"BLACK PRESS TV" (PT. II)
by: Todd Steven Burroughs
Everybody thinks they know somebody like the late, great Listervelt Middleton and almost everybody thinks they know a show like "For The People."
Middleton, who died in 1996, looked like that dark-skinned, Afro-head, very heavy set guy that loved to tease you, shaking as he laughed. Loudly. After trying to embarrass you, he would then try to sincerely ask you how you were.
"For The People," which Middleton produced and hosted on PBS affiliate South Carolina Educational Television from 1977 to his death, was one of those types of shows NBC-TV's "Saturday Night Live" and other entertainment vehicles have used for laughs over the years: the Black public-affairs show. Like the 1980's "SNL" Eddie Murphy skit, "Black Talk," where two brothers sit around and talk about their friends and loves in jive-talk.
But these surface portraits range from probably incorrect to outrageously false if we are talking about Middleton and his ground-breaking program.
Middleton, who had battled cancer for several years, lived a simple life, with family and friends. He was unassuming on the air. Legend has it he lived in a house he built with his own hands.
Middleton was a race man in capital letters. He lived and breathed the African and African-American experiences. Riddle: How did you know if Listervelt was calling you, a Black male, on the phone? All you would do is listen to the salutation: "African Man."
What was it he said once in an interview? "I try to raise the awareness level of our history. To find out who we are. I try to trace where we came from and uncover the many contributions Africans and African Americans have made to society.
"Many people think the history of Black people started with slavery in North America, which can cause a bad self-image to develop. But actually, the earliest bones of man were discovered in Africa. 'For The People' tries to find out what really was."
The half-hour program, which over time came to be aired by public television stations in Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Barbados, Virginia and Memphis--would do amazing multi-part interviews with historians like the now-late John Henrik Clarke and Cheikh Anta Diop. You knew you had "arrived" as an Africentric scholar if you were being probed by Listervelt in a South Carolina studio.
"For The People" brought Egypt home, so we could see and talk about the pyramids and their builders. Middleton's on-air poetry (he had authored three books of it) brought him "down home" to us.
He is home now with the Ancestors, and this viewer, who only "met" with him weekly in the mid 1990s via Howard University's WHMM-TV (now WHUT-TV), still misses him.
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