Black Power TV

by Devorah Heitner

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.

208 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr. Devorah Heitner is the author of Screenwise: Helping Kids Thrive (and Survive) in Their Digital World and her book on navigating privacy and reputation with kids and teens, Growing Up in Public will be out Septmber with Penguin Random House.

Dr. Heitner’s work has appeared in the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and CNN Opinion. She has a Ph.D. in Media/Technology & Society from Northwestern University and has taught at DePaul and Northwestern. She is delighted to be raising her own teenager and she lives with her family in Chicagoland. You can follow her on Twitter @Devorahheitner and on Instagram @devorahheitnerphd.

Reviews

[Ayanna Dozier · Rating 4 out of 5]

Black Power TV (2013) by Dervorah Heitner examines the Black journalism television shows that came to prominence following the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. Because of the public and archival erasure of these shows, many of the tapes were recorded over following each taping. Heitner focuses on four shows in this landscape, these shows are Black Journal, Soul!, Inside Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Say Brother. In Heitner’s case studies of these shows, she examines the visibility of a changing Black conscious within the hosts, participants, and audience members. In particular, Heitner focuses on the alternative cinematic approach that these Black-focused programs took to their content, which considerably differed from mainstream cinematic approaches to “documenting” Black life. In one example, Heitner describes the purposeful camera angles taken by Black directors to combat the anti-Black discourse of the visual representation of Black bodies and faces. She writes: “The use of the close-up when depicting African Americans in both the theme and throughout the program was an ideological as well as aesthetic decision. Stan Lathan had been told by a white director that he avoided close-ups of African American faces because he felt that white audiences would find their features grotesque. ‘I’ve been taking close-ups ever since’, said Lathan” (62). Heitner gives numerous examples about how white individuals tried to shape and control the level, direction, and appearance of Blackness onscreen. Black Power TV chronicles how these shows, largely ran by a Black Production team, resisted and countered these demands before the shows were ultimately cancelled. Heitner uses film analysis, letters from viewers, network correspondence, and archival notes to enhance her evaluation of these programs and the impact that they had on the community. Specifically, Heitner is invested in analyzing the focus these programs had on educating and informing a Black community about intra-Black issues and whether or not Black individuals had/have a “place” in the institution. The book is written in clear, concise, and comprehensible manner. While Heitner uses some theory to support her analysis, her clear focus is unraveling the documents (film, notes, etc.,) to piece together a narrative of a period of turmoil for Black Americans that turned into cultural production as oppose to disintegration as many non-Black individuals anticipate would happen following 1968.