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Journal of e-Media Studies, Volume 7 Issue 2: Accessible Civil Rights Heritage

Perlman Quote 1

"While NET embraced a range of strategies to address racism in US society, a recurring trope was the network’s emphasis on talk, discussion, deliberation, and debate not only as a crucial means to define the problem but as a constitutive part of its solution."

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Black and White Together?: National Educational Television and Civil Rights in the 1960s

by Allison Perlman
University of California, Irvine

Abstract
NET and Civil Rights
NET, Civil Rights, and the Power and Limits of Talk
The Limits of NET: Racism and the Press
Conclusion

"Black and White Together?", telecast in 1969 as part of National Educational Television’s (NET) weekly public affairs series NET Journal, examined an educational program in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The school system had received a federal grant to create an experimental, innovative program to address problems within the city’s schools. As the introduction to the documentary made clear, there were many intertwined issues to address: the widespread perception among students of the irrelevance of their curricula, the out-of-touchness of their teachers, the repressiveness of the school system, and the racial tensions that had emerged in interracial high schools—not only from bringing young people into contact who previously had been largely segregated but also from the discriminatory disciplinary practices leveled at Black students. The experiment, named Project WILL, brought an interracial group of students together at an Atlantic City hotel and initially intended to allow the students to determine the contours of the program to address the issues they faced. As the documentary traces, Project WILL was instead dictated by school administrators and inflamed, rather than ameliorated, racial tensions among the students.
One of the last direct-to-camera interviews in “Black and White Together?” is with Samuel Sanderson, a director in the Office of Evaluation in New Jersey who had been involved with Project WILL throughout its development and execution. Acknowledging its failures, Sanderson asks, “Where do we go from here?” Expressing skepticism that projects like it should receive additional funding, he suggests, “There is also the possibility that, really, the real reason that people don’t get along is not so much that they don’t understand each other, it could well be that they do understand each other.” That is, perhaps the very premise of Project WILL, that racial tensions could be resolved through interracial dialogue, was itself misguided, and the problem was not a lack of clarity about other perspectives but a gulf between people that conversation could not bridge.
Sanderson’s comment cuts to the heart of not only Project WILL but the televisual context in which the documentary aired. NET long had prioritized public affairs programming about racial discrimination and the struggle for civil rights. It sought to offer audiences a perspective distinct from what viewers could see on the major commercial television networks. While NET embraced a range of strategies to address racism in US society, a recurring trope was the network’s emphasis on talk, discussion, deliberation, and debate not only as a crucial means to define the problem but as a constitutive part of its solution. If Sanderson’s comment directly questioned the utility of experiments like Project WILL, it indirectly interrogated the efficacy of the program on which the documentary aired and the public affairs philosophy that instantiated its creation.
The dual register of this moment—Sanderson’s specific comment on Project WILL and an unintentional reflection on NET’s approach to civil rights programs—finds an echo in another NET Journal episode. “Welfare Revolt” (1967) offered an incisive critique of the US welfare system and documented coordinated resistance to its indignities and insufficiencies. At one moment, a leader of the welfare rights movement in Cleveland is asked to pose for a photo with the white male head of welfare distribution in her city. Despite the insistent cajoling of journalists and the bureaucrat, the woman refuses to smile for the photo. Within the context of the documentary, the moment at once underlines the seriousness of purpose of the activist and registers her refusal to placate white desires for her cooperation and containment; this moment also inadvertently speaks to the necessary resistance to the dominance of a white-controlled media system like NET, empowered to represent, document, and shape narratives about race, racial discrimination, and racial justice.
Across the 1960s, through multiple public affairs series and one-off specials, NET programs interrogated US racial discrimination and the fight for civil rights. These programs varied substantially in format, aesthetics, topic, tone, and politics. They profiled prominent Black leaders and interviewed everyday people, homed in on local struggles and addressed national problems, depicted white people both in solidarity with and in strident opposition to racial progress, and illuminated the divisions within and across Black and white communities over how to define and tackle racial discrimination. Struggles over educational institutions was a recurring topic across many episodes, as was the efficacy of government programs. NET programs traveled to all regions in the continental United States and, cumulatively, refused to exculpate any place as free from corrosive, entrenched, systemic racial discrimination. While nearly all the episodes featured white hosts or journalists, many also, by design or by happenstance, centered Black voices as the primary authorities on US racism and its consequences.
NET’s programs on civil rights were distinct from those offered by commercial networks and stations. One of the key differences was that NET shows avoided images of violence and spectacular Black suffering and instead emphasized talk, deliberation, discussion. Instead of pictures of firehoses, police dogs, and violent mobs, NET cameras entered Black homes, churches, schools, and workplaces and interviewed diverse people to illuminate the harms of segregation. Later in the decade, NET programs not only avoided images of the uprisings in US cities, they offered incisive discussion of the causes, justifications, and logic of these eruptions. Program guests frequently emphasized that the uprisings were rational responses to scarcity and abuse.
This essay focuses on two consistent elements of NET episodes on civil rights: the primacy of discussion and deliberation and a critique of the white press, both explicit and implied. While NET’s public affairs programming offers a remarkable archive of the struggles for racial justice in the 1960s—as well as the resistance and backlash they activated—many episodes also called into question the role of conversation and debate in ameliorating racial divides and the power of the media itself to structure how racial discrimination is defined and discussed.
NET and Civil Rights
The approach taken by NET’s series on civil rights emerged from its programming philosophy and the limitations of the noncommercial television sector in the 1960s. NET was formed initially as the Educational Television and Radio Center in 1952. Created by the Ford Foundation’s Fund for Adult Education, with the guidance of the National Association of Educational Broadcasters, the Educational Television and Radio Center was to procure and distribute programming to noncommercial broadcast stations. During its television licensing freeze from 1948 to 1952, the Federal Communications Commission was persuaded to set aside over two hundred television channels for noncommercial, educational purposes. These TV stations would build on a long-standing, if small and increasingly precarious, educational radio sector that had seen in broadcasting a technology of edification, instruction, and enlightenment. Ford would be the primary benefactor of the educational television sector throughout the 1950s and 1960s, including the Educational Television and Radio Center, which in May 1954 began offering five hours of programming per week to the four noncommercial TV stations on the air.
Initially the Educational Television and Radio Center’s philosophy toward its programming followed a few principles. It privileged a continuing weekly programming package with a predictable number of hours; in so doing, it favored stability over selectivity. In that vein, the Educational Television and Radio Center worked to provide its affiliates with series rather than one-off programs, presuming that the cumulative impact of a series would be of greater educational value to viewers than solitary programs. It strove for high-quality programs, both technically and substantively, seeking academic experts and often university or college sponsorship for its programs. While open to a range of programming sources, the Educational Television and Radio Center prioritized the local producing station for three reasons: local stations knew the interests of their audiences best, they benefited from the financial assistance the Educational Television and Radio Center could provide, and supporting local stations improved the quality of their programs.¹
Stations were pleased to produce these programs, but they were “disappointed with the programming coming back to them on the network.”² The Educational Television and Radio Center’s early programming often featured lectures or panel discussions of low technical quality that critics found “duller than dishwater.”³ Affiliate dissatisfaction with the Educational Television and Radio Center grew, for both the programming it distributed and its location in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which placed it far from the stations, production facilities, and key events in the news. Despite the low regard for this programming from stations and audiences alike, this early philosophy that prioritized edification and expertise would continue to mark NET’s approach, especially to its public affairs programs.
The leadership of the Educational Television and Radio Center changed in 1958 from Harry Newburn, its first president, to John White, who had been general manager of WQED in Pittsburgh and vice president at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. As president of the center, White renamed it the National Educational Television and Radio Center, and later NET. He moved its headquarters to New York, shifted its programming priorities, and announced its intention to be a “fourth network” that would operate as an alternative to the three major commercial broadcast networks. White amped up the development program—charged with soliciting financial support from individuals, foundations, government agencies, and corporations—and redirected its funds toward the acquisition of high-quality programming. In 1963 he secured a $6 million grant from the Ford Foundation, with the stipulation that NET focus on the production, distribution, funding, and promotion of noncommercial television programming. At the core of the shift inaugurated by this robust Ford grant was NET’s transformation from “an organization that contracted for or purchased almost all of its program units to one that does itself produce much of its programming.”⁴
White had envisioned NET as a “fourth” network not bound, as the commercial networks were, by an interconnected array of geographically dispersed stations but by a shared philosophy as to the purpose of noncommercial television. Especially with NET’s public affairs programming, White sought to offer an alternative to the commercial networks by covering topics and perspectives they avoided and provoking audiences to think critically, and perhaps differently, about the world they inhabited. NET aimed for noncommercial television to be an “influence” on the national stage by engaging with the issues of the day in a manner that commercial networks would not. Its public affairs programs were to provide alternative perspectives, go into greater depth on important topics, or dedicate airtime to issues ignored by commercial stations.⁵
By design and necessity, NET approached public affairs programs differently than its commercial counterparts. Perhaps the most salient restriction that NET faced was in its distribution capacity. Unlike the commercial networks, educational television stations were not interconnected. In other words, it would not be until the late 1960s that NET could offer simultaneous broadcasts to its affiliates and, prior to the creation of PBS, this was done on a very infrequent basis. Until 1964 NET used a block system to distribute its programs: it would send ten videotape copies to the stations designated in Block I; those stations would keep the tapes for up to a week, then ship them to Block II. It could take around twenty-one weeks for a program to circulate through the eight blocks of stations. This system not only angered stations in the latter blocks, but it made promotion of NET programming in national publications difficult and, importantly, was a deterrent to producing shows on topical issues.⁶
Starting in 1964, NET was able to produce more copies of public affairs programs and greatly shorten its distribution window; for its most topical programs, it produced enough copies for all its stations to air them on the same day. It could not, however, air simultaneous live broadcasts. Unlike the commercial networks, NET was unable to provide on-the-spot coverage of events or break important news stories. Its public affairs programs compensated for the absence of live reports and immediacy with the selection, thoroughness, and perspective of the topics they covered.
While NET often organized its public affairs programs as dedicated series, there was great variety in the provenance, format, and political orientation of individual episodes within a series. And while NET continued to actively court local stations for programming—both full episodes and segments—its public affairs programs often were sources of friction with affiliates. NET’s commitment to exploring topics and perspectives ignored by commercial media frequently conflicted with the mission and mores of local stations. Predictable patterns emerged for the episodes some affiliates refused to air. Of the topics rejected by some affiliates—such as shows that examined, rather than solely condemned, communist and socialist nations or explored new social mores around drugs and sexuality—a recurring topic refused out of hand by many stations was racial discrimination.⁷ Even so, NET continued to prioritize civil rights and myriad facets of racial discrimination in its public affairs programming in the 1960s and strove not to duplicate the coverage offered by commercial news.
NET’s episodes on civil rights hewed to the sector’s commitment to edifying programming and aligned with a postwar vision of television as an instrument of civic instruction. As Anna McCarthy shows, television was imagined as a technology of good citizenship, discussion programs a means to produce the proper disposition and knowledge required for democratic self-governance.⁸ Ford had been an advocate of this sort of programming, and it mapped onto the educational origins of NET’s programming. In addition, the role of conversation as a means to address racial tension was ascendant in the postwar decades. Commissions—alternately known as human relations, community relations, civil rights, and intergroup—emerged across the nation to foster discussion as an imagined necessary step to mitigate racial discrimination. The potential power of conversation similarly animated NET’s public affairs programming, especially shows examining US race relations.
NET, Civil Rights, and the Power and Limits of Talk
Discussion and deliberation were hallmarks of NET public affairs programs. Hot-button episodes frequently were followed by panel discussions of experts who would dissect the program and offer divergent perspectives on its claims. Interviews not only occupied a privileged place in many documentaries but often provided narration as well. Documentary footage often dwelled on public and private discussions, from school board meetings to kitchen table conversations. Entire episodes were dedicated to conversation; some focused on small panels of experts, others on town hall meetings or social science experiments predicated on bringing diverse participants into dialogue.
Many of the episodes dedicated to racial discrimination demonstrated the utility of such a format. NET’s Civil Rights Summer ’66 was an hour-long conversation between Bayard Rustin, Whitney Young, Mary Henry, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, moderated by journalist Paul Niven. The participants had been in Washington, D.C., to attend a conference convened by President Johnson on civil rights. It was a program dedicated to talk following a conference built on dialogue and confrontation. Young praises the conference for its work to bring into conversation captains of industry and Black people—the latter known to the former, as Young suggests, nearly exclusively in service roles as maids, gardeners, or caddies—and allows the latter to describe their desire for the same employment, educational, and residential opportunities as other Americans. The conference’s success, for Young, was in its capacity to generate this form of talk.
On a set that resembles a living room, the panelists take stock of the state of the civil rights movement and are especially attentive to the increasing generation gap between leaders like themselves and young Black people whose lives have not improved despite the work they have done. The discussion is remarkable for the generosity of the panelists toward their critics and for their recognition that despite their own avowed commitment to nonviolence, the uprisings in US cities were logical and effective responses to material deprivation. The panelists insist on the strength, creativity, and intelligence of people living in poverty and suggest that they are the best diagnosticians of their own problems and architects of their solutions. The conversation upsets reductive ideas about race and racism in the US, puncturing the demonization of Black youth so ascendant in the mainstream press.
The power of NET Journal’s telecast of “A Time for Burning” similarly comes from its emphasis on talk. NET Journal, which brought NET’s extant public affairs series under its umbrella in 1966, was a weekly series designated to be aired on Mondays during prime time as a flagship public affairs program. NET relied on an array of production sources for NET Journal: in-house documentarians, affiliated stations, and programs acquired from outside entities, especially international broadcasters. NET Journal was composed largely of documentaries adopting a range of aesthetic approaches to their topics, as well as panel discussion shows and debates. “A Time for Burning,” directed by Bill Jersey, had been commissioned by the Lutheran Church of America.
The documentary narrates the story of Lutheran minister Bill Youngdahl’s effort to address racial discrimination in Omaha through a program that would allow Black and white parishioners to socialize and talk; it was a proposal that exemplified a belief in dialogue as a remedy to racial strife. The film is composed of a series of conversations about race in Omaha—for example, white church leaders discussing white fears over integration, Black men in a barbershop disputing the racial anxieties that lead to racial covenants, young Black students confronting the racial animus that came from their visit to a white church—and its power comes from the juxtaposition of scenes and the portrait it paints of misunderstanding and misinformation. While Youngdahl lost his job for his efforts—his desire for conversation was seen as a step too far in Omaha—the film suggests that white Omaha’s resistance to talk is only propelling the city’s problems with racism.
NET Journal’s “Midsummer 1967” addresses the 1967 uprising in Newark through a filmed town hall meeting moderated by journalist Leon Lewis. While the meeting features a representative from the mayor’s office, a city council member, and local civil rights leaders, its voices include people from the community—some of whom participated in the uprising. Much of the conversation focuses on the prevalence of police brutality and the poor education delivered to Black children. Participants speak eloquently about the corrosive racism and insulting paternalism that have governed Black–white relations in the city and the power structure’s unwillingness to hear the legitimate grievances of its residents. The format of “Midsummer 1967,” anchored in the comments of Newark’s residents, punctures the characterization of the uprising as criminal or irrational and renders it as a legible act to resist the myriad violence of racism.
Yet the limitations of talk become one of the recurring features of NET’s programs on racial discrimination. The weekly public affairs series At Issue dedicated a number of episodes to the topic. At Issue premiered on NET in 1963 and ran until 1966. Produced by Alvin Perlmutter, it covered timely issues and prioritized topics ignored by the commercial networks, such as press coverage of the Jack Ruby murder, automobile safety, and consumer packaging practices.⁹ The episode “Quiet Conflict” focused on a city council race in Brunswick, Georgia, between the head of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and a member of the white Citizens’ Council. This election served as a proxy for race relations in Brunswick a year after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The episode makes clear that the economy of Brunswick, where over 40 percent of the residents are Black, hinges on its reputation for a lack of explicit racial strife. It features interviews with members of the local human relations council to underscore the possibilities of racial harmony and integration via social exchange.
However, the city council race forced tensions in the community to the surface. The mayor of Brunswick suggested in an interview that the election caused people to say things out loud that were best left unspoken; in the film, it is unclear if he is speaking of Black residents seeking change or white people affirming white supremacy, but the comment underlines the town’s preference for gradualism and moderation, all of which is undermined by explicit recognition, spoken aloud, of grievance or animus within Brunswick. The artifice of the town’s racial harmony is exposed when the episode brings the viewer into the scene of Reverend Hope’s church, in which he delivers a sermon that, in its emphasis on Black strength and resilience, counters the theme of gradual progress that structures the episode. “Quiet Conflict” at once holds out hope that dialogue and exchange, exemplified through the human relations council, can deliver racial harmony and signals that the suppression of speech, or its confinement to particular spaces, is an oft-unspoken requirement for progress.
“Where Is Prejudice?” is one of a number of episodes—such as “Midsummer 1967,” “Black and White Together?”, and “Some of Our Best Friends”—that are entirely focused on conversation. “Where Is Prejudice?” documents an experiment in which college students from elite schools and diverse racial backgrounds are brought together in a multiday retreat to engage in dialogue about racial prejudice. Led by Max Birnbaum of Boston University’s Human Relations Lab, the group lives together as a gauge of the level of prejudice among young, educated Americans. What emerges from the conversations is, as a young white woman puts it, that racial prejudice crosses generational lines and is not solely, as she had thought, a malady of her parents’ generation. In this she likely conflates, as do other participants, Black nationalism and bigotry based on race and religion. While the group includes an interracial couple, as well as participants who embrace colorblindness, the episode pays more attention to the participants who see import in recognizing difference. In one of the final moments of the episode, a white Christian fundamentalist tells the group that he fears for the future because people like those in the group will run the world, their lack of proper faith consigning them and the world to eternal damnation. The camera observes the silence that follows this declaration, broken up by a discussion of the dangers of unswerving belief that cannot be countered or changed.
The final comments of the episode, from journalist Dick McCutcheon via voice-over, answer the question “Where is prejudice?” with the words “Right here.” This form of prejudice results, in McCutcheon’s language, not in riots or lynchings or institutionalized forms of discrimination but in insidious expressions of racism in respectable circles. The narration suggests that if the most educated young people express prejudiced views, there is little hope for the future. Immediately following McCutcheon’s interpretation of the experiment’s lessons, the soundtrack repeats a line by a Jewish participant who states that he does not want to be stereotyped but wants to “be me.” It is this liberal individualism that the episode holds out as the goal of racial progress, unattainable based on the discussion on which the episode is based. “Where Is Prejudice?” was based on the power of conversation to unmask important truths. Yet the experiment, at its center, demonstrates how talk can clarify but cannot reconcile or heal.
The limits of talk are perhaps best on display in “Civil Rights: What Next?,” an episode filmed immediately after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1968—also known as the Fair Housing Act—and a week after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. There are two sets of panelists: civil rights leaders Floyd McKissick (Congress of Racial Equality), Hosea Williams (Southern Christian Leadership Conference), and James Foreman (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) are in New York; they are in dialogue with John Feild, James Kilpatrick, Charles Mathias Jr., and host Paul Niven in Washington, D.C. Feild is the director of community relations for the US Conference of Mayors, Mathias is a liberal Republican congressman from Maryland, and Kilpatrick is a journalist and newspaper editor perhaps best known for his advocacy—after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision—of interposition, or the right of states to interpose their own authority to protect their citizens from unjust federal actions. The men in each location wear earpieces to hear the panelists in the other city. And fairly quickly, Niven’s desire for deliberation and conversation breaks down.
Dialogue devolved as the civil rights leaders refuse to be silenced, either literally or figuratively. They have much to say about the failings of the 1968 law—seen as benefiting the Black middle class but not the majority of Black people and, through its antiriot provisions, criminalizing dissent and sanctioning the incarceration of protestors—but also about the thoroughgoing structural racism of US society and the state-sanctioned violence that propels its continuation. They are especially attuned to the insufficiencies of civil rights laws, often passed after the murder of activists and leaders, that do nothing to redress the corrosive racism that afflicts most Black people.
They continue to speak even as Niven shifts the conversation over to the D.C. participants, so much so that at one point, Niven asks that the New York panel’s microphones be silenced. At times the viewer can vaguely hear the sounds of the civil rights leaders as they interrupt the white participants, who speak haltingly over the interruptions. By the end of the episode, Kilpatrick and Mathias are accusing the civil rights leaders of racism, suggesting their advocacy for Black nationalism is equivalent to white segregationist rhetoric. Niven ends by stating that the lesson of the program is “to expose racial problems in the United States in 1968 is to exacerbate them, rather than to help solve them.” That there could be no agreement reached among the men who participated, and that the dialogue did not follow the rules that Niven tried to impose, registered to the host as a failure of talk as a means to redress racial problems.
Some of the NET Journal episodes anchored in group discussion include moments that recognize their artifice. At one moment in “Where Is Prejudice?”, a Black woman who rejects the nationalism of another participant acknowledges that the experiment is being filmed and her parents likely will watch the telecast, which affects how she has participated. While the documentary utilizes a direct-cinema, fly-on-the-wall filming technique, this moment reminds viewers that the participants are aware of the cameras and the authenticity of the exchanges is tempered by their presence.
“Some of Our Best Friends,” a NET Journal two-hour program that compressed a ten-hour conversation among Black and Jewish people about tensions across their communities, contains a similar moment. Prior to filming, Richard Cohen of the American Jewish Committee publicly criticized John Hatchett, who had lost his job as a teacher in Harlem for taking his students to a memorial service for Malcolm X. He subsequently was appointed to direct New York University’s Martin Luther King Afro-American Center. Jewish leaders, including Cohen, opposed the appointment over an article by Hatchett that claimed Black children’s minds were “poisoned” by Jewish teachers and administrators.¹⁰ Much of the discussion in “Some of Our Best Friends” hinges on this very tension over Jewish teachers in Black schools. While Jewish participants see racism in the marking as “Jewish” of the teachers and administrators that have failed Black students, the Black participants insist that this is borne out of the actuality that many of the teachers are Jewish and the hostility is about the structural position of these white people to control Black schools, not anti-Semitism. As Hatchett and Cohen discuss their specific incident, journalist Paul Jacobs asks Cohen why it took a TV show filmed in D.C. to push him to speak directly to Hatchett. It is a moment that at once recognizes the clarifying power of direct communication and the artifice of the program itself, which facilitated a dialogue precisely because it was a TV show.
The Limits of NET: Racism and the Press
In 1968 NET debuted Black Journal, a public affairs series by and for Black audiences. Alvin Perlmutter was the show’s first executive producer. Fairly quickly, the show’s staff rebelled and insisted on a Black producer, and Perlmutter was replaced by documentarian and filmmaker William Greaves, who would serve as cohost along with Lou House. Black Journal, as Tommy Lee Lott demonstrates, was informed by Black nationalism, from the use of Swahili in the show’s opening to the frequent inclusion of political scientist Charles Hamilton, coauthor of Black Power: The Politics of Liberation. Black Journal not only addressed Black history, art, and culture, it inverted the gaze of televisual journalism by foregrounding Black perspectives of current events and politics. Black Journal developed out of both criticism of the press in the Kerner Report—which identified print and broadcast journalism as among the institutions anchored in white supremacy—and the aftermath of the assassination of King and the hope that increased televisual representation could defuse violent Black protest.¹¹ The series also implicitly redressed NET’s public affairs programming, which—with rare exceptions—centered white journalists as guides and interpreters of its programs on civil rights. This facet of its public affairs programs inadvertently became part of the coverage of the Black freedom struggle in individual episodes.
The critique came in the form of resistance to white journalists on public affairs programs. The At Issue episode titled “Inside the Ghetto” is an hour-long conversation between writer Claude Brown and intellectual and critic Norman Podhoretz. The interview takes place outside in Harlem and intersperses its tight focus on Brown and Podhoretz with images of the neighborhood’s adult residents watching and nodding or children playing on fire escapes. While Podhoretz calls himself a fan of Brown’s book, throughout the interview Brown pushes against Podhoretz’s questions and the premises on which they are based. He insists on undoing what political leaders and the press, including Podhoretz here, have done, which is to presume a uniformity across the Black community and an allegiance to the same set of leaders, most notably King. Brown affirms the specificity of Harlem, honors the survival strategies of the people who live there, and dismisses the capacity of figures from outside the community—especially middle-class leaders—to represent them or speak to their problems. He especially rejects the pathologization of Harlem and the role of bureaucrats and social scientists, whose efforts to diagnose and solve the problems of communities like it are ineffectual and divorced from a genuine understanding of their inhabitants.
Toward the end of the interview, Podhoretz asks Brown if he still belongs in Harlem, given his fame as a writer and his advanced degrees, noting that when the two were walking in the neighborhood, people seemed uncomfortable. Brown responds that it was Podhoretz’s presence, not his, that made people uncomfortable. In this, as in the rest of the interview, Brown is telling Podhoretz that his capacity to see and interpret is hindered by his outsiderness, his whiteness. Brown does this repeatedly, perhaps most notably when he has to explain his use of the term “Goldberg,” to which Podhoretz clearly takes offense, as akin to “Mr. Charlie”—a reference to white society speaking to the fact that it is Jewish people, not those of other backgrounds, that people in Harlem most encounter.
Brown was not alone in his resistance to the questions that guided his interview. In Civil Rights Summer ’66, the panelists similarly correct Niven’s questions and counter their premises. When Niven suggests that the report to come out of the 1966 conference will be “radical,” a term of criticism from him, Rustin turns the derision attached to the term on its head. He suggests that the program is “radical” because US society has been devised to allow immigrant groups—who, on arrival to the US, are far less capable of thriving than contemporary Black Americans—to succeed within US institutions but block Black participation; if the answer to racial discrimination is “radical” for Rustin, it is because it requires reconceptualizing the very institutions that have kept Black people subordinate.
Rustin corrects Niven again when he asks about explicit discrimination against the Irish and Jews. He states that this misses the point and the “helter-skelter” environment during the period of great immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries may have allowed white ethnics to succeed, but direct intervention is required to remedy the impediments placed in front of Black Americans. This exchange, in other words, flags Rustin’s objections to Niven’s framing as he redirects the conversation to what he sees as the vital issues.
Niven’s exchange with Henry during the program similarly underscores the faulty premises of his questions. Niven asks whether the substantial money from War on Poverty programs has helped Watts. Henry responds that while there were worthwhile programs, the money came recently, whereas the conditions it addressed were long-standing. She also notes that one of the problems is that money, but not care and understanding for the people it helps, is offered. When Niven asks if she supports young radicals seeking power for the people against the traditional paternalistic approach, she again reframes the question by rejecting the label of radical and the critical inflection it carries. She suggests that people in poverty have brilliant answers to the problems they face, and the goals they seek—good jobs, safe homes, quality education—are recognizable and logical.
When Niven asks whether it is politically feasible to get billions of dollars for civil rights—a question narrowly considering an expansion of federal spending—Rustin undermines this by insisting that citizens are “not as stupid” as the question implies, speaks to budget priorities as moral issues, and insists that Americans can understand that the top priority is dealing with the anger that can tear the nation apart. He also insists that these “civil rights” issues are not specific to the Black community and the commitment should be to get rid of slums for all people or find work for all people. While Black people may face the most intense forms of these problems, he advocates for social transformation that removes these obstacles for everyone.
One could view the entirety of “Civil Rights: What Next?” as an expression of resistance to the very format and conditions that NET puts in place for the conversation. While Niven strives for a tempered discussion between the two panels over legislation and public policy, McKissick, Foreman, and Williams reject this emphasis as a woeful misunderstanding of both the problem of racism in the US and its solution. Their refusal to obey Niven’s request for restraint, or to restrict their insights to the narrow political questions he raises, is passionately expressed by the leaders, who seek to control a conversation about the future of their community that disrupts the format Niven had mapped for the discussion.
NET Journal dedicated an entire episode to comedian and activist Dick Gregory. Much of “Dick Gregory Is Alive and Well” shows Gregory at the University of Alabama performing in front of an interracial audience. The episode tacks between images of Gregory, shot in a low-angled, medium close-up, and reaction shots of the students in attendance, some laughing heartily, others sitting uncomfortably. At one point, Gregory enjoins the students to read the Declaration of Independence over silenced TV images of rioting to clarify for their parents what is happening in the streets. His routine focuses on the history of violence and dispossession that mars US history and has amplified the racism that structured who was classified as a patriot, a revolutionary, a victim, or a threat. This call asked the audience—in person and watching on television—to see the uprisings as responses to tyranny, actions borne out of a desire for freedom, equality, and dignity. It also implicitly recognizes that most people’s understanding of the uprisings is through commercial telecasts and that the framing of the events via TV news has neglected to impart the reasons, stakes, and history that underlay their eruption. Gregory’s recitation of the Declaration of Independence becomes the final words of the episode, delivered through a voice-over as he is shown leaving the auditorium, their import and power punctuated by this privileged position in the episode.

The NET Journal episode “Color Us Black” self-consciously acknowledges the limitations of white journalists narrating the struggles within the Black community, even as producer Dick McCutcheon provides the voice-over narration throughout. The episode focuses on a student protest at Howard University in 1969. The first half of the documentary charts the generation gap between Howard’s leadership and its students over what it means to be a Black university—the curriculum it should teach, the definition of leadership it should embrace, and the relationship to white culture it should have. Black journalist and associate producer Lou Potter briefly appears in the episode in an interview with Brown—both of whom are identified in voice-over as Howard alumni—who affirms the goals of the student protestors and the need for Howard to change.
The second half of the episode shifts the emphasis to a short film produced by Howard student Ben Land at the request of NET. “Color Us Black” shows moments of the filming, airs the film itself, and then offers a discussion with Land and his actors about its contents. The film examines an interracial romance and its end. The protagonist rejects his white lover in favor of his Black girlfriend. The short, which quotes cinematic romantic clichés, suggests that liberation comes not through integration or the ability of Black men to have relationships with white women but through pride and love in the community, exemplified by embracing Black women. Interspersed through the narrative of the short are scenes of activist Ron Karenga speaking at Howard about Black nationalism (see Figure 1).
The inclusion of Land’s film reads as a tacit acknowledgment that understanding the views of Black students requires literally putting the camera in their hands. Still, it is McCutcheon that leads the conversation after the film screening and provides the narrative voice of authority throughout the episode. The film within “Color Us Black” thus recognizes the necessity of Black control over Black stories, even when it rubs up against the white production team that oversees the episode and interprets its significance for the NET audience.
“Black Natchez,” another NET Journal episode, offers a fascinating example of this dynamic at work. The documentary covers tensions in Natchez, Mississippi, after George Metcalfe, a leader in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, is critically injured by a car bomb. A committee is assembled to make demands on the city council in response to the attack. Divides emerge among the Black community, especially between the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Freedom Democratic Party, over how to respond; the frictions between the groups are generational, class based, and tactical. The documentary also follows a group of men—including James Jackson, a local resident whose thoughts constitute much of the film’s voice-over—from a Deacons of Defense chapter who wish to use violence, if necessary, to defend the community. Like many NET programs, though violence is central to the events and debates in Natchez, it happens off-screen; the viewer is brought into spaces of deliberation and discussion, such as the barbershop, the church, the office of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the street corner.
The viewer learns about the violence in Natchez via news reports from WNET and CBS that alternately play over the soundtrack and are presented on-screen. The CBS report announces the arrival of the National Guard to Natchez and the imposition of a curfew on the city. The governor has ordered both to retain “law and order” in the city, and the newscast relies on white officials to justify the militarized presence and restriction of movement. The documentary rebuts this rationale. Coming on the day that the city council rejects all the commission’s demands, including denouncing the Ku Klux Klan, the film implies that the actions are not logical measures to keep the peace but deliberate acts of intimidation and repression. The media in “Black Natchez” function as a source of information, but one that articulates as fact the perspective of the white power structure.
The documentary landed in the crosshairs of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which specifically protested the ending of the film: Jackson describing a boycott led and ended by Charles Evers, field secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, followed by a second bombing that killed Wharlest Jackson, treasurer of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Jackson’s narration indicates his cynicism and belief that Natchez has made no progress and is back to where it started. Roy Wilkins, executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, labeled the depiction of his organization “bordering on the libelous” and stated that the suggestion that the actions of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People had not been impactful was untrue. Wilkins requested that NET cease to distribute the documentary. What followed was a heated exchange between Wilkins and Edwin Bayley of NET, in which Wilkins takes umbrage at Bayley’s claim that the film presents “a true picture of the Natchez experience as seen through local eyes” and questions how Bayley can be so confident in this assessment.¹²
Though Wilkins’s protest took place largely out of the public eye—Variety did report on his complaint—it spoke to a tension that plays out within a number of NET programs, questioning the authority, the confidence, and the interpretation of white media to define the problem of racism and chart effective paths to rectify it.¹³
Conclusion
NET’s programming has not, like that of the commercial networks, become integrated into the collective memory of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The television footage that recurs in documentaries about the period and often functions as a synecdoche of the era’s struggle for racial justice often is live coverage of spectacular, significant events—King speaking in front of the Lincoln Memorial, the National Guard beating nonviolent protestors at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, George Wallace announcing “segregation forever” on the steps of the University of Alabama, white mobs attacking Freedom Riders in Anniston and Birmingham. While violence is a recurring topic in many of the programs NET dedicated to civil rights, it is through discussion, narration, and debate that the programs uncover the many forms of violence in American racism and its devastating impact on people’s lives.
NET programming provides an alternative audiovisual archive of the fight for racial justice in the 1960s. Its programs profile both national figures and otherwise unknown individuals whose stories clarify the stakes of and obstacles to racial progress, offer in-depth investigations of the dynamics within particular institutions and places, seek big-picture analyses of the national problem of racism, and locate racial discrimination in official processes and everyday interactions. And while there is great diversity across the episodes it aired—aesthetically, topically, generically, politically—what binds them is a shared belief that deliberation, exposition, and discussion could expose and ameliorate racial discrimination. Yet some of the programs, as this essay has demonstrated, flag the limitations of this approach as well as of the white media, including NET, in narrating and framing the issue.

A list of external links featured in this essay can be found here.¹⁴

Allison Perlman is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies and History at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Public Interests: Media Advocacy and Struggles Over US Television (Rutgers UP, 2016). She is currently working on a history of National Educational Television (NET) as well co-authoring a revised history of US public media for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Title Image: "Some of Our Best Friends," NET Journal 228 (1969)

Black and White Together?: National Educational Television and Civil Rights in the 1960s © 2025 by Allison Perlman is licensed under CC BY 4.0.

The Journal of e-Media Studies is published by the Dartmouth Library.