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BLACKS ON TELEVISION

First Attempts

The civil rights struggles of the 1950s finally began to filter into the television industry during the 1960s. NBC had broadcast The Nat King Cole Show in 1956 and 1957, but southern stations refused to broad-cast it, and it was canceled. The new decade saw an increase in roles for black actors, such as the guest-star roles for a couple on The Dick Van Dyke Show. Rob Petrie mistakenly believes that his son, Richie, has been accidentally switched at birth and tracks down the couple he believes has his son. The couple turns out to be attractive, middle class, and black.

Bill Cosby

In 1965 NBC paired Robert Culp with black actor Bill Cosby in I Spy, an adventure-intrigue show. The easy rapport between Culp and Cosby and the relationship of Cosby's character to Culp's (Culp played a professional tennis star, and Cosby was his trainer-masseur) defused the potential for controversy. The first network show to star a single black character was Julia, which premiered on NBC on 17 September 1968, star-ring Diahann Carroll as a widowed nurse with a young son. Though it was one of the first shows to employ black writers, the show's plots did not accomplish much more than presenting white middle-class concerns with a black character. Despite criticisms by black critics of the show's lack of realism, Julia was still a breakthrough.

Positive Change

Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In featured black comedians, the best known being Flip Wilson. Wilson had his own show on NBC beginning in 1970, and it was briefly at the top of the ratings. The first black family on a prime-time soap opera, Peyton Place, made its appearance in 1968. The Mod Squad, featuring Clarence Williams III as one of the three-member squad, premiered in September 1968. Other black characters were included in Mission Impossible, Land of the Giants, Star Trek, Mannix, Ironside, and Hogans Heroes.

Problem Areas

Although roles for blacks on television increased during the decade, there was still little programming intended for the black community. Of the 1,135 hours of television programming broadcast monthly by the major national networks in 1969, only one hour—occupied by the monthly Black Journal on public television—was intended for the black audience. There were local, mainly public-affairs shows which attempted to fill the need for black programming—Black on Black in Syracuse, Inside Bedford Stuyvesant in New York, For Blacks Only and Our People in Chicago, Jobman Caravan in South Carolina—but there were few entertainment shows which spoke directly and solely to a black audience.

Network Myopia

The television networks saw the problem in racial terms: white audiences would not watch characters who were different from themselves, and black audiences were not large enough to support shows de-signed only for them. Paul Morash, executive producer of Peyton Place, described the network's solution: "All the Negroes I've seen on TV are colorless—absolutely de-void of character, humor or idiom. They are prideless Negroes, castrated men and desexed females. These people are really gilded Rochesters [Jack Benny's comedic manservant]." Harry Belafonte agreed that "For the shuffling, simple-minded Amos-and-Andy type of Negro, TV has substituted a new one-dimensional Negro without reality."

Problems of Society

At bottom the problem was that white, middle-class America did not know enough about black society to judge whether a representation was unrealistic or offensive. The one-dimensional Negro was reality for most white Americans; a realistic portrayal of black America was seemingly beyond the capabilities of network television. The more "realistic" black shows of the 1970s created their own set of problems and questions about perception. Television, as is any other form of popular entertainment, is an imperfect mirror of the society that produces it. The problems of race and television in the 1960s were manifestations of the larger struggles occurring in other segments of society.