Remember When Black TV Programs Were Angry and Unapologetic?

When I was growing up in a northern-New Jersey ghetto in the early Afro-picked 1970s, my mom used to take me places in her car. Our radio dial was locked to 1430 WNJR, a soul AM station, and in the afternoons I would hear something at the top of the hour called โ€œNational Black Network…

When I was growing up in a northern-New Jersey ghetto in the early Afro-picked 1970s, my mom used to take me places in her car. Our radio dial was locked to 1430 WNJR, a soul AM station, and in the afternoons I would hear something at the top of the hour called โ€œNational Black Network News.โ€ National black newscasters were talking about the condition of black people.

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Trump’s Tariffs Might Stick Around. What Should We Buy Now?
Trump’s Tariffs Might Stick Around. What Should We Buy Now?

We donโ€™t hear enough of that anymore.

I was reminded of that when I heard that William Greaves had passed away on Aug. 25 at the age of 87. Nearly 50 years ago, Greaves was fighting a war in the media world and we were all the beneficiaries. The skirmishes were over black public-affairs television programsโ€”shows that presented undiluted African-American political, social and cultural views on white television during the height of the civil rights movement and black power eras. Greaves was a pioneer of one:ย Black Journal.

In 1968, more than 100 cities had caught aflame after Martin Luther King Jr.โ€™s assassination. The Kerner Commission Report had just been released, and its media chapter explained that the virtually all-white news media were complicit in making black people invisible. Across the nation, virtually all of major-market television respondedโ€”local and national, commercial and publicโ€”with black public-affairs television showsโ€”programs that would reflect the black experience.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDPBGxiI4HU

Black Journal was produced by and for the National Educational Television network (now PBS). Greaves was the co-host, but he and the black staff had to walk off the show to make sure it was run by a black executive producer.

Film Quarterly wrote about the incident: โ€œAfter the third program had been aired, certain contradictions within the production of Black Journal had crystallized. Although the series was being sold as โ€˜by, for and of the black community,โ€™ the white [Alvin H.] Perlmutter was firmly in charge, and the programming was often dominated by white-produced segments. In mid-August, there was a palace revolt. Eleven of the 12 black staff members resigned in protest.โ€ A compromise was made: Greaves would produce, Perlmutter was renamed a โ€œconsultantโ€ and the show got more black staffers.

The first Black Journal programs show how clear, and how confused, black America was in 1968. With Kingโ€™s blood still wet on the Memphis, Tenn., motel balcony, in which direction would black people (note: not black Americans) go? Were they about to build a new, black nation; change the existing one; or both? That was the power of Black Journal and all the shows like it, across the nation.

Devorah Heitner,ย author of Black Power TV,ย a major study of black public-affairs television programming in New York and Boston, said in an email interview: โ€œWhat I remember most is Greavesโ€™ย colleagues telling me that he understood how much Black Journal was a product of its moment, and supporting/advising them to be as critical and as brilliant and brave [as they were]โ€”he understood that the space to tell these stories could disappear at any time! This loss is profound, but Greavesโ€™ย legacy of creative work and mentorship will be felt for a long time.โ€

Greaves was right about the shifting sands.

At surface glance, that space seems to have expanded exponentially in the 900-channel age of Obama. News- and public-affairs-hungry black audiences have Roland Martin and Al Sharpton on radio and cable television every weekday, Melissa Harris-Perry on the weekend,ย andย Tavis Smiley on PBS and public radio (and a new show or two, regionally), and black anchors dominate Americaโ€™s largest television markets. (Black America even has โ€œblack Twitterโ€ clearly surpassing the black talk, AM-radio call-in bluster, but thatโ€™s another article for another time.)

What is missing, however, is not the visibility and reach but the toneโ€”the constant, directed anger against a white supremacist, capitalistic system;ย the sociohistorical perspective;ย and the intended audience of black people hungry for political and cultural nourishment on unapologetic black terms.

Most of those black public-affairs shows created from the Kerner Commission and Kingโ€™s death are gone from the local television markets. Our serious and most controversial aspects of black history, therefore, are fading from black Americaโ€™s collective memory and editorial control, replaced by occasional segments on the white newsmagazine Democracy Now!,ย black history feel-good tidbits and blanket coverage of sporadic community flare-ups when a black child is shot by a white police officer.

Jennifer McArthur, a protรฉgรฉ of Greaves, might agree. โ€œA group of us at LinkTV tried to develop a newsmagazine in a similar vein to Black Journal,โ€ she said in an email interview. โ€œThis was right after Katrina, and the idea was to anchor the program in black New Orleans. We thought it could be a real success; after all, Americans had been glued to the TV 24-7, watching the news out of New Orleans. Yet even with Danny Glover attached, we werenโ€™t able to raise enough money to produce the show. Investors didnโ€™t think โ€˜mainstreamโ€™ audiences would find it of interest. From that experience, it became clear to me just how radical Black Journal was for not only the โ€™60s but the present day.โ€

William Greaves is an ancestor now, as is Gil Noble, another pioneer. The show that replaced Black Journalโ€”Tony Brownโ€™s Journalโ€”is also gone (but Tony Brown, thankfully, is still alive). The folks who took the street-corner-orator perspective off the corner and onto the boob tube are more and more becoming like their shows. In their stead stand a lot of activist Web radio/video on one side and some well-meaning, but corporate, black people on the other side, some in the latter group afraid, some not. Only a smattering of Web video clips serve to remind us how, once upon a time, to be black and televised was to be at the center of a dangerous, fluid, cultural-political ideaโ€”one against the status quo, not just a visual and popular cultural identity lived within it.

Todd Steven Burroughs, an independent researcher and writer based in Newark, N.J., is the author ofย Son-Shine on Cracked Sidewalks,ย an audiobook on Amiri Baraka and Ras Baraka through the eyes of the 2014 Newark mayoral campaign. He is the co-editor, along with Jared Ball, ofย A Lie of Reinvention: Correcting Manning Marableโ€™s Malcolm Xย and the co-author, with Herb Boyd, ofย Civil Rights: Yesterday & Today.ย 

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