Overview

In Black Power TV, Devorah Heitner chronicles the emergence of Black public affairs television starting in 1968. She examines two local shows, New York's Inside Bedford-Stuyvesant and Boston's Say Brother, and the national programs Soul! and Black Journal. These shows offered viewers radical and innovative programming: the introspections of a Black police officer in Harlem, African American high school students discussing visionary alternatives to the curriculum, and Miriam Makeba comparing race relations in the United States to apartheid in South Africa. While Inside Bedford-Stuyvesant and Say Brother originated from a desire to contain Black discontent during a period of urban uprisings and racial conflict, these shows were re-envisioned by their African American producers as venues for expressing Black critiques of mainstream discourse, disseminating Black culture, and modeling Black empowerment. At the national level, Soul! and Black Journal allowed for the imagining of a Black nation and a distinctly African American consciousness, and they played an influential role in the rise of the Black Arts Movement. Black Power TV reveals how regulatory, activist, and textual histories are interconnected and how Black public affairs television redefined African American representations in ways that continue to reverberate today.

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9780822354246

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"""Black Power TV effectively works in the space of the articulation between an emergent radical black identity, the ascendant network of public television, and the debate over what equality and racial democracy might actually look like from the vantage point of progressive black people. Devorah Heitner provides a rich look into an exciting and innovative world of black self-making and self representation."" - Herman Gray,author of Cultural Moves: African Americans and the Politics of Representation ""Long before Rev. Al Sharpton and Melissa Harris-Perry anchored talk shows on MSNBC, and long before the nightly news was read by people of color, several public television stations took tentative steps to bring the voices and faces of African Americans into US homes. Devorah Heitner's new book, Black Power TV focuses on four of them - two local and two national - and addresses their long-term impact on the racial politics of viewers and on the media itself [...]The four case studies she presents - Inside Bedford-Stuyvesant in New York; Say Brother in Boston; and the nationally syndicated Black Journal and Soul! Offer an incisive glimpse into the era's politics."" - Eleanor J Bader, Truthout"

When television shows produced by and for African Americans hit the airwaves, the unique and previously ignored perspectives of African Americans were broadcast to American households for the first time. Programs created by blacks, for black audiences revolutionized what people of color expected from public and commercial television. Devorah Heitner's dramatic account of African Americans' late-1960s breakthrough onto broadcast TV highlights the enduring significance of their achievement. --Jewelle Gomez, novelist, playwright, and former staffer for Say Brother

Author Information

Devorah Heitner is a media scholar based in Chicago.

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