Black Power TV

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.

"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 S. Gray, author of Cultural Moves: African Americans and the Politics of Representation, "When television shows produced by and for African Americans hit the airwaves, their unique and previously ignored perspectives were broadcast into 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, “Heitner provides a fascinating exploration of how national programs such as Black Journal and Soul!, along with local programs like Say Brother and Inside Bedford-Stuyvesant, ‘intervened in both the history of television and in the project of rearticulating racial formations that occurred in the Black Power era’...This book is a model of what great scholarship looks like. It is informative and engaging, and makes a considerable contribution to scholarship on the history of television.”, “Black Power TV recovers an important chapter in the history of both U.S. television and the intertwined Black Arts and Black Power movements. . . . The detailed visual and rhetorical analysis of episodes [Heitner] retrieved from disparate archives and the oral history interviews she conducted with hosts, guests, and creators allow her to paint a vivid picture of Black public-affairs programs and to tell the story of their emergence and decline.”, “Black Power TV provides a challenging experience to contemporary viewers, who are invited to imagine a different television image, which can also be recovered through the Internet, offering a glimpse into the activist past of Black television.”

Devorah Heitner is a media scholar based in Chicago.