My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Page 142

BLACK RENAISSANCE NOIRE

The show opened on June 12 with
comedian Godfrey Cambridge in
overalls painting a glass panel black as
he grimaced with the effort. With a
few strokes, the panel was covered — a
symbolic creation of a black world
and an intertextual reference to Amos
n’ Andy’s bumbling portrayal of black
workers. Cambridge’s black wall faded
to the program title with conga drums
and horns playing in the background.
Host Lou House announced: “It is our
aim in the next hour and the coming
months to report and review the events,
the dreams, the dilemmas of black
America and black Americans.” The
program segued to a speech by recently
widowed Coretta Scott King, followed
by segments including a focus on black
college students, the history of the
black press, an update on King’s Poor
People’s Campaign, a profile of black
entrepreneurs, and an overview of the
controversy surrounding the Black
Panther Party.

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While Greave’s film was being aired,
a white producer at Channel 13,
Alvin Perlmutter, kicked around the
idea for a black public affairs program
and lobbied for its creation. According
to Bourne, the series idea was
“enthusiastically” approved by the
station and net, which proudly
announced in the New York Times that
“a monthly news series on Negro life
and affairs” was in production and
would have an integrated staff. The
show would be produced in New York
and distributed to public stations
nationally. Most important, net
promised $400,000 of Ford Foundation
funding for four episodes that would
take the program through September.
Perlmutter, an established public
television producer known for critical
and politically risky projects, teamed
with Lou Potter, a black television
producer, to develop the show. Bourne
and Greaves were hired on as associates.

There had never been anything like
Black Journal on national television.
The show presented a range of cultural
codes inspired by the black power
movement — Afro-Cuban jazz
background music, hosts wearing Afro
hairstyles and later dashikis, and a map
of Africa draped across the backdrop
of a set decorated with African and
Caribbean artifacts. By October 1968,
host Lou House greeted viewers with
a clenched fist salute and “Jambo,
A Salaam Alaikum, Qual O — that’s
hello in Yoruba and Swahili.” These
aesthetics constructed an actual and
metaphorical separate space for black
subjects; they were used to establish
the idea of an autonomous black world.
Black Journal placed black people in
the foreground, while they interrogated
topics that had heretofore been
under the control of dominant media.
The program, like its peers in other
cities, had the potential to demonstrate
the breadth and depth of the black
counterpublic at that same time that
it offered pedagogies of blackness
by instructing the dominant culture
about the internal lives and logics of
black America. The appearance of these
visual, cultural and linguistic codes on
television also legitimated Afro-centrism
and black nationalist politics for those
African Americans who kept these
movements at arms length.