Black Power TV by Devorah Heitner (review)

Drawing on the rare archival footage from four television programs made during the Black Power years (1964–1974), Black Power TV attempts to recover the cultural and economic dynamics behind innovative televisual endeavors that were produced in the wake of the Kerner Commission Report (1968). Responding to the report’s call for more diversity on the small screen, several stations opened up public space for African American voices to reach out to television audiences. Whether they adopted a local lens like Inside Bedford Stuyvesant (1968–1971) and Say Brother (1968–present) or were broadcast nationally like Black Journal (1968–1970) and Soul! (1968–1973), these programs delved into the Black experience: from documenting the everyday life in Black neighbourhoods to debating local and national issues affecting African American communities, they “injected critical Black perspectives into an overwhelmingly White televisual context, creating a Black public sphere in an unlikely space” (2). The author endows her study with a lively touch by commenting on specific episodes, analysing how the anchors’ clothes and chosen settings influenced the construction of racial representations. African attire (including garments and hairstyles) reinforced ethnic identification, reflecting the merging of the political and the personal as a means “to assert Black identity and pride” (5). Heitner’s investigation into the paratextual documents of the period conveys a sociological perspective, reflecting an attempt to retrospectively assess the impact of these programs on Black and White communities. She strives to understand the audiences’ reception by reading and quoting from the letters, which producers preserved among their personal archives. While some of the given examples may seem anecdotal, they allow the author to capture the zeitgeist of the period. Her interviews with former participants (producers, reporters, editors) enrich the narrative, highlighting practical details that emphasize behind-the-scenes power struggles between Black staff members and White executive producers.

The book points to the diversity of Black aesthetics through underlining the characteristics of each program, introducing a few stills that illustrate the author’s argument. The study of the programs further sheds light on the ideological context behind television screens: although producers agreed to introduce more African American voices, regional and structural barriers constrained and restrained their creativity. Dependence on money donated by White-dominated institutions (such as the Ford Foundation) influenced the first episodes of Black Journal, which producer William Greaves strove to counter by promoting Black visuals as executive producer of the program from 1968 to 1970. While Black Journal suffered budget cuts when pressure from the civil rights uprisings eased, leading the foundations and corporations that funded the program to curtail their donations (122), Say Brother was canceled for tackling controversial subjects—including charges of personal corruption that stained the reputation of influential public figures (75). Local censorship constituted another barrier in the southern states: some stations voluntarily scheduled Black Journal at late hours to restrict its audience, whereas others chose to defy the Fairness Doctrine rather than broadcast Black programs on their channels—including Alabama ETV (10).

The book nonetheless underscores the positive input of these programs, which gave African American technicians access to television making, thus paving the way for their future media careers. The heart and soul of the book resides in its analyses of striking moments in the shows, which the author presents with great attention to visual and aural details that have an immersive power. The author dedicates numerous pages to recovering the cultural dynamics that made the newest developments in music, poetry, theater, and film (152). Black Journal was “designed to foster a shared vision of a national Black community by transcending regional, generational, and class differences in its coverage” (85) whereas Soul! included live performances that helped promote the creativity of the Black Arts Movement. Through the program-specific focus of each chapter, the author identifies the political underpinning of cultural productions that aimed to counter the negative stereotypes that the 1965 Moynihan Report had generated about the Black family. The focus on a specific Brooklyn neighbourhood in Inside Bedford-Stuyvesant allowed anchors Roxie Roker and...