My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Page 140

BLACK RENAISSANCE NOIRE

Public television was also a key
element of President Lyndon Johnson’s
“Great Society” liberal reform agenda.
At Johnson’s request, the Carnegie
Commission on Educational Television
conducted an 18-month study that
critiqued the narrowness of commercial
television and called for “enlisting
television in the service of diversity.”
The Carnegie Commission, which
counted novelist Ralph Ellison among
its members, presented a lofty vision
for public television. It imagined a
network that would serve as the nation’s
public sphere, injecting “a civilized
voice in a civilized community.”
The Commission’s report provided a
moral and political blueprint for
the Public Broadcasting Act, signed
into law in November 1967. The law
declared that it was in the public
interest to create television programming
that would address “unserved and
underserved populations, particularly
children and minorities.” The Act
established a new public entity, the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting
(cpb) to gradually take over the Ford
Foundation’s role in financing programs
under government oversight. Federal
Communications Commission (fcc)
chief Nicholas Johnson exhorted public
broadcasters to address “controversial
topics” and to help solve the nation’s
social problems. In particular, the hope
was that public television would help
release the pressure built up within
aggrieved communities that continually
erupted into urban uprisings.

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The Ford Foundation was one of the
principle architects of educational
television as well as its chief financial
supporter, and it played a crucial
role in this transformation. In the late
1950s and 1960s Ford granted over
$90 million to net, which also housed
New York City’s public television
station (Channel 13). net, established
as a non-profit corporation in 1952, was
the chief producer and distributor of
original programming for the network
of public television outlets. In 1967,
the President of the Ford Foundation,
McGeorge Bundy, declared that “The
first of the nation’s social problems is
still the struggle for Negro equality.”
Bundy, former Harvard dean and
national security advisor in the Kennedy
and Johnson administrations, told his
audience that despite pronouncements,
protests, court battles, and legislation,
black Americans faced profound
obstacles rooted in white Americans’
prejudice. Bundy believed that public
television might lessen prejudice and
hasten racial integration by exposing
white Americans to African American
perspectives. He argued that the
Foundation could help to counteract
racist commentary — what he termed
“preachers of hate” — in popular media.

In March 1968, three months before
Black Journal went on the air, the
National Advisory Commission on
Civil Disorders published a report
which sought to find not only the
causes of these violent disturbances,
but ways to avert and control
them. The commission, established
by President Johnson a year earlier,
enlarged the framework of white
culpability advanced by Bundy, noting
that “What white Americans have
never fully understood — but what
the Negro can never forget — is that
white society is deeply implicated
in the ghetto.” The group, popularly
known as the Kerner Commission in
honor of its chairman, Ohio Governor
Otto Kerner, analyzed hundred