Black Power TV by Devorah Heitner (review)

Marking Chicago-based media scholar Devorah Heitner’s foray into the genre of Black media studies, Black Power TV is chiefly invested in detailing the lifecycle (creation, governance, and dissolution) of local, “ultralocal,” and national Black-centered public access programming. Appropriately, Heitner’s arguments are simultaneously undergirded by histories of late 1960s uprisings in predominately Black metro areas, as well as an increasingly emphatic call for greater Black representation in all aspects of American life. Concurrently, this work highlights the positive impacts of urban uprisings, which, in this instance, is evidenced through the creation of Black-centered public access programs.

In Black Power TV’s introduction entitled “Reverberations of the King Assassination,” Heitner reads Martin Luther King, Jr.’s death as substantively bound to television networks’ decisions to produce shows catering to Black populations. In addition to an introduction (and conclusion), Black Power TV is divided into four chapters, each emphasizing a different public access program. Entitled “Welcome to Inside Bedford-Stuyvesant, Your Community Program!,” chapter one focuses on a New York–based show broadcast on the independently run commercial channel WNEW (p. 25). The chapter recounts former Democratic New York senator Robert Kennedy’s collaboration with Bed-Stuy activists in order to create the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation (BSRC).

The book’s second chapter, “Say Brother and Boston’s New Principles of Blackness,” details the history and inner-workings of the Boston public access program Say Brother. Simultaneously, this chapter locates the impact of Say Brother’s advocacy journalism as a “counterpoint to mainstream news accounts that presented African Americans as victims” (p. 65). It is here that Heitner offers the most compelling support for her opening thesis, recounting Boston city officials’ cursory decision to broadcast a James Brown concert (scheduled for April 5, 1968—one day after King’s assassination) as a strategy to keep “grieving and angry African Americans” from convening in a centralized location (p. 53).

In a departure from the local and ultralocal programs examined in the book’s earlier chapters, “No Thanks for Tokenism” examines the national television show Black Journal. Through a close exploration of the show’s production, the book’s third chapter links Black Journal to a myriad of improvements regarding how Black people are portrayed on television by emphasizing its contributions in lighting used to film Black people, the American public’s notion of a Black national identity, and Black Americans’ connection to a global decolonizing mission. Additionally, Heitner discusses the program’s transition from being under “White control” to having its first Black executive producer.

Chapter four, “That New Black Magic,” investigates the long-running, consistently popular national program Soul!, drawing on the show’s innovative relationship with its White audiences, who were “subtly” educated in “appropriate and respectful spectatorship” (p. 130). More so than in other chapters, Heitner is largely interested in the influential conversations on the program between guests such as Farrakhan, Nikki Giovanni, James Baldwin, and Muhammad Ali.

Black Power TV concludes with Heitner assessing Black Americans’ inventive mobilization of television as a communal resource. Conspicuously, the book’s conclusion makes no acknowledgement of its introductory thesis. Though, at times suffering from clumsy induction and lapses in general knowledge of Black studies, Black Power TV offers a much-needed examination of Black-centered televisual programming and is best suited for undergraduates (and beyond) interested in the Black Power era and/or media studies.