My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Page 138

BLACK RENAISSANCE NOIRE

The history of black American activism
in the latter half of the twentieth
century underscores the crucial role
of media coverage in garnering global
support for legal and social change,
and in mobilizing politicians and
grassroots participation. African
American activists, regardless of
ideological orientation, sought access
to broadcasting and print outlets and
hoped to influence the often distorted
images of their actions and ideas.
Charles Payne’s study of the freedom
struggle in Mississippi showed that
white journalists consistently ignored
the grassroots organizing tradition
in black communities, preferring to
focus on high-profile leaders and
familiar protest narratives. Even an
iconic figure like Rev. Martin Luther
King, Jr. was refused access to
numerous communications outlets
and constantly fought to have control
over how he was represented. Black
Power activists and organizations, from
Malcolm X, to Stokely Carmichael,
to the Black Panther Party faced a
generally hostile media that painted
them as violent, irrational, and threats
to national security.

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Black Journal was unprecedented — a
nationally distributed public television
program by, for and about African
Americans that beamed into America’s
living rooms. Television had the
potential to circulate African American
social, political and cultural
perspectives far beyond the print and
oral platforms on which the black
public sphere rested. In the hands of
a generation of young black cultural
workers hungry for opportunities, this
arena held out the promise of being
the “electronic stimulus for a black
revolution,” a proclamation made by
Kathleen Cleaver, Communication
Secretary of the Black Panther Party.
The occasion of Cleaver’s remarks was
her appearance on an early episode
of Black Journal. Cleaver, a skilled
media manipulator in her own right,
reflected on the ways broadcasting
had become a resource for black social
movements during the 1960s.
Because of television, “black people are
in a position to have instantaneous
information about what’s going on and
are in a position to react to that,” she
explained. Black Journal, largely funded
by the Ford Foundation and developed
by the National Educational Television
network (net), was part of an historical
moment that produced “the most
daring television the u.s. airwaves had
ever seen.” Black Journal opened up
opportunities for black media workers
and created new approaches for the
public discussion of race relations and
social justice. In 1969, Ebony magazine
pointed to the influence of Black
Journal when it declared that public
broadcasting was doing the most for
African Americans of any dominant
cultural institution.

Commercial culture of the 1960s —
particularly television — was
instrumental in the discursive
production of a national identity that
celebrated whiteness, domesticity,
and middle-class aspirations. Indeed,
Smith and Carlos’ act of defiance
that was broadcast around the world
opposed television’s carefully tended
narratives of race. “Network television
wanted to tell a story of moderate
racial progress,” noted Aniko
Bodroghkozy in her study of the era’s
entertainment programming. To see
an African American face on network
television was a rarity. When they
were rendered visible, it was through
a dichotomized lens that posed prime
time black entertainers as sanitized
and non-threatening, while in the
realm of public affairs they appeared
militant and dangerous. Network news
accounts of African Americans in 1968
were generally confined to a handful of
topics beyond King’s assassination —
the effect of the “Negro vote” in the
upcoming Presidential election (including
the Democratic national convention
in Chicago); racially-motivated conflicts
between blacks and whites, particularly
in the South; or resistance and rebellion,
ranging from Martin Luther King Jr.’s
Poor Peoples campaign to the murder
trial of Black Panther Huey Newton.
The commercial networks not only
positioned black Americans within
narrow and mythological frames, they
flattened or wholly ignored the breadth
of their communities, consciousness
and experiences. For example, the news
media reduced Rev. King’s quest
to build an interracial, cross-class,
anti-poverty coalition to just another
violent, failed protest movement.
“The press pre-empted the class
rhetoric and values of the Poor People’s
Campaign, and boiled them down
to a handful of potent but ultimately
misleading symbols,” one scholar
found. Similarly, while television
networks broadcast more than thirty
stories about Huey Newton’s murder
trial in the summer of 1968, the Black
Panthers were presented as a vaguely
threatening and glamorous group,
elevating Newton to celebrity status
with no serious attention to the group’s
political claims or constituencies.