My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Page 139

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Entertainment television of the 1960s
relegated black performers to the
margins of comedy and song-and-dance
variety programming. Celebrities
could be found occasionally on the Ed
Sullivan Show or American Bandstand,
but as comedian Dick Gregory
complained “the only tv show that
hires Negroes regularly is Saturday
night boxing.” It didn’t help that
affiliate stations in Southern states
exerted pressure on the networks
to avoid what they considered
pro-integration or pro-black content.
In 1968, for example, network
sponsors like the Chrysler Corporation
still censored programs, including one
featuring the popular singer Harry
Belafonte that showed black men and
white women in close proximity.

Gradually, the pressure from civil
rights groups, actors, and television
insiders led to the creation of a
handful of ongoing dramatic roles
for black performers. The programs
that incorporated these characters
sought to portray a more integrated
America in which well-educated,
upwardly mobile blacks interacted
successfully with whites. Countering
the discordant images on the evening
news, these shows promoted the
national fantasy of a pliant and amiable
black subject that helped obscure,
or even deny, the nation’s racial crisis.
In the first months o f 1968, black
prime-time characters included a secret
agent named Alexander Scott
(Bill Cosby), an African veterinary
assistant (Hari Rhodes), and another
globe-trotting secret agent with
electronics prowess (Gregg Morris).
Despite the limitations of their roles,
some of television’s black performers
deployed a subversive genius in their
ability to insert a critique of racism
through their characters. As Christine
Acham found, by the 1970s black
actors were able to engage in acts of
“residual resistance.” They relied on the
hidden transcripts of black American
life — the invisible social and cultural
codes that oppressed people share
beyond the gaze of their oppressors.
Despite their resistant potential,
the African Americans appearing on
network television had little autonomy
or control over its content; they
lacked the ability to shape the narrative
or insert their own experience, and
were dependent on the actions of
benevolent whites.

Even the rise of television documentaries
in this period tended to marginalize
African American audiences as they
tentatively explored racial issues.
Michael Curtin explained that “black
viewers were simply not considered
a major or distinctive concern of
television broadcasters” in the 1960s.
Documentaries about race relations were
narrated and produced by whites and
addressed a white middle-class audience.
Public broadcasting, launched in 1953
when the first non-commercial station
went on the air, was an experiment
seen primarily as an educational tool.
By the end of the decade, it was
expected to provide an alternative to
the commercial networks motivated by
profit and structured around advertising.
In 1959 journalist Walter Lippman
argued that public television could be
a network “…run as a public service
with its criterion not what will be most
popular but what is good.” Another
commentator noted that the public
broadcasting “has magnificent
opportunities to be independent,
irreverent, and bold.” In the early days
of public television, content was
divided between daytime instructional
programs often used in local classrooms,
and evenings devoted to cultural fare
not found on the networks. By 1968
there were nearly 200 public television
stations across the country, and increasing
time was devoted to documentary films,
critical commentary, and investigative
journalism. But, despite the hopes for
innovation, public television paid only
limited attention to race relations and
minority groups had no independent
voice in the medium. But this state of
affairs was about to change.