Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
POWER
TV
DEVORAH HEITNER
Black
Power
TV
Devorah Heitner
Duke University Press Durham and London 2013
© 2013 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
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■ Acknowledgments ix
conclusion 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 ex-
amined in this volume spent many hours with me, recollecting this forma-
tive 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 Gio-
vanni, Jewelle Gomez, Louise Greaves, William Greaves, Charles Hobson,
Anna Horsford, Stan Lathan, James Lowry, Kit Lukas, Ernestine Middle-
ton, 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 Fellow-
ship 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 pos-
sibilities 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 por-
tion 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 emerg-
ing 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. Archi-
vists 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, re-
sources, 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 gen-
erosity as an adviser, his encyclopedic knowledge, and his understanding
Reverberations
of the King
Assassination
2 I ntro d u cti o n
available resources—a marginalized public may need to employ an en-
clave 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 op-
pressive 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 in-
sider 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 pro-
gram employed code switching in order to gain some of the advantages
of an enclave strategy, in a widely accessible public medium. Yet their pri-
mary 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 audi-
ences 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 tri-
umphant 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 be-
came central issues on programs like For Blacks Only.
Around the country, other station managers almost simultaneously re-
sponded 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, Hous-
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 con-
tinued 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 commu-
nicated 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 com-
munities projected in black and white behind him. Through both hosts and
guests, these shows inserted new Black aesthetics and fashion into an over-
whelmingly 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 sit-
com 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, de-
scribes 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 aes-
thetic” came to signify a kind of currency on these programs.7
6 I ntro d u cti o n
performed by white actors using “negro dialect” and trafficked in stereo-
types 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 char-
acters, 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 charac-
ters 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 pre-
dominant source for perspectives on race and other social issues predis-
posed 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 af-
fairs 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 fea-
tured, but neither Black Power–oriented leaders nor ordinary Black citi-
zens were featured. One exception to the exclusion of more radical Black
perspectives was a 1966 episode of Meet the Press that featured Stokely Car-
michael, 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; con-
troversial figures like Carmichael rarely got to speak on television, and
when they did, they were often edited down to incendiary sound bites cal-
culated 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 main-
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 as-
signed 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 Ameri-
can journalists in television, and how politicizing it was to commence a
media career under such war-like conditions.15
Case Studies
In chapters 1 and 2, I discuss two local programs that emerged under dif-
ferent 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 corpora-
tion 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 pre-
dominantly 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 Moyni-
han 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