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 two national shows - Black Journal and Soul! . 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 South African apartheid. 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 critique of mainstream discourse, disseminating Black culture, and modeling Black empowerment. At the national level, Black Journal and Soul! allowed for the imagining of a Black nation and a distinctly African American consciousness and played an influential role in the rise Black Arts Movement. Black Power TV reveals the ways regulatory, activist, and textual histories are intertwined, and shows how these programs redefined Black representations in ways that continue to reverberate today.