My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Page 141

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Several experiments in black community
programming were already underway
on public television. One of the first
was in Detroit, where a young and
ambitious civil rights worker, Tony
Brown, collaborated with students
from Wayne State University to develop
a four-part series focused on black
history and politics. The series appeared
on the local public television outlet in
the winter of 1967, just months before
the city’s devastating riots. “Our timing
could not have been better,” Brown
recalled. “In the midst of growing
racial tensions and the unrest of the
summer of 1967, we portrayed the life
of the black community in a way that
had never been done before.” The series
was later picked up by Detroit’s public
television affiliate wtvs, becoming
Colored People’s Time, a title that hailed
black viewers directly.
Within months, other public and
independent television outlets
considered the possibility that media
access would be a cathartic release
for communities wracked by strife.
In New York City, independent
broadcaster Metro Media created
Inside Bedford-Stuyvesant and in Boston,
fledgling black media workers created
Say Brother on the city’s educational
television station. wttw, Chicago’s
public station, started a short-lived
program called Our People, while in
San Francisco, Rev. Cecil Williams
of Glide Memorial Church launched
Vibrations for a New People on the local
CBS affiliate. All of these shows were
borne of struggle as black broadcasters,
filmmakers, and community groups
agitated for time on the airwaves. They
were also distinctly local ventures that
provided community residents a venue
through which to address each other.
Only Black Journal and the variety show
Soulhad a national audience. Black
Journal debuted on June 12, 1968 at 9 p.m.
on New York City’s Channel 13 and
was shown on 147 public television
stations across the country.

The staff of Black Journal was part of
a small but thriving community of
black filmmakers who were anxious for
autonomy and self-expression. Among
them was St. Clair Bourne, a graduate
film student and a member of the
Student Afro-American Society at
Columbia University. He was part of
an uneasy alliance of black and white
activists who stormed the campus
and took over a locked administration
building to protest the university’s
ban on indoor demonstrations and
its plans to build a gymnasium in
Morningside Park adjacent to the
campus. For Bourne and his fellow
protestors who occupied Hamilton
Hall, the Morningside Park takeover
represented a war against white elite
interests usurping black communities.
After a week’s occupation, Stokley
Carmichael and H. Rap Brown
renamed the building Malcolm X
University and the students dug in
their heels. As was the case in so many
uprisings of the era, the university
administration brought in police and
an episode of violent reprisal ensued.
Bourne was among the more than
700 students who were arrested and
subsequently suspended after the
incident. Years later, he recalled this
politicizing experience as influencing
his interest in television programming.
“Fresh from the barricades and a
night in jail, I was brought on as an
associate producer” of Black Journal,
he said. “The life of Black Journal was
closely allied to the Black movement
that gave birth to it.”

William Greaves, an older and more
experienced filmmaker, also joined the
fledging television program after years
struggling to find a niche in the media.
Born in New York City, he spent the
immediate postwar years working in
theater and film in the city. Greaves
found discrimination in the u.s. film
industry so pervasive that he decamped
to Canada, spending eight years there
training and producing films at the
National Film Board. He worked with
a host of important filmmakers and was
influenced by celebrated documentary
director John Grierson, in the
process developing a distinctive cinema
verite approach to storytelling.
When Greaves returned to the states in
the mid-1960s, the black revolution
was everywhere yet “there were barely
a handful of black documentary
filmmakers in America,” he remembered.
He marked the creation of Black
Journal as the moment when “the whole
filmmaking field really began to move
for African Americans.” After a stint
producing films for the United States
Information Agency, Greaves collaborated
with net on a documentary on the
black middle-class for net. Titled Still
a Brother, it was broadcast on New
York’s Channel 13 in April 1968, just
three weeks after King’s assassination.