My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Page 149

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In the same month, Black Journal
was awarded an Emmy for excellence
in magazine-type programming —
a mainstream acknowledgement
of its artistic and professional
accomplishments. The National
Newspaper Publisher’s Association
also bestowed Black Journal with
its Russwurm Award for contributions
in African American journalism.
Greaves left the program shortly
afterwards, stating that he planned to
focus on filmmaking through his
own production company established
in 1964. St. Claire Bourne continued
for another year before launching
his independent film company, a route
taken by several Black Journal alumni.
Greaves was also leaving public
television with a bitter taste in his
mouth, which he revealed in an article
for the journal of the National Academy
of Television Arts and Science.
He echoed the findings of the Kerner
Commission report, arguing that
racial unrest was due, in part, to “the
lack of a mass media communication
mechanism to adequately protest the
outrages perpetrated against the black
man… ” Greaves also wrote a lengthy
and unsparing broadside in the
New York Times in which he argued
that American racism had destroyed
the nation’s ability to engage with
the rest of the world, and that black
media workers were the only hope for
rescuing the medium. “As Black
producers, our task will be to encourage
the mental health among the Black,
Brown and Red people, to help still
adaptable white people to be healthy, so
that the transition from rule by racial
paranoia to rule by racial harmony can
be as painless as possible.”

Tony Brown, who had developed
Detroit’s black public affairs show, took
over as executive producer of Black
Journal in summer 1970. The program
was renewed for the next year with
a promised $350,000 of net’s Ford
Foundation grant. The budget,
considerably smaller than the early days
of Black Journal, meant that Brown
would need to find ways to cut costs
by using freelancers and part-time staff.
While Greaves was first and foremost
a filmmaker, Brown’s experience was
primarily as a producer and activist,
and these distinctions became evident.
Brown’s first episode in September 1970
focused on the lack of employment for
blacks in the media featuring Greaves,
filmmaker Melvin Van Peebles, and
actor Ozzie Davis. Greaves called the
presence of black filmmakers “quite
grim” while Davis said it was impossible
for blacks to underwrite the cost of
film or television productions. The New
York Time’s Jack Gould, a staunch
advocate for the program until this
point, was not enamored by the
program’s stylistic shift. In his review
of this first episode he suggested that
Brown sacrificed quality for breadth
and dealt only with generalities. Gould
inspired Brown’s ire when he asserted
that although Black Journal was clearly
designed for black viewers, “its
peripheral value is hardly insignificant,
which is letting whites know the
who, what, where and why of the black
perspective.” In a heated response,
Brown rejected this premise, arguing
that Black Journal was not intended
to serve the needs and interests of white
viewers; rather, it reflected “a perspective
which deals in Black on Black.” This
was the first in what would be a series
of testy encounters between Brown
and his critics. Nevertheless, Black
Journal’s reach continued to expand —
it was now carried by 195 public
television affiliates.

After the debate with Gould, Brown
continued to fashion himself as a
provocateur in an interviewed by
Charlayne Hunter, one of the New York
Times’ few black reporters. Throughout
their conversation, he gestured to their
shared racial identities, conveying that
this enabled him to speak more freely.
Brown told Hunter that Black Journal’s
programming decisions were based
on whether they would “help Black
people,” and he sneered at the notion
that the show should provide
pedagogies of blackness for a white
audience. “It is not necessary for me
to sit there and outline racism so that
some white liberal can sit at home and
understand it,” he maintained. Echoing
Kathleen Cleaver’s pronouncement
two years earlier, he predicted that black
activism and agitation would bring
“revolutionary change” to television,
“not because they like Black people but
because Black people, too, own the
airwaves…” In Brown’s view, mass
media were the frontlines of the struggle
for social justice, and black power
advocates “ain’t gonna change nothing
until they change communications
in this country.”