settle into their exchange, smoking cigarettes as they converse. As the smoke swirls around them, Baraka describes when he became serious about writing and how he moved from poetry into plays. In the course of their conversation, Baraka eventually decries New York as “a white literary achievement.” He says the environment is polluted by what came before, which he calls “slick Western degeneracy,” and he proposes an alternative—a version of the West Coast Black Power thinker Ron Karenga’s “Black Value System.” As Baraka enumerates the seven principles, Haizlip encourages the audience to repeat the phrases and learn them, directly addressing and teaching the audience, underscoring the pedagogy of Soul! and Haizlip’s role as a facilitator. “Umoja, unity,” Baraka begins. “Take it slow,” urges Haizlip, the audience cooperates relatively enthusiastically, responding to Baraka: “Nia, purpose. Kuumba, creativity. Imani, faith. . . .” As the studio repeats after Baraka, it is clear how the program’s format made possible a more inclusive, participatory kind of television that defied genre conventions. The individuals in the audience may have been critical of some of Karenga’s ideals (or very sympathetic, as Soul! tended to pack the house with like-­minded folks), but they were all sympathetic enough to spontaneously consent to being part of the performance. Their voices in the resonant space of the studio reinforce Baraka’s performative identity. This process of modeling what a participatory Black public sphere could look like for the at-­home viewer was central to Soul!’s ethos. Baraka epitomizes the political and creative forces that Soul! blended. As Baraka said on the program, “Culture is the strongest thing in a person’s life—what they think is beautiful, what they think is ugly.” The show reiterates this centrality of culture in each episode. Responding to rumors about Baraka and exhibiting his characteristic willingness not to shy away from discussing nonheteronormative sexuality on the air, Ellis Haizlip asks Baraka about polygamy, does he believe in it, live it, or promote it? Haizlip provocatively points out that a large number of Black men have been “ripped off by drugs” and that there is “a lot of homosexuality,” creating a surplus of single Black women. Baraka laughs and refutes any belief in or practice of polygamy, saying that men can only have the time to be revolutionaries if they have one family. If they try to take on too much, Baraka jokes, “their revolution will be coming in that house trying to deal with all the women.” Furthermore, Baraka points out that in a postslavery society it is revolutionary for a Black man and woman to live together and to raise children, since slaves were denied access to That N ew Black Mag i c 133

legal marriage and its protections. As a father, he notes, “you might be stranger on the block.” Baraka recalls that his own parents stayed together, and he makes it clear that this was important, that having a father and mother is right for Black children. He uses Blaxploitation films—“bloods Superflying it or Shafting it”—as a metaphor or cautionary tale for how he thinks men should not behave. “Black people achieving health and normalcy. . . . That will be revolutionary,” says Baraka. In addition to discussing his writing and new poems, Baraka also addresses his work building alternative political and material institutions in Newark, as well as his work on the Kawaida Towers. He calls this sixteen-­ story tower in Newark a “concrete manifestation of revolutionary philosophy.” Once again eschewing a model of passive viewing, Baraka calls on the studio audience and the home audience to respond and engage with their own liberation. He is clear that all Black people have a strong obligation to participate in physical, economic, intellectual, and psychic liberation from white-­supremacist thinking: “You work eight hours for white folks. Can you work one hour a day to liberate yourself?” Baraka is unrelenting in his criticism of those that would do harm to the Black cause: he calls those in power “well-­dressed killers” and argues that Black people must change what they are able to, making the most of their “political and economic power.” He describes the scourge of drugs and the toll on Black people as “a result of being crushed by somebody else’s values.” The discussion between Baraka and Haizlip also underscores the importance of fashion on the program, and in the wider milieu of the Black public sphere in this time. Haizlip pointedly asks Baraka about his striking suit, and Baraka tells the audience that it is a “national suit from Tanzania, designed by J. K. Nyerere.” Baraka presents the suit as an antidote to the kind of passive assimilation into white culture that he refers to as “shirt-­tie syndrome.” The program illustrates his intention for a new Black look: in the background, we see men and women in the audience wearing a variety of clothing and accessories, representing the an emerging Black aesthetic: large pendants, batik patterns, afros, and braids. At the end of the program, the audience cheers and cheers as Baraka returns to the stage to deliver another riveting performance: “See? We are very slow, very slow / we are in our hip terribleness / so cool yet slow.” The closing shot of the audience nodding, smiling, and applauding demonstrates that this mix of politics and performance speaks to them.

134  Chapter Fo u r

Engaging and Discomfiting: Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam on Soul!

While Baraka offered a cultural nationalist position on gender and family dynamics, emphasizing separate and traditional roles for men and women, a range of other positions on these issues were also considered by guests on Soul!14 Equally as impassioned and intense a performer as Baraka, Louis Farrakhan, the minister of the Nation of Islam, appeared on the program several times. The Nation of Islam was intentionally trying to assert control over their media image, and Farrakhan’s performances on programs like Soul! and Black Journal were calculated to spread an easily digestible version of its message. A powerful and popular nationalist organization, the nation had a significant cultural influence in the 1960s. As a group, its position on gender was largely patriarchal, leading to a recruiting gap in which only one woman joined for every five male recruits to the organization.15 The historian Steve Estes calls the nation’s approach to gender a “masculinist liberation theology” and details how “its doctrines of separatism, self-­defense, and Black nationalism . . . gained wide currency among civil rights activists in the second half of the 1960s.”16 Farrakhan, a charismatic spokesman for the Nation of Islam, typically gave a commanding performance for the media. His appearance on Soul! is no exception. The episode opens with Farrakhan standing in three-­quarter profile to the camera. Lights shine brightly and give him a halo effect. He speaks in a booming voice to both the studio audience and, perhaps more so, to the television audience, letting them know how passionately he seeks their attention. This kind of direct address and appeal to the audience was unusual on Soul! but not atypical of Farrakhan. As he addresses the audience, he takes on some of the negative images of the Nation of Islam and of its leader, Elijah Muhammad. Muhammad’s image is on the coffee table, and the audience is composed of serious persons in suits, sitting around the stage, mostly members of the nation and therefore not the people whose unfamiliarity Farrakhan is truly addressing. Farrakhan sits down as he begins to pontificate about how “Black men are in pitiful condition.” Farrakhan goes on to refer to “all dark people” as “mentally dead” and in need of “a minister.” “That’s right,” says someone in the audience in the manner of a call-­and-­response religious service. Over applause and supportive responses from the audience, we hear Haizlip murmur with appreciation, “You’re incredible.” In this episode, aired in May 1971, Haizlip, while remaining respectful That N ew Black Mag i c 135

of and even deferential toward Farrakhan, deftly steers the conversation away from standard Nation of Islam talking points, asking what it takes to serve the nation, wondering if those who are interested necessarily have to fully commit to its moral code in its entirety. Pointing out that a number of people “have discovered their righteousness in prison,” where “one of the things a lot of men and now some of the women have to deal with is homosexuality,” Haizlip moves from behavior to identity without skipping a beat. “Does the fact the man is a homosexual have anything to do to prevent his coming into and being dealt with by the nation? How can they serve the Nation of Islam?” Farrakhan’s lengthy response makes clear that the Nation of Islam is only an option for gays who see themselves as “fallen,” those who might be interested “correcting” their sexuality. He offers a theory of homosexuality as a perversion of nature, explaining that men and women “incline” toward one another in the same way that “the planet inclines to the plane of its orbit.” Specifically rejecting Black homosexuality, Farrakhan explains that homosexuality is a “learned” behavior that Black people were introduced to in America—that is, he blames slavery for the introduction of homosexuality among Black Americans. Haizlip sits back in his chair and stares as Farrakhan says: “We didn’t learn this freakish behavior in Africa. You cannot find brothers in Africa walking around with broken wrists [showing a limp wrist]. You don’t find women in Africa running with women. We learned that behavior in our sojourn in America.” Farrakhan concludes his impromptu sermon: “There is no such thing as a homosexual that cannot be changed. There is no such thing as a lesbian that cannot be changed. Almighty God Allah is here to change us all back again into a new group and bring us back to the natural order in which we are created.” One might expect the rest of the interview to have been anticlimactic, but Haizlip shakes his head and boldly asks Farrakhan, “What are the black sisters to do to fulfill their sexual needs?” Later, he raises the question of whether the Nation of Islam promotes polygamy, giving Farrakhan, like Baraka, the chance to dispel rumors on the subject. The interview considers the role of women in the nation, with Haizlip pointing out that the dress code puts special burdens on women, since their “special way” of dressing makes them “readily identifiable in the community.” Farrakhan explains that “the greatest reward for a good woman is a good man.” In the audience are seated a number of women with veils and a variety of head coverings, showing both that women in the nation do not all dress the 136  Chapter Fo u r

same and that women in the nation are out on the town, listening to Farrakhan speak on Soul! These images intentionally contradict the impression that viewers may have of the women of the nation as cloistered and invisible or homogeneous and unidentifiable. Farrakhan and Haizlip are masterful together, creating interactive theater for the audience instead of a more typical, and less exciting, sermon by Farrakhan. The tonal warmth of their exchange suggests that though the two men are very different, their mutual love for Black people gives them common ground. That Farrakhan agreed to appear on Soul!, knowing both of Haizlip’s reputation as a gay man and of his directness about discussing controversial issues on television, suggests the importance of Soul! as a venue. On another episode, Soul! featured the prominent Nation of Islam member Muhammad Ali. Ali’s interview with Nikki Giovanni covers a lot of ground, from his resistance to the draft to his bullying by mainstream media to his advising young Black men to work hard in school and not enter the field of athletics. Only when Giovanni asks Ali about his family is the masculinist philosophy of the Nation of Islam in evidence. Answering a question from Giovanni about his children, Ali admits frankly that he does not know them, especially his youngest, “too well” because of his travels. Ali explains that he feels strongly that it is his wife’s obligation to “train them” until they reach a certain age. From their position in the Nation of Islam, Ali and Farrakhan offer patriarchal and conservative viewpoints on Black family life while celebrating the resiliency of those families. Arguing that this kind of conservatism was defensive, although problematic. The author E. Frances White explains, “Black family life has consistently served as a model of abnormality for the construction of ideal family life.”17 Reinforcing traditional family roles was one strategic response to this pervasive form of racism. On Soul!, however, this conservatism was featured in a context of openness to new ideas about possibilities for Black people and Black families, as a discussion between Nikki Giovanni and James Baldwin illustrates. Love Is Love, Baby: James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni Discuss the Black Family

The poet Nikki Giovanni, whether interviewing Muhammad Ali or performing her own work on Soul!, was a major voice in the discussion of Black gender roles and family life. In the early days of the show, Haizlip That N ew Black Mag i c 137

sought Giovanni out to appear on the show, and they became friends, with Haizlip babysitting her son when she went out of town and Giovanni frequently hosting Soul! Giovanni always appeared on Soul! as a volunteer because she did not wish to be on the staff or to be obligated in any way. She preferred to have the freedom to say what she wanted to say and appear when she wanted to appear. Her guests responded to her openness with their own directness. In an interview with Miriam Makeba, the South African singer, which aired in January 1972, Giovanni apologizes for the difficulties Makeba has had traveling in the United States. Makeba says, “I always say the difference between America and South Africa is very small. In South Africa, they admit what they are.” The audience responds enthusiastically to this critique of American apartheid, underscoring the political charge created by the concentration of like-­minded people in the room. Shortly afterward, Makeba rises from her chair to deliver a riveting performance of several of her songs, reflecting the program’s immediate mix of art and politics. Referring to that moment, I asked Giovanni if she had ever worried that statements like this would get the program canceled, and she said, “If ever America has had an existential moment, probably it would be Soul! . . . I think that all of us knew you only get one time to do the right thing. Ali said that the war was wrong. You only have one time that you have a national voice. . . . And so you have to say what you’re going to say that one time you say it. You don’t compromise.”18 In addition to Soul!, Giovanni’s uncompromising presence was a regular feature on other Black television shows. She interviewed Lena Horne on Black Journal, and she appeared regularly on other Black programs and in Black publications. James Baldwin, by this moment, was a public intellectual, known for outspoken commentary as well as his acclaimed novels and nonfiction. A longtime friend and colleague of Haizlip’s, he agreed to be on the program if Soul! would come to Europe to meet him. Giovanni went to England to tape a conversation with him. That these two literary figures were also public commentators central to Black publics reflects the vitality of Black arts to Black politics in this historical moment. A two-­part special episode of Soul!, filmed in November 1971 and aired in December, featured the two writers in a no-­holds-­barred, two-­hour, unscripted conversation meditating on Black politics, art, and gender (see figures 4.3, 4.4, and 4.5). Both writers engage with the medium of television wholeheartedly, performing for the camera and capturing the interest of viewers. Shot by a European crew in an experimental style, the images are not of the talk138  Chapter Fo u r

ing heads genre. Instead, long takes of the artists’ hands are interspersed with images of their faces, creating an expressive television discussion. The age difference between the two writers positioned Baldwin the elder in the conversation, and Giovanni is respectful though not deferential as she plays the role of the questioning new generation. In this conversation, the two writers postulate and interweave ideas about power and authority within Black families, discussing, for example, the internal power relations in a Black family in relation to external oppression. Their discussion also touches on homosexuality and offers openness to the possibility that women bringing up children without a man might not always be a problem. It is striking that two prominent intellectuals who were not living traditional heteronormative roles in their adult lives playacted a married couple in the discussion about the heteronormative Black family. This suggests how deeply “the Black family” had become grounds for maligning Black people, and therefore the concept of family became territory that African Americans felt a need to defend. Indeed, Giovanni and Baldwin sought to investigate the deeper, less blame-­oriented roots for the formation of Black families as part of a defense of African Americans as a people. Giovanni spoke openly and often about choosing to bring up her son independently and, characteristically outspoken, questioned the idea of marriage, saying it was inhospitable to women. Furthermore, Giovanni (and everyone else) surely knew that Baldwin was gay. With a knowing nod to their own outsider status in relation to conventional heterosexual marriage, the two took up metaphoric roles as husband and wife at key points in the discussion, vocalizing these roles to address fundamental issues about Black male-­female relationships. In response to Giovanni’s criticism of some Black men’s irresponsibility and abusive behavior, Baldwin offers this d­ efense: Your manhood is being slowly destroyed hour by hour, day by day. Your woman’s watching it; you’re watching her watch it. The love that you have for each other is being destroyed hour by hour and day by day. It’s not her fault, it’s not our fault, but there it goes, because the pressures under which you live are inhuman. My father finally went mad, and when I became a man I understood how that could happen. It wasn’t that he didn’t love us; he loved his wife and his children, but he couldn’t take, day after day, hour after hour, being treated like a nigger on that job and in the streets on the subways—everywhere he went. That N ew Black Mag i c 139

Figures 4.3, 4.4, and 4.5.

James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni on Soul!

Giovanni challenges Baldwin, proclaiming that she cannot understand “how you could be mistreated and come home and mistreat someone in the same way.” She goes on to state that she could never act less intelligent or bold in order to bolster a man’s self-­esteem, however damaged it might be. She responds to what she considers a prototypical, extreme nationalist position—that women should walk ten paces behind a man—with frustration: “I can walk ten paces behind a dog. It means nothing to me, but if that’s what the Black man needs, I’ll never get far enough behind him for him to be a man. I’ll never walk that slowly.” In another pointed moment in the dialogue, Baldwin traces the challenges of expressing sexuality for African Americans back to slavery: “In the same way that my child produced from your body did not belong to me but to the master and could be sold at any moment. This erodes a man’s sexuality. You destroy his ability to love anyone, despite the fact that sex and love are not the same thing. When a man’s sexuality is gone, his possibility, his hope of loving is also gone.” These performances, in which the “you” and the “me” stand in for archetypes, allowed the two public intellectuals to spin out innovative possibilities for thinking through Black relationships in this period of social transformation. Baldwin’s lament about the loss of the right to sexuality and about the unspeakable losses wrought by oppression also speaks to his own situation as a gay man. At another point, their exchange escalates into an argument: Baldwin: Yeah, but be careful as a woman what you demand of a man. Giovanni: I demand that he be a man. Baldwin: But you can’t demand it, you have to suggest it. Giovanni: Well, that’s your ego that demands that. No, I demand it now. You deal with that. Baldwin: All right, OK. After this exchange, appearing concerned about how critical she sounds, Giovanni attempts to soften her statements somewhat by mentioning how much she loves her father, and she praises her parents’ thirty-­five-­year marriage. On the other hand, while she claims her love for her father, she quips, “I just don’t want to marry him.” Indeed, throughout their conversation, as Baldwin and Giovanni express their compassion for the struggles of Black families, they also reiterate the fact that they as individuals are looking for alternatives to traditional family structures, which sets them apart from some African American leaders who advocated solutions to That N ew Black Mag i c 141

the problems facing Black families surprisingly similar to those proposed by Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Giovanni and Baldwin manifest their enjoyment of one another’s company and conversation, yet they are not afraid to challenge one another. When Giovanni asks Baldwin directly about homosexuality, he smiles and says, “Love is love, baby: if you duck it, you die!” He goes on to talk about the price of denial: “I’ve seen white boys die by the needle because they couldn’t admit who they were.” This incredibly open exchange as well as the frank intellectualism and political unorthodoxy of the entire conversation, places Soul! as a television outlier, conveying ideas that could be found nowhere else on the dial. After it aired, Anna Horsford recalls that the studio received a few hateful phone calls from people wondering why Soul! had given so much airtime to “that homo” but that responses of that type were relatively isolated, and the two-­part program received overwhelmingly positive feedback. Meanwhile, Black Warriors on Black Journal

While the conversation between Baldwin and Giovanni was atypical even for Soul!, many guests on Soul! and other Black programs addressed gender issues and in particular offered a defense of Black families. Tony’s Brown’s first episode of Black Journal in the 1970 season, for example, reveals the intensity of internal conflict over gender roles among African Americans. Nationalist ideas, with their call for complementarity in gender roles, are omnipresent in the episode, as is a call for reverence for Black women. This episode features fake commercials, highlighting the attractiveness of Black women and the ideal of Black men and women together. Black Journal’s faux commercials do not advertise a product; instead, they use high-­ concept imagery and direct address in an attempt to reconstruct and rewrite circulating negative, emasculating images of Black women. The first commercial highlights Black femininity; it opens with close-­ups on the faces of young Black women; sultry flute music plays in the background. The women stand on a beach and are on display, holding themselves like trees in the landscape and wearing wraparound print dresses. While the commercial resembles a fashion shoot, the message is clear: as the camera pans up to a woman posing on the beach, a voice-­over declares, “The next time someone says the Black woman is domineering, remind them how gentle her strength.” This commercial was simultaneously reverent in its 142  Chapter Fo u r

celebration of Black women’s beauty and nationalist in its pointed emphasis on the “gentleness” of Black women. “A Black woman’s role is to relate to her man and family, but first she must learn to relate with her community,” begins the next commercial over a scene of a man and woman walking down an empty sidewalk, wearing African-­inspired fashions, the man in a dashiki top and slacks and the woman in a printed wrap. The following shot features the same couple sitting together and holding hands. At the end of the commercial, the voice-­over praises the couple, presumably for being together at a time when tensions among Blacks over interracial dating were high: “Right on Brother, Right on Sister!” the voiceover says approvingly. These commercials offered a defense of Black women, responding to the charges that women were emasculating men and that the problems of African Americans were women’s fault. Yet the defense insisted on the innate “gentleness” and femininity of women, as well as on heterosexual and same-­race coupling. Their creation of these commercials recognized the dominance of commercial television as an important site for gendered, racialized discourse and positioned Black Journal’s (or at least Tony Brown’s) definitive point of view on gender, demonstrating the salience of both reverence and nationalism. The contrast to Soul!’s more inclusive, feminist vision is ­striking. Soul! Salutes the Sisters: Staging a Black Women’s Public Sphere

As the Black Journal commercials also suggest, beauty was an important arena from which to contest both patriarchy and white-­supremacist thinking. The revolutionary potential of beauty is discussed in an episode that features the actress Cicely Tyson, who appeared on Soul! in December 1972 after starring in the landmark epic film Sounder, which chronicles the lives of an African American sharecropping family. She speaks with Ellis Haizlip about the limited roles available for Black actresses: “I thought it was time for the Black woman to appear on the screen as a human being, rather than as a Barbie doll or a sex symbol or an addict.” After the audience has had a chance to respond approvingly to Tyson’s critique, Haizlip brings up the subject of her hair, which Tyson wears in elaborate braids for the interview. “Cicely, you’re extremely beautiful,” Haizlip remarks. “Your hair looks exquisite.” The audience applauds, and Haizlip acknowledges That N ew Black Mag i c 143

the ironies of African Americans’ focus on hair as part of self-­presentation: “We’re kind of pathetic in that way, because I remember quite a while back when you first started wearing your hair in the Afro hairstyle. You did that for television, right?” Tyson responds with a narrative about her hairstyles that the audience clearly finds as riveting as her discussion of her role in the film. Well, initially when I did it, I did it to play the role of an African woman so far back I don’t even want to say. But it was a show entitled Between Yesterday and Today. I had been bothered because I was wearing it straight and very conventional. . . . The show was being done live. I walked into a barber shop and I asked the barber to cut it off. Of course, he thought I was insane. And it took him about three hours to cut my hair. . . . Of course, I was seen on that television show by the producers of The Blacks. And I went into The Blacks, and that lasted for years, and then I went into East Side, West Side. It was during East Side, West Side that I began to get letters from hairdressers all over the country complaining about the fact that they were losing their business because everybody was going natural, and, you know, I kind of take credit for it. In the midst of the transition to a new Black aesthetic, it was challenging to historicize and analyze these aesthetic and personal transitions as they occurred. Soul! offered a forum to engage this discussion, as well as a visual space to demonstrate a range of approaches to personal aesthetic expression as part of Black liberation. The visibility of women on Soul! reflected a larger culture of the program. The work environment at Soul! was very progressive and woman-­ friendly, for the period. Haizlip hired numerous women into major roles in the production and editorial staff—among them Alice Hille, Sherry Santifer, and Anna Horsford. He entrusted them with important tasks and publicly thanked them. Employing a predominantly female staff was unusual in television, and seems to have affected Soul!’s openness to women’s liberation. Nikki Giovanni was frequently on camera, but also behind the scenes as a friend of Haizlip and a friend of the show. As mentioned earlier, Nikki Giovanni chose not to be an employee of Soul!. Haizlip invited her and she chose to appear based on her interest, but she was not paid. “I never thought it was smart to let Ellis pay me. It was just that simple. What I said to him had nothing to do with bread on my table . . . because he can’t control me by firing me and so there are some people you just can’t let pay you. I knew that. I did want my producing credit, but no money.” He asked 144  Chapter Fo u r

her who she would be interested in talking to, and though a full episode with Giovanni in conversation with Angela Davis never worked out, the conversation with James Baldwin was something Haizlip and Giovanni planned together. The round-­the-­clock nature of being a Soul! employee, which involved seeing shows and editing late into many nights, would not have appealed to Giovanni, who had a young son, and was touring nationally to share her own work. But for young staff members like Anna Horsford, Soul! was her life, a demanding but unmatched opportunity to participate in an ongoing salon on and off the air. Soul! regularly featured female artists but the staff also recognized a need to address female artists who specifically focused on gender. Alice Hille organized the first episode of 1971, a “Salute to the Sisters,” that addresses many of the currents of thinking about gender, women’s roles, and the relationship of women to Black nationalism swirling about in the Black public sphere in the 1970s. The program featured a number of female artists, mostly poets and actors, as well as a dancer and a classical pianist, performing for an avid studio audience apparently composed entirely of women. Knowing of the staff member Anna Horsford’s budding career as an actor, Hille offered her a chance to appear on the program. While the other women wore dashikis and performed the new Black look, the twenty-­year-­old Horsford bought a low-­cut dress at Bloomingdales for her first appearance on television. “It must have been down to my navel,” she recalls, laughing.19 Her performance on the show was so stirring that she was invited to perform the same poem (not her own work) at several venues after it appeared. Like many of the women on stage, the women in the audience wore cutting-­edge fashions that mixed African inspirations with downtown bohemianism, including African-­inspired robes and hats, dungarees, and large, chunky jewelry. Haizlip’s decision to have an episode that focused on women and did not feature men speaking about, singing about, or otherwise performing their opinions on women was an unusual one, as many of the other Black public-­affairs programs offered special episodes on “the Black woman” that featured all of these approaches. The poetry performance in this episode of Soul! illustrates the Black Arts Movement poet Cheryl Clarke’s contention that “poetry was a principal instrument of political education about the new Blackness” during the movement.20 The guests’ luminous performances, offered from a graduated stage with warm light shining upward at them from footlights, offers insights into the passions and politics that drove Black women’s liberation struggles in this era. Some guests read, That N ew Black Mag i c 145

while others perform their poems from memory. Each poem appears to respond to and comment on the others, the show moving easily from one artist to the next. The poems address many issues, but almost all of them speak from a strongly gendered and raced consciousness. The all-­female audience responds with rapt attention, laughter, and applause, transporting the at-­home audience into a female-­only space. This episode allowed the audience to participate with the artists as they demonstrated the possibility of a vital Black women’s public sphere. The studio audience, dressed up and ready to appear on television, played an important part in performing this public sphere and in modeling reception for the home viewer. They signaled their approval with loud applause and approving murmurs of recognition and support. The repeated shots of the audience participate in the pedagogical strategy of the program in its representation of the possibilities for complex self-­definition and political agency for Black women. By performing poems that addressed sexuality, relationships, motherhood, and other “private sphere” concerns that have historically been associated with women, these performers broke down boundaries between public and private, creating an intermediate, communal space in which these gendered issues were discussed. Their performance holds these “private sphere” issues up to the bright lights of television and a national audience. For example, one artist performs a poem critiquing Black men for using their newly felt empowerment to form relationships with white women, saying, “Put that white girl where you got her!” This admonishment elicits a knowing laugh from the women in the audience. In the subsequent poem, the poet uses the acronym “bp” not for “Black Power” but, cleverly and with sexual innuendo, for “Black persuasion.” The poem promotes Black women’s femininity and sexual appeal: “I got the power to make you the eighth wonder, womanly powerful bp, soft Black persuasion. If this sounds like a commercial it may be true, but if I’ve got to advertise, that’s what I’ll do. Soft, soft.” Also criticizing Black men for not choosing to be with Black women, Anna Horsford declaims: “You reached in to pull my mind out of the mire out of four centuries / to tell me I am beautiful / . . . now you want to protect and write poems about me, / so now, what I don’t understand about my new beauty is / why is it not reflected in your eyes?” By addressing male artists who want to “write poems about me,” the poem Horsford performs (which is not her own work) engages in a dialogue with other representations from Soul!, such as those of the Last Poets (see figures 4.6 and 4.7). Another poem emphasizing the challenges of communicating with men 146  Chapter Fo u r

Figure 4.6. Anna Horsford (left), Marilyn Berry (center), and Novella Nelson (right) on Soul! Courtesy of Photofest.

tells the story of the narrator who leaves her partner. It begins, “I had another one of those talks with my man last night.” The narrator explains to her partner, “You have been losing me for a very long time.” She describes a relationship in which her man is unable to give her the emotional connection she seeks. Nikki Giovanni then recites a simple poem of her own on the same theme: “I always liked to houseclean, / Unfortunately this habit has carried over to you and / I find that I must remove you from my life.” The tough sensibility of this poem is marked by a woman taking control of the domestic sphere, metaphorically “housecleaning” a lover out her life. Yet she reads the poem in the public space of television, bridging the gap between the home, the private sphere, and the televisual, public sphere. This poem represents the accountability that feminists demanded from men while also showcasing the independence that Giovanni and other women claimed. Many of the episode’s other poems circle back to relationships with men, frequently emphasizing what Black women have to offer as emotional, sexual, and political partners in the struggle and in life. Often, these assets are described in terms of gentleness and femininity. Sonia Sanchez’s poem, “Summer Words of a Sistuh Addict,” explicates this theme: “Am I not your woman even if you went on junk again / and I a beginner in your That N ew Black Mag i c 147

Figure 4.7. Jackie Earley on Soul! Courtesy of Photofest.

love say no / Black lovers cannot live in white powder, / Black women deal in / Baaaaabies / and nights that multiply by twos.” Sanchez’s insistence that Black women do not deal in drugs but in “babies” may sound essentializing, but it makes apparent that Black men were not the only ones invested in Black women’s fertility and role as mothers. The emphasis on motherhood points to the saliency of the issue of parental status and the image of the Black family for Black women at that historical moment. Assailed as pathological matriarchs by the Moynihan report and seen as baby-­makers by some nationalists, these female artists used the platform Soul! offered to present their own thoughts on the loaded subject of motherhood—some reverent, others critical of the constraints of motherhood or of the expectation, or demand, that they have children. When the announcer introduced these women, their children, if they had them, were mentioned by name—a striking choice that could be seen on one hand as essentialist and on the other as respectful of the work of mothering. The poet Novella Nelson offers a poem about giving birth: “How the day went, flooded then jumped and / I thought it was my heart, now her teeth are done / I bore you one morning just before spring / flowing through cells toward you.” While this poem seems to celebrate motherhood, a poem by Kay Lindsey (who did not appear on the program) criticizes nationalists’ emphasis on motherhood—although it still conflates motherhood with womanhood:21 My womb is packed with mothballs. I gave birth, my body deserves a medal for that they thought I was just answering the call of nature, now that the revolution needs numbers motherhood got a new position, 5 steps behind manhood and I thought sitting at the back of the bus went out with Martin Luther King. While the literal emotional, psychic, and intellectual work of motherhood itself is clearly at issue in much of this work, birth also offered a powerful metaphor for expanding Black consciousness, as is evident in Jackie Earley’s poem in which she speaks of “giving birth to a Black lifestyle.” While many of the poems evoke characteristics that may seem essentialist, such as the oft-­repeated “gentleness,” it is evident that the gentleness articulated in these poems is a sexually assertive gentleness, not a passive one. The poems position gentleness as a choice. The poet Cheryl Clark recounted That N ew Black Mag i c 149

that this frankness about sexuality represented a form of liberation to many Black women artists in this era: “Proud that the public should know they were sexually liberated and active; the women poets make the Black Arts Movement the stage for a foray into a liberated Black woman’s sexuality.”22 Other poems, such as “I Am the Black Woman,” emanate a perspective that women’s duties should be focused at home “to teach and train the young for the future.” While all the women in the episode perform this poem together, some of them make their discomfort with the perspective it offers clear with their facial expressions.23 Strikingly, this is the only poem that offers a nationalist vision of gender roles, in which the father is out working for liberation and the mother is home “teaching the young,” echoing Muhammad Ali’s appraisal of how things should be done. Ultimately, Soul!, by creating a women’s space, removing the male host for the evening, and inviting an all-­female audience, created a separate and celebrated space for Black women, unheard of in television. The televised salon offered this work to an audience far wider than a New York poetry venue would have created. With this audience, the featured female artists shared perspectives on motherhood, relationships, sexuality, and the Black family that defended it against the hostility of the Nixon era. They defended Black parenting—particularly Black motherhood. The female poets and actors were, as one poet described them, “giving birth to a Black lifestyle” by bearing witness to Black women’s experiences. The End of an Era: The Cancellation of Soul!

Despite a small budget, near-­total lack of promotion, and a variable time slot, Soul! reached an audience of significant size and dedication. Unfortunately, television ratings systems of the late 1960s and early 1970s (and today, many would argue) largely ignored the preferences of Black audiences, leaving little concrete evidence of audience support. As Haizlip put it, using Harlem as a metaphorical stand-­in for all of Black America, “There are no ratings taken north of 96th Street.” Audience ratings are mostly advertiser-­driven, and public television had no need to sell advertising and little funding to investigate its audience; public stations did far less audience research than their commercial counterparts. Nonetheless, pbs did collect some audience data for Soul! and Black Journal. A Harris poll taken among 912 Black families in Harlem, Bedford-­Stuyvesant, South Jamaica, and the South Bronx demonstrated that African Americans were watching Soul! in “significant numbers.” According to the New York Times, when 150  Chapter Fo u r

the program broadcast in the accessible time slot of Thursday at 9 p.m., “It gathered an audience that compared favorably with prime-­time commercial shows on the three major networks.”24 In order to ascertain the role of these programs in attracting Black audiences to educational television, one researcher commissioned a study of 2,400 African American households in Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Washington, D.C., and New York City. (The St. Louis public television station did not actually carry Black Journal or Soul!) While 70.6 percent of those surveyed watched The Flip Wilson Show and 21.8 percent watched Julia, 20.8 percent watched Soul!, and 13.2 percent watched Black Journal. The research report concluded that Soul! and Black Journal drew Black viewers to public television who were not otherwise interested in its programming, which, internal communication demonstrates, was quite interesting to administrators of educational television at the time.25 Soul!’s popularity and critical acclaim would seem to have called for keeping the program on the air, but the cpb decided to kill the show in 1974. Other Black arts programs like Black Omnibus (1972–73) and Black Arts (1970–72) also went off the air in this period. Responding to the cancellation of Soul! Ellis Haizlip pointed out that the decision ignored the preferences of African American audiences: “The Corporation for Public Broadcasting claimed that it was not refunding Soul! because they wanted to replace it with an interracial show called Interface—they said that they preferred a sociological production rather than a cultural one, which is really no reason for canceling Soul! The tragedy is that Blacks didn’t have any voice about how the cpb distributed the 215 million it had available for public television.”26 As Haizlip suggests, it is telling that the cpb cited “making room” for another Black or “interracial” program was the reason for canceling the critically acclaimed Soul! Furthermore, it is worth noting that Interface was also proposed as a replacement for Black Journal, which was leaving public television, demonstrating an overall decrease in Black programming. Why was there not room for all these programs? After all, Soul! had passionate fans, as is clear from viewer surveys, letters, and popular memory—numerous fans, including incarcerated men, community leaders, parents who said this was the only show they wanted their children to watch, and children, who sent in drawings showing their love for Soul! (see figures 4.8 and 4.9). In 2009, when a few archived episodes were posted online, loyal fans immediately demanded a box set. It seems that without the pressure of riots, it was harder to justify such a radical and unabashedly empowered Black program. That N ew Black Mag i c 151

Figures 4.8 and 4.9. Children’s drawings representing the many pieces of viewer

mail that were sent to protest the cancellation of Soul! Courtesy of Kit Lukas.

Soul! offered some of the most exciting, engaging, and politically engaged music and art and culture of its time. Influenced especially by Haizlip and Giovanni, the program also offered new insights on gender, and made a space to talk about issues of sexuality that other television shows would not touch for decades. As Ralph Bunche’s telegram, and numerous letters and interactions on the program demonstrate, Soul! mattered deeply to spectators across the generations and far beyond the art world. While other Black programs were inclusive of and knowledgeable about the arts and connections between the creative process and Black liberation, Soul! was centered on cultural producers as experts on Black life, on American politics, and, of course, on the newest developments in music, poetry, theater, and film. Soul! unabashedly posited musicians, actors, and poets as experts on the state of Black people, of Black liberation, and of the political and aesthetic contribution of new cultural forms to Black identity and to the world at large. As Haizlip said, “Soul! offers Black performers a chance to be meaningful, to be relevant to the Black experience, to say, ‘Just present me as a man or a woman without justifying my Blackness.’”

152  Chapter Fo u r

conclusion

■■ Even as others were dismissing tv as a vast wasteland, African Ameri-

cans seized the opportunities created by social crisis to create and retool representations of themselves in an increasingly influential medium. Social crisis created the conditions of possibility for a momentary war of position in which emergent Black radicalism could be injected into the media flow, helping both audiences and media makers reimagine what tv could mean. In an era of multiple and contested ideas about Black liberation, these shows portrayed Black communities as discursive environments where Black nationalist ideas had permeated and were debated, and a place where parents on welfare, business owners, teachers, war veterans, police officers, and high school students held and articulated strong political beliefs. The programs represented new cultural practices and legitimized activism by documenting struggles against school segregation, university discrimination, substandard housing, and public officials’ lack of accountability to Black constituents. Programs like Inside Bedford-­ Stuyvesant and Say Brother countered the invisibility of Black artists by showcasing little-­known local performers alongside national acts. The history of these programs shows that local television, as well as national television, offered a crucial set of possibilities for Black viewers. Examining local television, especially in urban areas, is crucial to understanding the possibilities for African American television, as the majority of African Americans live in urban areas of the United States. Letters such as the following one, from an African American viewer of Soul! (writing to protest the cancellation of that show), typified the trans-

formative experience that these programs offered to Black viewers, and demonstrates how powerfully these viewers appreciated the role of these programs in opposition to mainstream television. On May 5, 1969, Carol E. Walker wrote: When tv was completely lily white and had nothing to offer in the line of the Black expression of life, we weren’t completely conscious of the whole realm of what we were missing . . . but to suddenly have a program that we can identify with completely and enjoy to the fullest, and then for it to be taken away leaves an awful void. . . . tv really never was for me before; and now that three or four hours of viewing per week are for me, I just “Eat them up” with enjoyment.1 The letter closes by describing African American broadcast programming as a right, not simply a luxury or indulgence. “In my opinion,” Walker writes, “Soul! is too relevant to the social viewing needs of a group of minorities of the New York area as large in number as we are, to be taken away.” This letter writer, after only a year of seeing Soul!, recognized television as a crucial realm for African American self-­expression. Her recognition of “social viewing needs” shows how Soul! (and other programs) created a culture of active viewing and interactivity. Despite the loyal audiences for the both local and national Black public-­ affairs programs, they were vulnerable to cancellation as priorities shifted in the 1970s, reflecting changes in the American political landscape. The range of programs that followed—Interface, Black Perspective on the News, and others—attempted to engage in both advocacy and interracial dialogue, as media spaces such as For Blacks Only (as one Chicago show was titled) once again became less compelling to those in power. Despite the many differences between white television station managers and media activists of all ethnicities, these two groups shared a sense of the potential of television as an important setting for the battleground of ideas. A brief moment of consensus had allowed these programs to flower; the deescalation of urban uprisings (despite the spiraling economic and social pressures in many cities) allowed this consensus to dissipate. Once station officials were less apprehensive about potential violent unrest, they were less likely to heed the demands of activists. By 1974, the proliferation of new Black public-­affairs programs had abated dramatically, and over time, most such programs declined in resources and influence—and although a few remain on the air at this writing, most were ultimately canceled. Diminished budgets have meant that 154  Co n clusi o n

those programs that remain are no longer able to pursue the aesthetic innovation and ambition that marked some of the early Black public-­ affairs programs, and a few have turned away from the progressive political agenda that marked the genre’s beginnings. The trend of political transformation has been most evident in national programming, such as Black Journal’s transformation into Tony Brown’s Journal since 1976. America’s Black Forum, introduced in 1977, became dominated by conservative political voices in the 1990s and ceased production in 2006. Of the local shows discussed in this book, Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant ceased production in 1970, but a descendant of that program aired as Black News (N.Y.) into the 1980s, with Bill McCreary as managing editor and Marian Etoile Watson, from Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant, as both a producer and a newscaster. In 1987, Bill McCreary got his own show, McCreary Reports. Those of us who lived in New York at the time might recall Bill McCreary’s asking television audiences, “Its ten o’clock. Do you know where your children are?” The Detroit-­based show that debuted in 1968 as Colored People’s Time continues to air as America’s Black Journal. Michigan State has published a rich archive of these programs, and episodes from the late 1970s through the eighties and nineties are available online as a very comprehensive resource.2 Chicago’s For Blacks Only remained on air into the 1990s as Face to Face with Vernon Jarrett, and New York’s Like It Is aired until the founding host Gil Noble was incapacitated by a stroke in the summer of 2011. Like It Is was replaced by wabc with a show intended to carry on Noble’s legacy, Here and Now, which continues to air. A strong host-­advocate-­producer who fought for his program with the support of an audience who would fight the program’s cancellation seems to be the one factor that kept these few programs alive—but these programs then became much more focused on the interests of that single person, ultimately lacking the collaborative energy that made the programs examined in this book especially dynamic. Reduced resources and a focus on a single host made the “talking head” format unavoidable, so as mainstream television grew more and more visually engaging, these programs were moving in the opposite direction, and for the most part, did not gain a large number of new viewers. The role of Black public-­affairs television programs as a launching pad for a media or artistic career cannot be overstated. These shows catalyzed the careers of professionals who went on to change the medium as a whole. Eyes on the Prize was made by Blackside Productions, the company of Say Brother’s Henry Hampton, with several Black Journal alumni, including the cinematographer Bobby Shepard. Charles Hobson continued to produce Co n clusi o n 155

groundbreaking documentaries for decades after his work on Black public-­ affairs programs, including The Africans: A Triple Heritage (1986), Robert F Williams: Negros with Guns (2004), and Harlem in Montmartre: A Paris Jazz Story (2009). St. Clair Bourne, until his passing in 2007, was a major force in the documentary genre, making more than forty films documenting African American culture, including Let the Church Say Amen (1974), In Motion: Amiri Baraka, Paul Robeson: Here I Stand, and Making Do the Right Thing (1989). Even for individuals like Stan Lathan, Madeline Anderson, and William Greaves, who were already experienced media makers prior to their work on these programs, the creative opportunities afforded by working on these shows advanced their careers and connections. Greaves’s role as a mentor and champion of his Black Journal colleagues is a major part of his legacy, in addition to his many films. Madeline Anderson, after leaving Black Journal and directing the landmark civil rights film I Am Somebody, worked on Sesame Street and The Electric Company, and also worked on Howard University Television Stations’ Black public-­affairs program. Stan Lathan’s career included directing episodes of numerous influential television programs, such as Sesame Street, Sanford and Son, Hill Street Blues, and Cagney and Lacey, and he was the executive producer of Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry. In recent years Lathan has directed Dave Chappelle’s influential comedy specials and has many other credits. The Black Journal Workshop trained technicians of color, transforming an overwhelmingly white industry by fostering numerous careers. In the realm of news and journalism, Marion Watson, Kent Garrett, and others have gone on to successful careers as journalists, newscasters, and executive producers of news. The continuing professional activity of alumni of Black public-­affairs television speaks to their commitment to challenging old hierarchies and representations. The impact of these professionals extended further as they hired, trained, and collaborated with other media workers throughout their careers, and in some cases moved into leadership roles beyond the media industry. Jewelle Gomez is now a renowned playwright, author, arts-­policy leader, and activist for lesbian and gay rights.3 Angela Fontanez worked on films such as Let the Church Say Amen and Amazing Grace, the Orisha Tradition: An African Worldview and has mentored young people in a variety of settings. James Lowry is a senior management consultant with Boston Consulting Group. Ultimately, the legacy of the individuals involved continues to reverberate in the film and television industry, and beyond. Examining the history of the these alumni is particularly relevant at this 156  Co n clusi o n

time, as affirmative action’s efficacy and ethics are under considerable debate, and growth in African American employment in the media industry has slowed considerably. Currently, the path to a filmmaking or television career is often an expensive film-­school degree, and very few pathways for young people of color, especially first-­generation college students, exist to support a new generation of Black media artists.4 It seems no stretch to say that these programs played a significant role in creating spaces into which figures like Oprah Winfrey and Tavis Smiley strode, even after the shows themselves began to decline. This is not a simple “progress” narrative. Black public-­affairs programs were not the only places where African Americans became more visible on U.S. television in the late 1960s and 1970s, nor were they the only place where African American media makers made intentional use of the medium to disrupt exclusionary discourse. As the author Bambi Haggins shows in her insightful study of post-­soul Black comedy, although representations of African Americans on entertainment programs were mixed and often problematic, comedians—from Richard Pryor to Dave Chappelle—each in his or her way made significant interventions through the complex layers of comedy.5 Nor have the emergence of “Black” television spaces in the cable-­tv era represented a straightforward extension of the political sensibilities proffered by these early shows, as Beretta Smith-­ Shomade’s critique of Black Entertainment Television so eloquently illustrates.6 But Black public-­affairs programs, in addition to creating career opportunities for individual media workers, created new conditions of possibility for envisioning African American media spaces within the otherwise segregated sphere of “mainstream” news, and public-­affairs and documentary programming at a time when a narrow range of television networks and stations occupied a nearly overwhelming share of that mainstream: in 1968, most Americans received only three to five broadcast channels— many of which signed off during late-­night hours. Adding even a few hours of Black public-­affairs programming to this limited schedule amounted to an intervention on a scale that might be impossible to replicate in the current era, when hundreds of tv channels compete with the effectively endless array of “content” available on devices that literally follow users everywhere. And although the Internet and mobile technologies have created new possibilities for more open networks of production and distribution of content and ideas, these media increasingly lack the element of chance that initially connected so many viewers, both Black and white, to Black Co n clusi o n 157

public-­affairs television. On the Internet, one tends to find what one is looking for, reinforcing the one’s initial position or perspective. Search engines are now designed to use previous activity to “guide” users, resulting in different results for different people for the same search—a phenomenon that the activist Eli Pariser calls the “filter bubble.”7 Despite the challenges of finding visibility for African Americans, challenges ironically wrought by contemporary media proliferation, both new media, and the widespread proliferation of accessible tools for making media offers users a chance to be cautiously optimistic about the possibilities for marginalized voices to assert themselves. The scholar Melissa Harris Perry, who got her own show as a political commentator and television host on msnbc, in 2012, is certainly notable. Both local and national Black public-­affairs programs have left a rich archive that illustrates the complexity and ambition of local and national African American activism and cultural achievement in the Black Power era, and the history of programs such as Say Brother, Inside Bedford-­ Stuyvesant, Black Journal, and Soul! offers a chance to reconsider the efficacy of the urban uprisings of the mid- and late 1960s. The story of these programs emphasizes the positive gains brought about by media activism and affirmative hiring practices. The climate of social unrest crucially informed Black power and made these programs not just possible, but necessary. In some accounts of this era, the uprisings are considered to have been primarily destructive. While they did often devastate the very infrastructure of the people who had been most grievously wronged by American apartheid, they also made local and national government officials far more acquiescent to activist demands for the airwaves than they would have otherwise been. By recognizing the importance of both the uprisings and the changes in the broadcasting wrought from the inside by an innovative and outspoken cohort of media makers, this history of Black Power television adds to current reconsiderations of the Black Power era that see this era not as a period of decline in which a mythical Black consensus gave way to factionalism and despair, but as an era in which lively and far-­ reaching ideas in Black liberation came to fruition.

158  Co n clusi o n

notes

introduction  ■  Reverberations of the King Assassination 1 Squires, “Black Audiences Past and Present,” 447–49. 2 Catherine Squires nuances previous theories of the Black public sphere by paying attention to the differential uses of strategies and tactics. Squires’s work builds on scholarly critiques of Jürgen Habermas’s iteration of a “public sphere,” which emphasize the formation of “marginalized counterpublics,” such as Nancy Fraser’s concept of “subaltern counterpublics.” Squires, “Rethinking the Black Public Sphere,” 446–68. 3 Ibid. 4 Eventually, Jarrett became the host as well. The station continued to broadcast For Blacks Only until the 1990s, under the name Face to Face with Vernon Jarrett. Vernon Jarrett, telephone interview with author, 2003. 5 Craig, Ain’t I a Beauty Queen? 18. 6 Elombe Brath, interview with author, July 12, 2005. 7 Craig, Ain’t I a Beauty Queen? 73. 8 Vernon Jarrett, interview. 9 Kerner Commission, Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, 326. 10 Elombe Brath, interview with author, August 4, 2005. 11 Kerner Commission, Report, 366. 12 Joseph, Waiting ’til the Midnight Hour, 156. 13 For example, see the kqed-­San Francisco news report from February 17, 1968, at the Oakland Auditorium, featuring excerpts from speeches by the Black Power activists H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael. 14 Rhodes, Framing the Panthers; Staub, “Setting Up the Seventies.” 15 Noble, Black Is the Color of My tv Tube, 25–37.

16 Steven Classen (Watching Jim Crow), Kathryn Montgomery (Target), Chon Noriega (Shot in America), Heather Hendershot (Saturday Morning Censors), and Aniko Bodroghkozy (Groove Tube) have all considered the impact of television activism. 17 Nicholas Johnson, How to Talk Back to Your Television Set (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970). 18 Classen, Watching Jim Crow, 3–4. 19 Merrit, “A Historical Critical Study of a Pressure Group in Broadcasting.” 20 Lott, “Documenting Social Issues,” 78; Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight, 2. 21 Bennett, The Challenge of Blackness, 205. 22 Ibid. 23 Carmichael and Hamilton, Black Power, 6. 24 Smethurst, The Black Arts Movement, 14. 25 Kelley, Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional! 21–35. 26 “Culture of poverty” was a phrase coined by the anthropologist Oscar Lewis, in Ethnography La Vida; a Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty—San Juan and New York (1966). Lewis believed that the poor were held back by “present time orientation, poor speech patterns, fatalism and resignation, and low aspirations” (Kelley, Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional! 25–27). According to the sociologist Jill Quadagno, this type of research, along with the Moynihan report, which blamed the problems faced by African Americans on the “broken” and “matriarchal” Black family, were used by the U.S. government to argue that the state should be an agent of socialization, and that poor people were unfit for significant self-­determination (Quadagno, The Color of Welfare, 35–36). In addition to addressing the Moynihan report’s significant and lasting influence on U.S. welfare policy-making, feminist critics have also critiqued the report’s influence on poets of the Black Arts Movement and some Black nationalists. 27 Bensonsmith, “Jezebels, Matriarchs and Welfare Queens,” 262. 28 Undated Variety clipping from the Peabody archives, but the Northwestern uprising occurred in April 1968. 29 Green, Selling the Race, 82. 30 Brian Ward’s Radio and the Struggle for Civil Rights in the South demonstrates the complex relationships between civil rights activists, radio station owners, and listeners during the tumult of the civil rights movement. Barbara Savage’s Broadcasting Freedom: Radio, War, and the Politics of Race, 1938–1948 demonstrates that the history of African American involvement in and activism around the medium of radio is integral to twentieth-­century Black liberation. Moreover, Savage provides historical accounts of two local radio programs by African Americans that addressed political and social issues and criticized racism. These programs, New World a-­Comin’ and Destination Freedom, were pioneering precursors to the Black public-­affairs television programs that I analyze here. 31 Nikki Giovanni, interview with author, August 4, 2010. 32 Angela Fontanez, interview with author, October 2004. 160  N otes to I ntro d u cti o n

33 Stan Lathan, telephone interview with author, April 2005. 34 The Ford Foundation is a large, private foundation started in 1936 by Edsel Ford. The foundation funds economic development, human rights, and the arts. The foundation has been very involved with funding educational television and civil rights initiatives. 35 Bird, The Color of Truth, 379. 36 Ibid., 382. 37 In addition to foundations, local utility companies chose to sponsor local programs, while national corporations like Coca-­Cola chose to sponsor both local and national Black programs. 38 Noriega, Shot in America, 23. 39 Gray, Watching Race, xiv. 40 Herman Gray considers the Cosby Show, arguing that the popular, long-­running situation comedy about a well-­to-­do Black family is emblematic of how Blackness figures on network television. Focusing on the intersectionality of race and gender, Beretta Smith-­Shomade places the representation of Black women in television on shows like Gimme a Break into a context of visual art, literature, and film, showing the still limited but complex ways that television constitutes race and gender. Christine Acham intervenes in the critical dismissal of situation comedies that celebrate Black working-­class life, such as Good Times. Aniko Bodroghkozy and Sasha Torres have begun the important work of interpreting how the civil rights movement represented itself on television, and Jennifer Fuller is raising important issues about how the civil rights movement is made the subject of nostalgia and mythologized by more recent films and television programs. 41 Gil Noble, the producer of Like It Is, intuiting the historical significance of the program and recognizing the potential for the station to lose this legacy, obtained the rights to his own show. Like It Is is archived at a community college where Noble has taught. While I was working on the book, however, Noble removed many episodes from the archive, and the resulting uncertainty of whether episodes would remain available made it difficult to continue working on the program. Like It Is is especially notable for its global reach and Noble’s long and wide-­ranging interviews with figures such as Bob Marley and Maurice Bishop. While the show was especially ambitious on global issues, the connection to global and diasporic issues and figures is a thread I picked up on in numerous other programs. 42 Acham, Revolution Televised, 26. 43 Lott, “Documenting Social Issues.” 44 Cynthia Young engages all of these discourses in Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of a U.S. Third World Left. Young addresses how film, literature, and art traveled in the radical, diasporic, and interconnected world she terms the “Third World Left.” Cultural producers from this perspective included the Third World Newsreel, which created groundbreaking documentaries on prison N otes to I ntro d u cti o n 161

issues, race rebellion, and gender, and the L.A. rebellion filmmakers, which included Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust), Charles Burnett (Killer of Sheep), and Haile Gerima (Bush Mama). The crosscurrents from these makers and artists fed into Black public-­affairs tv—sometimes directly—for example, a documentary on the Attica prison uprisings made by Third World Newsreel screened as an episode of Say Brother. Thus Black public-­affairs shows made this work accessible to many interested viewers who might not have known about Third World Newsreel, or other media made within the context of radical politics and experimental aesthetics. 45 Collins, Black Feminist Thought; Crenshaw, “Whose Story Is It, Anyway?” 406.

one  ■  Welcome to Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant 1 After the demise of the program, the community would not see a substantial mass-­media representation again until Spike Lee created a cinematic portrait of it in his feature film from 1989, Do the Right Thing. 2 The phrase “long hot summers” became synonymous with the urban uprisings of the 1960s. To get a sense of how this phrase was used in media accounts to describe urban uprisings, see Powledge, “Civil Rights.” 3 The cbcc was a diverse coalition of civic leaders, church leaders, block clubs, and other local leadership. This leadership was especially important because gerrymandering had effectively prevented Bedford-­Stuyvesant from having elected Black leadership that was politically empowered to represent the neighborhood. The cbcc was active in Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. Its invitation to Kennedy should be seen in context: the practice of politicians touring neighborhoods in the 1960s was a way to bring attention to a certain area. 4 “Thomas R. Jones, 93, Judge Who Agitated for Urban Revival,” New York Times, November 1, 2006. 5 Kimberley Johnson, “Community Development Corporations, Participation, and Accountability: The Harlem Urban Development Corporation and the Bedford-­Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 594 ( July 2004): 16. 6 Ibid. 7 cdc Oral History Project, “Bedford-­Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation (bsrc), Brooklyn, NY,” Pratt Center for Community Development, www.prattcenter .net/cdc-­bsrc.php. For a fuller account of this history, tracing back to the 1930s, see Wilder, “Vulnerable Places, Undesirable People,” esp. 184–85. For a very critical account of the Poverty Program, which argues that funds associated with the Poverty Program were misused in Brooklyn, see Thabit, How East New York Became a Ghetto. Thabit was a planner hired by the Lindsay administration in 1966 to work on urban renewal projects in East New York. 8 Quadagno, The Color of Welfare, 31. 9 Pratt website, www.prattcenter.net. 162  N otes to Chapter O n e

10 Jim Lowry, interview with author, December 2005. 11 Johnson, “Community Development Corporations,” 117. 12 Jack Newfield, “A Few Rays of Hope,” Life, 8 March 1968, 84–96. 13 Ibid., 87. 14 Charles Hobson, interview with author, August, 5, 2005. Unfortunately, the proposal has been lost, but Hobson was able to describe the proposal from memory, to some degree. 15 See also Wilder, Covenant with Color, 156–57. He recounts infamous employment discrimination by Consolidated Edison and New York Telephone. 16 Ben Gelascoe, telephone interview with author, December 3, 2005. 17 George Gent, “tv Series for Bedford-­Stuyvesant Begins Monday,” New York Times, April 5, 1968. 18 Ibid. 19 wcbs press release, April 8, 1968, unarchived files of the Bedford-­Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation. 20 Hobson, interview. 21 Newfield, “A Few Rays of Hope.” 22 Ibid. 23 Bedford-­Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation press release, April 5, 1968, Ford Foundation Archive. 24 Gent, “tv Series for Bedford-­Stuyvesant Begins Monday.” 25 For the most part, the program took on an identity and life of its own beyond the bsrc, although there were important connections between the show and its sponsor. In the arrangement between the station and the cdc, the bsrc paid for “above the line expenses” (Hosts Roker and Lowry’s salaries, as well as the producers’ salaries) and wnew paid for the crew and film. In Lowry’s case, the ibs salary was an additional and separate salary from his Restoration Corporation pay, which not everyone at the bsrc appreciated. The projects and staff of the bsrc were occasionally featured on the program. The hosts interviewed the Restoration Corporation director Frank Thomas in the first episode. Another example of a multilayered connection between the cdc and the program was the “discovery” of the Persuasions, whose careers launched after they appeared on the show. The members of the group took one of the bsrc’s surveying classes, and they let Jim Lowry at Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant know that “they could sing.” 26 See “Roxie Roker.” 27 Lowry, interview. For a critical account of the “modernization” discourse that informed the Peace Corps, see Latham, Modernization as Ideology. 28 In Uplifting the Race, Kevin Gaines characterizes uplift as a countering ideology to white supremacy, an uplift that protested segregation and physical and economic violence against African Americans (22). Furthermore, Gaines calls attention to the rhetorical and ideological power of images in the struggle for Black self-­representation (67). He maintains that African Americans, particularly from the middle class, tried to use photographic technology to contraN otes to Chapter O n e 163

dict circulating racist images by inserting a new “representative” image of Black people. Discussing this attempt to reimage African Americans, Gaines wrote, “Anything less than stylized elegance would hold the race back” (69). To no small extent, programs such as Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant were engaged in this type of “reimaging.” 29 Letters from viewers, bsrc files. 30 Lowry, interview. 31 Ibid. 32 Later, this important role was taken over by Marion Etoile and Joe Dennis, who had worked as producers on the program in the initial seasons. The show launched Etoile’s media career: Maryanne Etoile Watson still works at Channel 5 News, in New York, as of this writing. 33 “Patterned after nbc’s Today Show [Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant], is produced by Negroes, tells what Negroes are doing, and, most significantly, is aimed at Negroes.” This quotation is from an article in Newsweek, n.d., Bedford-­ Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation microfilm reel, Ford Foundation Archive. 34 Hobson, interview. 35 Kelley, Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional! 36 Squires, “Rethinking the Black Public Sphere.” 37 Harris-­Lacewell, Barbershops, Bibles, and bet. 38 Grant, “The New Lafayette Theatre,” 54–55. 39 Cole, “Anomaly tv.” 40 Smethurst, The Black Arts Movement, 81. 41 Benston, Performing Blackness, 12. 42 Smethurst, The Black Arts Movement, 66. 43 Ibid., 77. 44 wnew, Channel 5, was not one of the “big three” networks, abc, nbc, or cbs. In the 1960s, wnew-­tv was one of three independent stations in metropolitan New York. By the 1970s, wnew was New York’s leading independent station. The station was purchased by Fox Broadcasting in 1986. 45 Wilson Walton, Brooklyn, N.Y., to ibs , April 24, 1968, unarchived records of the Bedford-­Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation. 46 Postcard from unknown author, May 1, 1968. 47 While none of the viewers declare their self-­identification on the basis of race in their letters, I use context, neighborhood, and names to infer racial and ethnic identity when it seems relevant to do so. Thus, except for self-­identified Puerto Ricans, I assume that most, if not all, Bedford-­Stuyvesant residents who wrote in praise of the program were African American. Furthermore, I infer that the residents of Astoria, Queens, and Valley Estate, N.Y., who wrote to the program and sometimes used phrases such as “you people” that separated them from the program, were most likely not African American. A few writers do also mention that they are white. 48 Ward, Radio and the Struggle for Civil Rights in the South, 80–82. 164  N otes to Chapter O n e

49 Thomas George, Valley Cottage, N.Y., to the Bedford-­Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, April 26, 1968. 50 Russell Locasia to Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant, April 18, 1968, collection of the Bedford-­Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation. 51 Staub, “Setting Up the Seventies.” 52 For a critical insider account that paints Model Cities as ineffectual due to infighting, see Thabit, How East New York Became a Ghetto.

two  ■  Say Brother 1 Lukas, Common Ground, 32. 2 Ibid., 34. 3 Educational television was highly criticized by many, including African Americans, who felt that, like commercial television, educational television did not have their interests at heart. Ouellette has documented this criticism in Viewers Like You. See also Carnegie Commission on Educational Television, Public Television, a Program for Action. For the station’s articulation of its reasons for starting a Black program, see [Hartford Gunn], speech, unpublished manuscript, wgbh archives, Boston. 4 [Gunn], speech, unpublished manuscript, wgbh archives, Boston. The untitled typed manuscript is annotated in pencil: “Written for Hartford Gunn—don’t know for what audience” and “City Council Hearing.” 5 Ibid. 6 Mansbridge and Morris, Oppositional Consciousness, 16. 7 Ouellette, Viewers Like You? 8 Although there were relatively few content restrictions, there were significant budget limitations. 9 Stan Lathan, telephone interview with author, April 2005. 10 Ibid. 11 Jim Boyd, an African American media maker who was on a one-­year fellowship from the influential New York City public television station wnet, was the producer for the first few episodes before he returned to net. Richardson took over as producer after he left. The fact that Boyd came to wgbh to train for one year demonstrates how influential wgbh was as a station among the many educational broadcast outfits in the United States. Many nationally broadcast pbs programs were created by wgbh. 12 The station’s choice of Northeastern as the primary site from which to recruit Black student workers signaled its recognition of Northeastern’s innovations in recruiting and funding Black students. Northeastern was (and is) a cooperative-­ study university, and the student workers at Say Brother were full-­time staff members who rotated in and out between semesters in the classroom. 13 Jewelle Gomez, telephone interview with author, April 10, 2005. 14 Ibid. N otes to Chapter Two 165

15 Lathan, interview. 16 The recollections of Hazel Bright and Jim Boyd were very helpful in reconstructing the lost episodes. Hazel Bright, interview with author, May 2005; Jim Boyd, telephone interview with author, August 2005. 17 Bright, interview. 18 Lathan, quoted in Bourne, “The Call Board.” Lathan’s prolific and still active career ranges from documentaries to television serials such as Hill Street Blues and Sanford and Son. 19 In his reflections in 1981 on Boston’s civil rights history, Chain of Change, Mel King, currently director of Boston’s New Urban League, argues that Boston’s mid-­twentieth-­century Black community evolved in three stages. He considers the first stage to be the “service stage,” in which African Americans demanded better social services with mixed results. The second stage was the “organizing stage: Black Power,” in which the community began to organize to take control of education and policing. The third stage was a moment of “institution building.” The three stages roughly conform to the decades of the fifties, sixties, and seventies. This type of analysis reflects popular understandings of the changes in political approaches during these decades. King’s analysis is resonant with the lyrics of Say Brother’s theme song, with its attention to a transition in mood and tactics. 20 In the 1980s female employees at wgbh would win a class-­action suit for having received lower pay, a problem endemic in the television industry that only marks Say Brother and wgbh as typical. 21 See Rodriguez, Making Latino News. 22 Bright, interview. 23 These statistics were cited by Richardson in the actual episode. See also “New Bedford Blacks Bitter over Death.” 24 Senator Edward Brooke was the first African American to be elected to the Senate in the twentieth century. 25 Gomez, interview. 26 Ibid. 27 Rice is quoted in Deac Russell, “Who Has a Say in Say Brother,” August 18, 1970, clipping from the files of Kay Bourne. 28 The letter appeared in the Bay State Banner, August 20, 1970. 29 Tragically, Richardson was killed in a swimming accident while vacationing in Mexico shortly after the Say Brother cancellation, but not before wgbh reinstated the program. 30 Interview with Sarah Ann Shaw, wgbh archives, n.d. 31 This move also parallels the rise of feminist film theory, notably Laura Mulvey’s pivotal essay from 1975 on the problematic male and female gaze, “Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema.” 32 Dow, Prime-­Time Feminism.

166  N otes to Chapter Two

three  ■  No Thanks for Tokenism 1 Madeline Anderson, interview with author, October 2004. 2 Al Perlmutter, interview with author, Wednesday, September 1, 2010. 3 “Black on the Channels.” 4 Ouellette, Viewers Like You?, 67. 5 Macy, To Irrigate a Wasteland. 6 L. Williams, “Dixie Dialing.” 7 Kent Garrett, interview with author, September 2010. 8 St. Claire Bourne quoted in Alexander, Why We Make Movies, 277. 9 Anderson, interview. 10 Jerry Cudlip to Al Perlmutter, net interoffice memo, June 26, 1968. National Public Broadcasting Archives, University of Maryland, College Park. 11 Bourne gives the figure $550,000 in Alexander, Why We Make Movies, but accounts vary. 12 Anderson, interview. 13 Getlein, “Black Journal.” 14 Lentz, “Quality Versus Relevance.” 15 Gent, “Television: Black Journal Premiere.” 16 Ibid. 17 Shohat and Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism, 21. 18 Hodges, “‘Journal’ Illuminates Dark Racial Cavern.” 19 Williams, “Dixie Dialing.” 20 Bailey, “Black Excellence in the Wasteland.” 21 Ibid. 22 Dallos, “11 Negro Staff Members Quit N.E.T’s ‘Black Journal’ Program.” 23 Ibid. 24 De Pue, “net ‘Black Journal’ Ended Era.” 25 Ibid. 26 Charles Hobson, interview with author, August 2005. 27 De Pue, “net ‘Black Journal’ Ended Era.” 28 Garrett, interview. 29 Noriega, Shot in America. 30 De Pue, “net ‘Black Journal’ Ended Era.” 31 Garrett, interview. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 35 See Allen, Black Awakening in Capitalist America. For an examination of the role of foundations, especially the Ford Foundation, in the creation of African American Studies departments at universities, see Rooks, White Money/Black Power. 36 Black Journal press release 23, transcript. National Public Broadcasting Archives, University of Maryland, College Park. N otes to Chapter Th ree 167

37 Alexander, Why We Make Movies. 38 Though the Nation of Islam was pleased with its representation in this episode, it took issue with Black Journal soon afterward for starting a bureau in Ethiopia. 39 Laurent, “Black Journal in Ethiopia.” 40 Wali Siddiq, interview with author, July 5, 2010. 41 Wilkins, “The Making of Black Internationalists,” 469. 42 Although it would have been possible for local stations to run their own messages promoting the program and stating its airtime, in practice this did not always happen. 43 Hendershot, Saturday Morning Censors. 44 Fred Schmutz to Stan Levy, at Arkansas Educational Television Commission, June 19, 1968. National Public Broadcasting Archives, University of Maryland, College Park. 45 Dennis, “fcc vs. Alabama over tv Tuneout.” 46 Morton, “Public Service for Black Viewers,” 49. Morton worked on Black Journal and went on to a successful broadcasting career in news reporting in Los Angeles. 47 Day, The Vanishing Vision, 177. 48 Quoted in a series of promotional quotes in the Friends of Black Journal pamphlet from 1972, National Public Broadcasting Archives, University of Maryland, College Park. 49 Siddiq, interview. 50 “tv’s Black Journal Is Hanging in the Balance.” 51 Friends of Black Journal to Mr. John O’Connor, undated, Black Journal files, National Public Broadcasting Archive, University of Maryland, College Park. 52 Bill Duke to John W. Macy, personal memorandum, npba, March 24, 1972. The memo continues: “Your note on the Nebraska etv study panel reaction to ‘Black Journal’ and ‘Soul’ reminded me of scene intelligence forwarded by Leroy Miller concerning Tony Brown. Leroy feels that many members in the black communications community feel that Tony is being as arbitrary in excluding all view points but his own from ‘Black Journal’ as are ‘white directors and producers on black shows.’ Tony apparently went very far in his separatist comments at this media conference here in Washington and is apparently going to be raked over the coals by the Board of Governors of the Black Press Association in Houston next week. Leroy feels that the ‘Tony Brown syndrome’ is going to cause us some grave problems in the very near future. (He apparently has had some conversation about this with Ward Chamberlin.)” 53 J. Williams, “Blacks and Public tv,” 31. 54 Ibid. 55 See Tony Brown, Black Lies, White Lies, to understand Brown’s politics since the 1990s. 56 J. Williams, “Blacks and Public tv.” 57 De Pue, “net ‘Black Journal’ Ended Era.” 168  N otes to Chapter Th ree

four  ■  That New Black Magic 1 Christopher Lukas, telephone interview with author, September 3, 2010. 2 Delatiner, “Soul tv Not Black and White,” Newsday, 46–48. 3 Nikki Giovanni, interview with author, August 5, 2010. 4 Ibid. 5 Anna Horsford, interview with author, September 10, 2010. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 Feuer, “The Concept of Live Television,” 17. 10 Ibid. 11 Berkvist, “Dig It or Forget It.” 12 Geraldine Warren, letter to Soul!, May 1, 1969. 13 Ibid. 14 Later, Baraka lamented the oppression of women by Black nationalists—at the time he said the sexes would “never be equal.” In his autobiography, he says, “All the black women in these militant organizations deserve the highest praise. Not only did they stand with us shoulder to shoulder against black people’s enemies, they also had to go toe to toe with us, battling day after day against our insufferable chauvinism” (Baraka, Autobiography of LeRoi Jones, 39). 15 Estes, I Am a Man! 88–89. 16 Ibid. 17 White, “Africa on My Mind,” 75. 18 Giovanni, interview. 19 Horsford, interview. 20 Clarke, After Mecca, 10. 21 This poem also appears in Bambara, The Black Woman, 14. 22 Clarke, After Mecca, 71. 23 The fact that multiple poems and visual artworks with this title were produced by different artists in this era shows how much currency the notion of defining and redefining Black womanhood had. 24 Feretti, “Harris Polls Weigh Effects of Ethnic Programming.” 25 Memorandum, December 14, 1972, J. Golden to Jack Lyle, subject “Data Regarding Black Journal,” npba. 26 “Soul tv Cancellation Termed ‘an Insult,’” Jet, June 21, 1973, 5.

conclusion 1 Carol E. Walker, letter to Soul!, May 5, 1969. 2 American Black Journal Archive, abj.matrix.msu.edu/ (accessed January 12, 2012). 3 Jewelle Gomez, bio, www.jewellegomez.com/bio.html (accessed January 12, 2012). N otes to Co n clusi o n 169

4 There are innovative programs for youth media making and digital art all over the country, such as those by Chicago’s Street Level Youth Media, Digital Youth Network, and YouMedia, which offer paths to digital and video authorship. Tracking the future of the alumni of these kinds of programs, as well as the dissemination of the rich work created by these young people, will be important for future scholars. 5 Haggins, Laughing Mad. 6 Smith-­Shomade, Pimpin’ Ain’t Easy. 7 Pariser, The Filter Bubble.

170  N otes to Co n clusi o n

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Wilkins, Fanon Che. “The Making of Black Internationalists: sncc and Africa before the Launching of Black Power, 1960–65.” Journal of African American History 92, no. 4 (2007): 469. Williams, James D. “Blacks and Public tv: As Squeeze Play Misfires, Blacks Challenge White Control of Tax-­Supported Medium.” Black Enterprise, January 1974, 31–33. Williams, Larry. “Dixie Dialing: Monday’s Black Journal Will Focus on Solution.” Memphis Commercial Appeal, January 24, 1969. Williams, Rhonda. “Black Women, Urban Politics, and Engendering Black Power.” In The Black Power Movement, Rethinking Civil Rights and Black Power, ed. Peniel Joseph, 79–112. New York: Routledge, 2006. ———. The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women’s Struggles against Urban Inequality. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Woodard, Komozi. A Nation within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Black Power Politics. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Wortham, Jacob. “In with the Big Boys.” Black Enterprise, September 1974, 22–25. Yardley, Jim. “Black America Made Visible: tv Show Illuminated Culture through Lens of Bed-­Stuy.” New York Times, June 25, 1998. Young, Cynthia. Soul Power: Cultural Radicalism and the Making of a U.S. Third World Left. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. Interviews by the Author

Madeline Anderson, Brooklyn, N.Y., October 4, 2004. Bahati Best, telephone, September 4, 2004. Kay Bourne, May 3, 2005. St. Clair Bourne, March 7, 2005. Jim Boyd (telephone), February 2005. Hazel Bright, Boston, Tufts University, May 2, 2005. Ellie Cabot (telephone), July 23, 2005. Danny Dawson, July 2, 2004. Angela Fontanez, October 12, 2004. Kent Garrett, September 14, 2010. Ben Gelascoe (telephone), December 3, 2005. Nikki Giovanni, July 17, 2010. Jewelle Gomez (telephone), April 10, 2005. Ronald Gray, (telephone), February 2004. Charles Hobson, August 5, 2005. Anna Horsford, October 27, 2010. Vernon Jarrett (telephone), January 14, 2003. Stan Lathan (telephone), April 2005. Kit Lukas, October 4 and 16, 2010. Mark Lloyd (telephone), September 2004. 182  Bi bli o g raphy

Jim Lowry, Chicago, December 2005. Al Perlmutter, September 28, 2010. Wali Siddiq (Lou House), July 6, 2010. Bobby Shepard, October 6, 2004. Dighton Spooner, June 16, 2004. Jim Tilmon, September 12, 2004. Marian Etoile Watson, February 5, 2006. Eric Werner, September 15, 2004. A Partial List of Black Public-­Affairs Programs Airing between 1968 and 1980 N o rth east

New York Metropolitan Area: Black News (wnew); Black Pride (wpix); Inside Bedford Stuyvesant (wnyw); Like It Is (wabc); Positively Black (wnbc) Syracuse, N.Y.: Black on Black Boston, Mass.: Black News (whdh-­tv); Say Brother (wgbh); Talking Black (later renamed Mzizi Roots) (wbz-­tv); Third World (wvcb) Philadelphia, Pa.: Another Voice (whyy); New Mood, New Breed (wcau) Pittsburgh, Pa.: Black Horizons Connecticut: Lookin Better (cptv) Washington, D.C.: Black News (wttg); Harambee (wtop) Mi dwest

Detroit, Mich.: Colored People’s Time; Go Tell It—Ben Hooks Reports (wdiv-­tv); Haney’s People (wxyz) Chicago, Ill.: A Black’s View of the News (wciu); Common Ground (wbbm); Face to Face, originally For Blacks Only (wls); Our People (wttw) Cleveland, Ohio: Black on Black; Black Peoplehood Cincinnati, Ohio: Right On (wcet) Milwaukee, Wisc.: Black Noveau Kansas City, Kans.: Dimensions in Black (kmbc) Omaha, Neb.: Black on Black St. Louis, Mo.: Heads Up (kmox) Minneapolis, Minn.: Black Voices West

Los Angeles, Calif.: Innervisions (kcet) San Francisco Bay Area, Calif.: Black Dignity; Vibrations for a New People (kpix) Web Resources

American Black Journal, http://abj.matrix.msu.edu. “Broadcasting while Black,” http://www.thirteen.org/broadcastingwhileblack/. Bi bli o g raphy 183

Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant, LeRoi Jones’s Young Spirit House Movers and Players, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fD42WWi6xgM. Say Brother, http://main.wgbh.org/saybrother/. “wpa Gets Soul!—All 40 Show Episodes,” http://www.reelchicago.com/article /wpa-­gets-­soul-­all-­40-­show-­episodes.

184  Bi bli o g raphy

index

Africa: and the Black diaspora, 22, 85; coverage of on Black Journal Bureau, 22, 85, 89, 113–15, 143; decolonization of, 87, 114–15; importance of to African Americans, 40, 115, 138; and the Nation of Islam, 136; representation of on Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant, 37–38, 40–44; on Say Brother, 67–68, 98; on Soul!, 130, 132 Alabama etv, 10–11, censorship on, 116–17 Ali, Muhammad, 61, 111, 150; on Soul!, 137 American Apartheid, 41–43, 138, 158. See also Black aesthetic Anderson, Madeline, 83, 87–98, 93, 156 audience, 1, 4, 5, 13, 20, 22, 38, 41, 46, 53–54, 69, 72, 76, 115, 117, 119, 124, 125, 127, 153–55 Baldwin, James, 125, 127, 137–42, 145 Banks, Jacqueline, 64–67 Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones), 41, 43–44, 129; on Soul!, 131–36 Batten, Tony, 114 Bay State Banner, 69

Bedford-­Stuyvesant, 27–29, 30–32, 35, 38–40, 51, 71. See also Inside Bedford-­ Stuyvesant Bedford-­Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation (bsrc), 16, 27, 32 Belafonte, Harry, 33, 36, 39, 40 Black aesthetic (look), 5, 134; afro/hair and, 5, 20, 35–36, 40, 64, 143–45; influenced by Black Power, 12; dashiki and, 20, 35, 37, 43, 61, 105, 143–45 Black Arts Movement, 4, 22, 40–41; as Black women’s liberation, 145–50; as theorization of usable cultural past, 44. See also Black theater; Soul! Black audience, 3, 11, 18, 19, 26, 29, 30, 32–33, 35, 36–37, 48–49, 125, 151; of Black Journal, 85, 86, 96, 114–15, 116, 121–22, measurement of, 18, 117, 150; of Say Brother, 54, 55, 61–62, 65–66, 69, 81–82; of Soul!, 125–26, 129–38, 143–44, 145–46, 150; white audience, 3, 8, 55, 62, 84. See also ratings Black Cop, The, 98, 100–102, 108. See also uprisings Black Efforts for Soul in Television (best), 116

Black elected officials, 12, 30, 72, 121, 166. See also Chisholm, Shirley; Powell, Adam Clayton Black Journal, 4–5, 10, 14–15, 18, 19–20, 21–23, 83–84, 123, 126, 127, 128, 135, 138, 156, 158; as advocacy, 85–87; Black audience response to, 96; as Black self-­help, 112–15; coverage of Black women’s liberation, 142–43; coverage of school desegregation, 90–91; coverage of Vietnam, 103–11; critique of white institutions, 98–112; end of tokenism on, 97–98; funding for, 15–16; problems getting on air, 115–17; as representation of youth, 90–93; statistics of, 150–51; strike at, 22, 85–86, 96–98, 188; transformation to Tony Brown’s Journal, 117–22, 155; under white control, 87–90; white response to, 94–96 Black Journal Workshop, 156 Black newspapers, 69, 96. See also Bay State Banner; Black press; Chicago Daily Defender Black Panthers, 8, 30, 37, 48, 66; Lt. Aponte, 37 Black Power Movement, 4–5, 7–9, 102, 108, 112, 115, 154; televised, 11–12, 61, on Say Brother, 61–64, 132, 146, 158. See also Vietnam War, emergence of Black Power in Black press, 11, 14, 41, 60, 86, 96, 120. See also Black newspapers Black public affairs programs, 2–9; Black control over, 15, 22, 68; Black Journal, 85–87, 118–19; on Black Journal, 84, 96–98, 121–22; censorship of Black Journal, 87–88, 88–93; and creating Black public sphere, on Inside Bedford Stuyvesant, 25–26, 34–35, 45, 50–52, 154–58; and creating Black women’s public sphere, 143–52; decline of, 23, 120–21, 154–55; funding 186  I n d ex

for, 15–17; as media activism, 9–11; response to from viewers, 18; on Say Brother, 53–5; staffing of Say Brother, 57–61; televising Black Power, 12–13 Black public sphere, 2, 25–26, 35, 45, 50–51, 130, 133–34, 145; and gender, 127, 145. See also Black public affairs programs Black theater (performance), 4; Barbara Ann Teer, 123; Boston, 57, 60, 91; on Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant, 18; The Last Poets, 123, 127; Lisbeth Grant, 41; on Say Brother, 77; on Soul!, 124, 127, 129–30, 137, 143–50, 152; Spirit House Young Players, 36, 41–45; women’s performance, on Flo Kennedy Show, 79. See also Black Arts Movement Boston University, 57 Bright, Hazel, 60–61, 70 broadcast regulation, 9, 10, 12, 29, 75, 176. See also Federal Communications Commission Brooke, Edward (U.S. senator), 72. See also Black elected officials Brown, James, 53–54, 69, 82 Brown, Tony, 22–23, 86, 117–22, 143, 155 Carmichael, Stokely (Kwame Ture), 7–8, 12. See also Black Power Movement Carson, Sonny, 36–37, 48. See also Black Power Movement Chicago Daily Defender, 2 Chisholm, Shirley, 12, 120. See also Black elected officials Christian Science Monitor, 116 Civil Rights Movement, 6, 8, 12, 66, 112, 124 Clark, Robert G., 113. See also Black elected officials Clarke, Cheryl, 145. See also Black Arts Movement

Colored People’s Time, 4, 6, 18, 155. See also Brown, Tony Corporation for Public Broadcasting, 120, 121–22, 151 counterpublic strategies, 2–3, 26, 33, 44, 55, 64. See also Black public sphere Davis, Ossie, 102, 118 Daylie, Holmes (Daddy-­O), 2 Detroit Cooperative work-­study program (Northeastern University), 58 Earley, Jackie, 148–49 Ebony, 4, 14, 93, 96, 128 Equal Rights Amendment (era), 78–79 Fairness Doctrine, 9–10, 50, 71 Farrakhan, Louis, 14, 128, 129, 130, 135–37 Federal Communications Commission (fcc), 9, 10, 70, 75, 116, 121, 168, 172– 74, 176; first African American commissioner, 121, 176. See also Hooks, Benjamin Flo Kennedy Show, The, 79 Fontanez, Angela, 15, 156. See also Black Journal staff Ford Foundation, The, 29, 86, and Black Journal, 121–22, 125; and public television, 15–16, 83 Garrett, Kent, 19, 85, 87, 97, 98, 100, 103–5, 108 Giovanni, Nikki, 14, 19, 22, 126–28, 137–42, 144–45, 147, 152, 156. See also Black Arts Movement Gomez, Jewelle, 19, 58, 72, 156. See also Say Brother Gould, Jack, 119 Gray, Herman, 17 Greaves, William, 19, 20, 22, 86, 88, 97–99, 117, 122, 156 Gunn, Hartford, 53–54

Haizlip, Ellis, 19, 22, 123, 124–25, 126–29, 130, 131–34, 135–38, 143, 144–45, 150, 151, 152 Hampton, Henry, 60, 155 Harlem, 25, 26, 27, 41, 62, 83, 87, 88, 101–2, 123, 124, 129, 150 Harvard University, 39, 65 Hille, Alice, 127, 144–47. See also Soul! Hobson, Charles, 19, 28, 30, 36, 89, 128, 155 homosexuality: and the Nation of Islam, 136; representations of, 14, 19, 126–27, 128–29, 139, 141–42; stereotypes about, 133 Hooks, Benjamin, 10, 21, 176, 183 Horsford, Anna, 19, 129–30, 142, 144–45. See also Soul! House, Lou (Wali Siddiq), 5, 85, 89, 98, 99, 103, 111, 112–13; as Wali Siddiq, 98, 99, 113, 117 Howard University, 36, 121, 156 Huntley, Chet, 103–4 I Spy, 6–7, 25 Inside Bedford Stuyvesant, 13, 16, 18–19, 24–26, 32–33, 37–38, 45–46, 48–49, 54–55, 82, 89, 92, 128, 153, 155, 158; Amiri Baraka on, 41, 43–44; as Black public sphere, 50–52; critiques of welfare on, 28, 37, 51; funding of, 16, 28–30; Harry Belafonte on, 33, 36, 40; hosts of, 33–37; James (Jim) Lowry, host of, 19, 20, 30, 33–34, 39, 46, 50, 156; letters from viewers, 25–26, 45–47, 49; representations of the Black Arts Movement on, 40–45; representation of families on, 4, 6, 12, 20–21, 51–52, 68–69; representation of youth on, 38–39, 41–45; representations of women’s liberation on, 37–38, 50; Roxie Roker, host of, 20, 30–31, 33–38, 44–45, 47, 49; Young Spirit House Players on, 36, 41–45 I n d ex 187

Jarrett, Vernon, 1–2, 63, 155; on Jim Crow tv, 5 Jet Magazine, 6, 96 Jones, Thomas R., 26, 30 Julia, 5–7, 25, 151 Kennedy, Flo, 69, 78–79, 80. See also Flo Kennedy Show, The Kennedy, Robert: involvement with Bedford-­Stuyvesant, 26–28, 34 Kenya, 114 Kerner Commission Report, 5–6, 8, 28, 10, 75, 124 King, Dr. Martin Luther, Jr., 1, 7, 8, 48, 149; post-­assassination of, 1–2, 6, 10, 11, 23, 48, 50, 53, 54, 57, 75, 84, 124 Last Poets, The, 123, 127 Lathan, Stan, 15, 19, 22, 57, 62, 126, 156 Lester, Julius, 12, 48, 72. See also Black Power Movement letters from viewers: to Black Journal, 117; to Inside Bedford Stuyvesant, 25–26, 45–47, 49; to Say Brother, 61, 81, to Soul!, 131, 132, 144, 151, 152, 153 Lowry, James ( Jim), 19, 20, 30, 33–34, 39, 46, 50, 156. See also Inside Bedford Stuyvesant, hosts of Lukas, Kit, 152 Massachusetts, 71, 77, 78, 81. See also New Bedford, Mass. Meet the Press, 7, 8, 15 model cities, 50 Moynihan report, 12–13, 20, 142, 149; critiqued on Soul! (“Moynihanned”), 126 Mozambique Liberation Front, 114 Muhammad, Elijah, 95, 112, 135 Muhammad Speaks, 111 Muigai, James, 114, 119

188  I n d ex

Nation of Islam, 62, 111–12, 130, 135–37; on Soul!, 135–37. See also Farrakhan, Louis National Education Television (net), 83–84, 87–89, 116, 122, 123; Black Journal staff strike at, 22, 85–86, 96–98, 188 nbc: Black coverage on, 7, 84, 103–4, 107; Melba Tolliver, Black host on, 5; Melissa Harris Perry, Black host on, 158; Roxie Roker, Black host on, 34 Negro Digest, 96 Nelson, Novella, 147, 149. See also Soul! Newark, 1, 9, 49, 134. See also New Jersey; uprisings New Bedford, Mass., 71–76, 81–82, 150 “new Black look,” 134, 145 New Dimensions in Television (wndt, Channel 13), 123–25, 129. See also Lukas, Kit New Jersey, 9, 49, 123, 129, 131. See also Newark New York Times, 29, 33, 95, 97, 117, 119, 124, 150–51 Nixon, Richard M., 39–40, 150 Northeastern University, 58, 65 Northwestern University, 13 Operation Bootstrap, 108–10 Ouellette, Laurie, 19 Papert, Fred, 28–29 Perlmutter, Al, 19, 84, 86, 87, 89, 97. See also National Education Television; public television police force, Black officers on, 98–101; violence of, 3, 6, 8, 26, 66–69, 72, 81 Potter, Lou, 85, 95, 97. See also Black Journal Powell, Adam Clayton, 27. See also Black elected officials; Harlem

Pratt Institute, 27, 32 public television, 3; distribution of, 115, 120; funding of, 15–16, 19, 21, 29, 53–54, 57, 76, 83, 86, 87, 89, 115, 117, 120–21, 122, 123, 125–26, 150, 151 racism. See Black public affairs programs; white supremacism radio, 2, 6–7, 14, 29, 47, 49, 87; activism through, 14, 160 ratings, 18, 117, 150 representations of youth: in Black Journal, 86, 90–93, 97, 118, 142; in Inside of Bedford-­Stuyvesant, 24, 26, 37, 38–40, 41–43, 46, 49; in Operation Bootstrap, 110; in Say Brother, 14, 21, 54–55, 57, 61–62, 67–69, 71–73, 76, 79; in Soul!, 125, 137, 145, 150; in Teen Reporter, 67; in Young Spirit House Players, 41–42, 45 Richardson, Ray, 58, 69–72, 75–76 riots, 1, 6, 8, 10, 11, 122, 151; covering of, 9, 15, 21, 84. See also Bedford-­ Stuyvesant; Newark; New Bedford, Mass.; uprisings; Watts Roach, Max, 30, 38 Roker, Roxie, 20, 30–31, 33–38, 44–45, 47, 49 Roxbury (Boston), 55, 59, 66, 69, 90–92 Sanchez, Sonia, 147, 149. See also Black Arts Movement Say Brother, 4, 13, 14, 18, 53–56, 89, 92, 126; becomes national, 76; as Black news, 64–69, 158; as Black Power, 12, 61–62; cancellation of, 75–76; coverage of Bedford-­Stuyvesant, 71–75; coverage of school desegregation, 82; coverage of Vietnam War; 69–70, 73, 79; coverage of women’s liberation, 61–64, 77–81; focus on local, 81–82, 153; funding of, 15; staff of, 19, 21,

57–61, 70, 72, 75–76; “teen reporters” on, 67; theme song of, 62–64 schools, coverage of, 45–46, 55, 69, 91, 92; activism in, 24, 39 Sesame Street, 116, 156 Sibeko, David, 115 Soul!, 4, 12–13, 14, 18–19, 21–22, 116, 121, 157–58; Amiri Baraka on, 131– 34; audience of, 129–30; as “Black Tonight Show,” 125–26; as Black women’s liberation, 22–23, 123–27, 143–50; cancellation of, 150–52; distribution of, 116, 123, 125, 129; Farrakhan on, 135–37; as forum for national voice, 138; funding for, 15–16, 121, 125; guests on, 129; The Last Poets on, 123, 127, 146; letters from viewers to, 131, 132, 144, 151, 152, 153– 54; Muhammad Ali on, 137. See also Baldwin, James; Black Arts Movement; Giovanni, Nikki; Haizlip, Ellis; Hille, Alice; Sanchez, Sonia South Africa, 138 Spruill, James ( Jim), 64, 67–68 Squires, Catherine, 2–3, 26. See also Black public sphere; counterpublic strategies Stark Reality, The, 62–63 St. Clair Bourne, 19, 97, 112, 156 Stearns Foundation, The, 29 Tanzania, 114–15, 134 Teer, Barbara Ann, 123 Tony Brown’s Journal, 117–18, 121–22, 155 Tyson, Cicely: hair, 143–44. See also “new Black look” uprisings, 1, 7, 9, 13, 25, 29, 54, 69, 78, 154, 158; covering of, 71; Kerner Commission on, 5–6. See also Bedford-­Stuyvesant; New Bedford, Mass.; riots; Watts

I n d ex 189

Variety, 13, 97, 98 Vibrations for a New People, 4, 12 Vietnam War, 1, 28, 69, 120; Black soldiers in, 73, 103–8; covered by Black Journal, 103–11; covered by Say Brother, 69–70, 73, 79; emergence of Black Power in, 105–6, 108, 120 Wallace, Michele, 80 Watts, 1, 20, 40, 102 welfare, 28, 37, 51, 73, 82, 153; Mothers for Adequate Welfare, 65

190  I n d ex

white supremacism, 12, 134, 143 wlbt, 10, 11, 116. See also broadcast regulation women’s movement (liberation), 13, 21–22, 77–80; addressed by Soul!, 22–23, 123–27, 137–42, 143–50; through Black Journal; 142–43; discussed on Inside Bedford-­Stuyvesant, 37–38, 50; and the Nation of Islam, 135–37; Say Brother, 61–64, 77–82