Kerner's Other Black Explosion: The Chapter 15 Mandate and the Birth of New York's Black Public-Affairs Television Programming, 1967–1968

ABSTRACT

Black public-affairs television programming in New York City between 1967 and 1968 happened because of a convergence of several factors. They include (a) the upheavals in urban America between 1964 and 1967, (b) the release of the Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (a.k.a., the Kerner Commission report) and (c) the assassination of Martin Luther King, the latter two both within months of each other in 1968. Other equally important factors include the organic development of Black American-owned and Black American-oriented media—newspapers and radio outlets buttressed and informed by more than a century of Black Left/Nationalist/Pan-Africanist/integrationist intellectual thought and African-centered/Afrocentric ideology. Using and critiquing the emerging scholarship on such programming, a brief historical review of the creation and development of 4= such shows in 1967 and 1968—WABC-TV's Like It Is, WNEW-TV's Inside Bedford-Stuyvesant, and National Educational Television's two locally produced (but nationally broadcast) programs, Black Journal and Soul!—shows that these programs sought to correct the Kerner Commission's critique that the American mass media show “a White man's world” by attempting to show, for the first time, a Black world to large mainstream broadcast markets.

KEYTERMS:

• Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders
• Kerner Commission report
• Black public-affairs television programming
• Public Broadcasting Service
• National Educational Television (NET)
• WNDT-TV
• WABC-TV's Like It Is
• WNEW-TV's Inside Bedford-Stuyvesant
• WNET/NET's Soul!
• WNET/NET's Black Journal
• WNET-TV
• New York network affiliate broadcasting
• New York independent broadcasting
• New York public-affairs broadcasting
• New York public television
• New York commercial television
• public-affairs television
• Black television broadcasting
• Black media ideology
• Black media history
• Black media theory
• Afrocentrism

Notes

1. For a post-modern, 21^st-century example of the kind of archived video interviews of Black-centered, Leftist/Nationalist/Pan-Africanist intellectual discussions of history, society, and political development once dominated by 20^th-century televised Black public-affairs shows, see Morgan State University media professor Jared Ball's multimedia news and public-affairs website (imixwhatilke.org), video portions of which are on YouTube. His application of the “emancipatory journalism” theory to Black American radical Leftist, Nationalist and Pan-African communication vehicles, ranging from underground street music mixtapes to Black revolutionary print to 21^st-century online websites that succeeded pirate radio, can be found in his 2011 book, I Mix What I Like: A Mixtape Manifesto.