My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Page 152

BLACK RENAISSANCE NOIRE

Black Journal was not the “electronic
stimulus for a black revolution”
as many activists might have hoped.
Yet, it did lay the groundwork
for a handful of local public affairs
programs — notably Boston’s Basic
Black (originally Hey, Brother) and
Detroit Black Journal (originally Colored
People’s Time) — that continue to be
broadcast. Perhaps Black Journal’s most
enduring contribution was to spawn
successive generations of independent
black filmmakers and producers whose
work populates pbs programs like p.o.v.
(Point of View), American Experience
and Independent Lens. St. Clair Bourne
recalled that while the dream of black
authorship on public television was
often thwarted, the show “did achieve
some of its aims in terms of racial
identity and a greater recognition of
the need for economic and political
self-determination.” Black Journal and
the programs that followed it were
able to constitute African Americans as
resistant subjects, rather than objects
of scrutiny and scorn, for millions of
television viewers.

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Four years after the inception of
Black Journal, the program’s staff and
advocates faced a dramatically altered
political environment. The Ford
Foundation’s activist philanthropy
may have helped establish landmark
television programs but it did not
sustain them over the long term. Media
historian Chon Noriega noted that as
Ford realized its efforts had made little
inroads in overcoming racism in the
media, “it blamed the larger society,
then withdrew.” McGeorge Bundy’s
foundation sought to intervene in
the nation’s racial crisis, but failed
to consider what African Americans
wanted — to control their own media.
Ford’s model of developing prototype
minority programming was insufficient
to change the interests and behavior
of the industry, and the Foundation’s
own assets were in decline. The ability
of controversial public television
p &