"BLACK PRESS TV" (PT. I)
The Power Of The Blood
by: Todd Steven Burroughs
The birth of the Black public-affairs television show is drenched in blood.
Mostly Martin Luther King's blood.
King was assassinated in 1968. So too died many major cities, torched by those of us who were angry at his killing. King once said the riot was the "language of the unheard."
"Unheard" was the right term.
The same year, President Lyndon B. Johnson's Report of the National Commission on Civil Disorders, nicknamed "The Kerner Commission" because it was lead by Illinois Gov. Otto Kerner. The purpose of the Kerner Commission was to find out why so many Negroes and others physically rebelled in the summer of 1967. The commission correctly found that White racism was the cause of the urban insurrections.
The White news media was one of the greatest targets of the commission. It wrote that the major news media, which was virtually all-White at the time, see the world only from the perspective of White men.
The commission's recommendation was that the news media hire Negroes--and fast.
Gil Noble, a reporter for 1190 WLIB-AM, a music station in Harlem during the 1960s, wrote in his book "Black Is The Color of My TV Tube" about his sudden employment opportunity around Kerner time at New York's WABC-TV, the flagship of the ABC television network.
"The mass media had been caught with their zippers down," wrote Noble. "Red-faced executives scurried about, seeking Blacks for on-air and other job activities. What more logical place to find Black media persons than the so-called soul stations and newspapers? Within a year, many of us found ourselves downtown at major radio and TV stations....None of the stations said we were being hired because of the prescriptions of the Kerner Commission's report. they all maintained, and they still do, that they are committed to being equal-opportunity companies. If asked about pressure, they would say, 'What pressure?'"
What is also not mentioned by these employers is that Black journalists were needed for another reason: White journalists, many of whom had never taken the time to cover Black communities adequately, were understandably and correctly getting their tails kicked while trying to cover those that were exploding in 1967 and 1968.
After a brief try-out, Noble's hiring by WABC-TV was cinched when he was sent to cover the Newark rebellion of 1967.
"The news director had decided to hire me," wrote Noble. "I wearily returned home to tell my wife the good news and was acutely aware of the countless brothers and sisters who were still encircled within the National Guard barricades. Their uprising had been at least partially responsible for my new employment."
When King was assassinated less than a year later, WABC-TV made another decision that dramatically changed Noble's life: he would contribute to "Like It Is," a Black-oriented weekly local news-talk program that would soon premiere. Similar decisions were being made not only in other New York television stations, but also in local commercial and public television stations in several major markets roughly between 1968 and 1978.
"Like It Is" was first hosted by actor Robert Hooks, but Noble took over some months
afterward. Noble became producer of "Like It Is" in 1975. He still hosts and produces the show today.
"Like It Is" has become known as one of the most outstanding Black-oriented shows in the nation, with Noble winning several local Emmy awards, as well as a special award from the National Association of Black Journalists, for his work. He has produced and written several documentaries, under the "Like It Is" banner, on ancient Egypt, Malcolm X, The Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Jr., and on the Civil Rights Movement.
The show's tone is strongly African-centered. "Many Whites feel intimidated when anger is expressed on the program," wrote Noble. "Others mistake the speaking of truth for racism."
The unheard had begun to be listened to--and seen--by large audiences
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