Robert Chrisman lecture, "Blacks and the Publishing World," at the University of Iowa, June 5, 1978

Darwin Turner: Will you be standing? Will you be standing? Robert Chrisman: Well, I probably will just ... Yeah, I'll be standing up. I work off of this. Darwin Turner: Okay, then I'll swipe the chair. Robert Chrisman: Okay. Darwin Turner: I was going to leave it here, and— Robert Chrisman: Well, let's say, I'll take one up with me, because I [inaudible] Darwin Turner: Okay. Would you want [inaudible]? Robert Chrisman: No. If I do, I'll just move it around. Darwin Turner: Okay. Robert Chrisman: What I'm going to do is talk for a few minutes for— Darwin Turner: To welcome you to the session this morning, and to introduce our distinguished lecturer for the day, Mr. Robert Chrisman, publisher of The Black Scholar, and President of the Black World. Darwin Turner: The Black Scholar, since its inception in 1969, has become one of the most distinguished magazines. As Mel Watkins explained in an article in The New York Times, it is one of the very few Black magazines ... perhaps the only Black magazine ... aimed at a mass audience, that has consistently explored scholarly subjects of Black life; a magazine that has concentrated on Black definitions and Black values. Our lecturer for this morning, Robert Chrisman, is the publisher of that journal, and the President of the Black World Foundation, which supports that journal. A poet and essayist, he was the Professor of Creative Writing at San Francisco State College, and has taught English and Black Studies at the University of California, the University of San Francisco, the University of Hawaii, and Contra Costa College, where he developed a number of remedial education programs for low-achievement audiences. Darwin Turner: In 1967, he was awarded a one-year Title V fellowship for teacher training, and attended Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, where he specialized in group dynamics. He holds the Bachelors from the University of California, and the Masters from San Francisco State College. His work has been published in the Saturday Review of Literature, Black World, Ramparts, Scanlan's, the Los Angeles Times, Seven Days, the Whole Earth Epilog, and others. He has received grants from the Danforth Foundation and Point Foundation. He's the co-editor of the anthology Contemporary Black Thought: The Best from the Black Scholar, and another volume, Pan-Africanism published by Bobbs-Merrill in 1974. Darwin Turner: In 1972, Mr. Chrisman went on an extensive tour of Cuba, as a guest of that government, with other Afro-American leaders and intellectuals, and he has written on that experience subsequently. In 1976, he visited Cuba again. He served as a consultant for the San Francisco School District and the Berkeley Unified School District, and for McGraw Hill. Darwin Turner: This morning, he will be talking on the politics of Black media. With great pleasure, I introduce Mr. Robert Chrisman. Robert Chrisman: Thank you, sir. Robert Chrisman: It's a great pleasure for me to have an opportunity to participate in this seminar series. The distinction and achievement of Darwin Turner's work with them increases every year, and if you were fortunate enough to hear his keynote lecture last night, you will know what a high level of effort and aspiration he has for all of us as we participate in this seminar. So, as I say, it's a particular honor for me to be here this summer. Robert Chrisman: I wanted to, in a sense, try to survey some of the major ingredients involved in the element of the politics of Black media from 1954 to 1970. I would like to do that rather sketchily and rather summarily, and then move on to some visual slides, materials, and discussion of some of the contemporary Black media. Robert Chrisman: When I conceptualized my approach to this topic, I saw it inevitably as we must, as Afro-Americans; with a double consciousness. Which is not only as we are reported and defined and registered in white media, but as we report and register and define our own lives in the media that we ourselves create. I believe it was Du Bois who coined the phrase ‘double consciousness’. Michael Harper rephrased it another way, I believe, when he spoke of double consciousness behind the veil, and I would like to, of course, expand upon that and say that perhaps we are entering a stage of triple consciousness, in which we are aware not only of ourselves as Afro-Americans and as citizens of the United States ... which are two levels of consciousness ... but perhaps as Black people who are part of an international community of solidarity against the forces of racism and imperialism as they exist today. This triple consciousness, I believe, has developed dramatically with the rise of the Black movement ... again, from 1954 to 1970 ... and we will touch upon that later on in our presentation. Robert Chrisman: Now, it might be significant here to touch first upon some of the characteristics of the white media. When I say ‘white media’, I mean exactly white media. I don't mean media that's predominantly owned by white people. I don't mean media whose major concern is white people. I mean W-H-I-T-E media, where the ownership, the domination, the employment, and the subject is the white experience. A number of wits have been considered the source of this particular remark: "The only way you have freedom of the press is if you own one." I think Joseph Pulitzer repeatedly said it, and I think also A.J. Liebling and Mencken has also been reported as having said it. But I don't believe that truth is any more apparent than it is in this country. Robert Chrisman: It's a rather cynical truth, and in fact, it makes ... when we analyze it ... a mockery of the practical application of the First Amendment. I remember arguing last week with someone over the controversy of whether or not people have the right, under the First Amendment, to be racists. Now, this is one of the new radical sheik arguments that's being promulgated by this kind of neoconservative liberalism that people are coming forth with, so that you have ... The Ku Klux Klan has the right to march through Skokie, Illinois for the express purposes of tormenting the Jewish population there. By the same token, the American Library Association has the right to sponsor a film with racist objectives called Speaker. Robert Chrisman: Now, the point, of course, is that I do not have, and no one in this room has, the same equality and protection under the First Amendment as Nelson Rockefeller does, because we do not own the instruments of broadcasting, so we do not have any equality. Furthermore, our people's institutions, which used to be our federal and state and municipal governments, do not own broadcast apparatus, do not own democratic public media. So we are not talking about any kind of quid pro quo, tit for tat equivalent when we talk about the freedom and power of the press. We are, in fact, talking about something quite different, which is a struggle ... a very definite, and a very strong, and a very prolonged struggle ... to control and shape our consciousness and the consciousness of other people. Robert Chrisman: At this point, it might be appropriate to consider, what are some of the characteristics of the white press as it is so constituted. Well, I think the first thing that we have to comprehend is that it is a monopoly, and like many of the other major industries ... and it is, of course, an industry; it is a very big business ... media tends to escape that realization by many people because it is glamorous, it is pretty, it is attractive, it is flashy, it has some of the appurtenances of art, it generates emotion. But the bottom line of any media ... be it movie, television, or the local supermarket flier ... is profit. So it is a business, and as such, it operates by all the laws that any other business, on all the dynamics that any other business in the United States operates with. The primary direction of a business now is in the direction of increasing monopoly. Robert Chrisman: Now, I don't need, of course, to enlarge upon what monopoly is at this point, but I would like to discuss with you briefly ... Quoting from an article in Black Scholar called Imperialism in the Black Media, which was put together by the National Coordinating Committee of the YTPTCOI group, that was handed up by Gerald McWorter (Abdul Alkalimat), and the term means ‘years to pull the covers off imperialism’ ... Nashville, Tennessee. Robert Chrisman: The first thing that has to be understood in McWorter's context is, his ability to trace the relationship between the development of modern mass media in the United States, and the rise of Imperialism itself. I will read from his text here. Robert Chrisman: Newspapers developed during the period identified as the beginnings of US imperialism, the four-year period of rapid post-Civil War economic growth. Between 1880 and 1910, newspapers spurted from three million to 22-and-a-half million in circulation. That's a period of 30 years. 1883 was the first year that advertising exceeded circulation as a source of revenue, pointing to the growing importance of newspapers to the advertising needs of a developing capitalism. Again, the laws of industrial growth. As advertising itself became a major source of revenue for newspapers, then their growth became that much more rapid. And the fact that they were growing due to advertising revenue began increasingly to shape, in a qualitative way, the kinds of duties, responsibilities, functions, obligations, and identities that they achieved. Robert Chrisman: There is a lot of difference between a publication which is supported primarily by subscription, and which has, as its primary contract, a relationship to its readers, and one which is prominently supported by advertising, which has, as its primary contract, a relationship to its financiers. So, enormous growth of newspapers from 1880 to 1910, and simultaneously the rise of advertising as a source of revenue for these publications. Robert Chrisman: The next stage in media development was radio. Radio got its boost during the post-World War I period of industrial growth and economic prosperity. Between 1922 and 1925, radio grew from 400,000 sets per home to four million. Part of that, again, was just the fact that it was a brand new invention for public consumption. I think we can attribute this first early spurt to the fact of the technology being achieved that could make radio sets producible on a mass basis for the individual home. Robert Chrisman: While installment buying made it easier for the average family to afford consumer goods like the radio, the major obstacle was the lack of a financial base to make radio turn a profit. When capitalists recognized the advertising potential of radio in 1922, then it developed. And sometimes we find that we take for granted certain realities. We take for granted that media ... that television, that radio ... are subsidized by advertising, as though there were no other way that these instruments could be used, or could be distributed to the public. Robert Chrisman: We do, of course, have counter cultural models, like subscriber-supported radio and subscriber-supported television. Even those have certain problems. I know in our community in San Francisco, increasingly Channel 9 is being subsidized by grants from a major industry for its programming ... Mobil, Standard Oil, Exxon, Xerox ... which inevitably begins to determine the content of what gets onto the air. Robert Chrisman: The same analogy is drawn by McWorter for television. The number of televisions jumped from 10,000 in 1945 to 10 million in 1949. So we begin to have, in this brief profile, the quantitative development of mass media in every sense of that word, literally. It was massive, it was developed on a saturation basis, and it was reaching millions of people who had heretofore not been exposed to certain types of messages, information, attitudes, and input. Robert Chrisman: Now, there's another dimension to this rise of modern media which McWorter did not touch upon here, which is that with television, I believe another very significant shift was made from media which had its base in literacy to media which became visual and oral. I believe there's a very firm correlation between the deterioration of the skills of literacy of our youngsters today and the rise of television as the major information mode in the United States. What we are seeing in the mid '70s are the children of television. We can assume that the USA was populated generally with television sets by 1955 to 1958, which would mean that the average youngster who is 18 to 22 or 23 years old today was raised with a television set in the home at all times; and which, in turn, meant that that youngster no longer had to learn how to read for his or her recreation in the evening, but simply to turn on a dial. Robert Chrisman: Further, the shift of the storage of knowledge, from the literate mode, again, to the electronic mode subverted the base for a lot of education. Now, for example, most basic knowledge is stored in computers rather than on paper, which had to be filed and read. Now your typical bank does all of its billing, filing, sorting, and accounts electronically through a computer, whereas it used to work with skilled human beings who could maintain the files, read and write and answer the letters, and do the billing by hand. This, in turn, has meant that there has been less pressure by big business upon colleges and high schools to turn out youngsters who have the basic skills of computation and literacy. I don't think all of the consequences of this shift have yet been explored. People are viewing the rising illiteracy with considerable alarm. That, of course, is not our particular concern here, but it is something that I want to put on your agenda. Robert Chrisman: The question of monopoly itself is very important, because we begin to find that publishers and radio and television stations have not only monopolies among themselves in the forms of radio chains and newspaper chains and television chains, but have interlocking monopolies so that you will find, for example, that a major oil company owns a major publishing house and all its subsidiaries. For example, Bobbs-Merrill Publishing House in New York City is owned by the IT&T, the International Telephone and Telegraph Company. Random House, which itself has absorbed [North] Publishers, which has absorbed [Grow Press], which has absorbed Pantheon Books, Random House Publishing itself is owned by RCA. Bantam Paperbacks, which is one of the largest and most distinguished publishing houses in the United States, is owned by General Foods. Robert Chrisman: Just to quote here briefly, 11 banks have voting rights to 38.1% of the common stock in CBS. Eight banks have voting rights to 34% of the common stock in ABC. Chase Manhattan and Bankers Trust together have voting rights to 19% of the stock in CBS, and 17% of the stock of ABC. McWorter concludes here, we see that banks and other financial institutions are very important in keeping the economy under the control of a few members of the US ruling class, and at the same time control much of the broadcasting industry ... 65% of the voting shares of ABC, 30% of the voting shared of NBC, and 47% of the voting shares of CBS ... so that the white media is dynamically and integrally locked into the finance structure of US monopoly capitalism and imperialism. Big Business, if you will. Robert Chrisman: The magnitude of the networks itself is astounding. ABC is mainly controlled by the Morgan Finance Capital Group. It owns ABC television network with 168 affiliates, five TV stations, four ABC radio network with 1200 affiliates. ABC is the largest motion picture distribution chain in the US, owning over 434 Paramount Theaters. It also owns ABC Records, and publishes several journals. It's international as well, having controlling interests in 16 foreign companies operating TV stations in 26 countries, and its ABC World division directly owns 64 foreign television stations. Robert Chrisman: We can trace on the same kind of background for NBC and CBS. The question of what kind of advertising revenue this generates, as follows. This control is strengthened by the fact that these same corporations provide the advertising revenues to make media a very profitable business. $10.8 billion in newspaper, magazine, radio and television ads in 1968, and $4 billion in television alone in 1972. So the advertising in media is a multi-billion-dollar industry. Robert Chrisman: One study reports that 60% of all newspaper space, 52% of all magazine space, 25% of all radio air time, and 22% of all TV airtime is taken up by advertising. And that we know at a gut level. I, for about a week at a time, can enjoy reading The New York Times. I remember the last time I was in New York, I was reading it and saying, "I'm going to enjoy this paper," and I really began to look at The New York Times. It runs eight columns, and usually, on a given page, only one column is news; the rest are adverts. Furthermore, The New York Times has custom-made ads. Those ads do not look like the adverts you see in any other newspapers. They are typically line drawings, line shots, and sketches designed to flow into the text unobtrusively, so that you are not aware that you are all of the sudden reading about Andrew Young at the United Nations while there's an enormous ad for Saks Fifth Avenue right next to it. Robert Chrisman: By the same token, we're aware constantly of the interruptions of our television programming by advertising, and furthermore by advertising that often subliminally relates to the subject at hand. Someone pointed out the presence of pain relievers on the broadcasts of Roots and the Holocaust. If you watch suspense movies late at night, you will see that there's a high degree of antiperspirant ads sold, and other remedies for sweat-caused problems. And if you watch very, very late at night, the ads become either X-rated, or else they're ads directed at the depressed and the introverted and the alienated individual. Because the late solitary TV watcher who is in that gray wasteland from 11:00 p.m. to about 3:00 a.m. is a very important element in our society increasingly. Robert Chrisman: Well, what does all of this have to do with the Black press? As follows. The position paper the congressional Black caucus summed up in its documentation on the question of employment, that in the newspaper industry, only 4.2% of all employees are Black, and only 1.5% at the professional level. So that 4.2% includes women who work in the cafeteria, men who sweep the floors, errand boys, drivers, and so on, and only 1.5% are reporters. Again, that's very instructive, because the New York Times, according to Shirley Chisholm, has a total of only 24 Black professional workers. There is not a single Black correspondent from any of the newspapers in Washington, D.C., which again is a consistent pattern in the suppression of the Black presence among the international community. They don't want other people to know that we're here. Robert Chrisman: This reminds me of a story that, I think it's been told by many people, but I heard it a presentation once by James Farmer. It seemed that it occurred in the middle of the '60s, right after the George Meredith demonstrations and riots at Ole' Miss, in which the governor had decided that he had to refurbish the image of Mississippi. So he hired a public relations agency from New York to handle the problem, and they said, "What you have got to do is show America that Blacks are happy in Mississippi. That it's good here." Robert Chrisman: Well, the plan they came up with was to get the janitor who worked in the governor's building, who was about 65 years old and they felt completely safe, and hook him up on a national television network live to give his little prepared speech. "Ladies and Gentlemen, I'm John Jefferson, and I want to tell you that I'm very happy here, and that I really appreciate the progress our people are making," et cetera. Robert Chrisman: So they get it all hooked up, and just before they go on television, there's the last countdown. He recites his speech, and goes over it and so on. The governor says to him, "Do you have any question?" He says, "Well, I want to know several things. I'm going on right now?" He said, "That's right." "Everybody in the United States is going to see me?" "That's right. Now don't be afraid, John. It's okay." He says, "Fine. Thank you, sir." Robert Chrisman: He gets up, and they say, "I'm going to give you the finger, and when the red light starts, hit it." So he gets up in front of the microphone, the red light blinks, the governor points his finger, and he says, "Help!" Robert Chrisman: Dick Gregory said he used to work for the post office, but he got fired for putting directed to Mississippi in the foreign mail slot. They're doing that in Boston now. Robert Chrisman: So, the employment is at a minuscule level. In fact, it's dropping. It dropped to 8% in 1971 from 12% in 1970. The fact of advertising revenue and what we get from this, as follows. The 100 largest white ad agencies placed $1.9 billion worth of advertising in 1971, and less that one half of 1% of this went to Black newspapers. That begins to tell us something about the identity of Black newspapers. It means that Black newspapers, among other things, are not supported in the main ... not overwhelmingly by white media outlets. Robert Chrisman: Just to close out this section, in terms of Black ownership of media outlets, an identical pattern emerges. There are 225 Black newspapers in the US, and only four of them are dailies. Most are weeklies, and about 15% publish less than once a week. This is according to the congressional Black caucus. Of these 7,000+ radio stations licensed in the US, just over 20 are Black-owned ... That's 1972 ... and only 360 are Black-oriented, even though they're white-owned. Speaker 3: How many Black-oriented? Robert Chrisman: 360 are Black-oriented and white-owned, and the total stations are 7,350. So, 7,350 radio stations; 20 are owned by Black people, and 360 are owned by whites, with a Black orientation. Those are your soul stations. You get them everywhere; Chicago, Des Moines. I'm sure you've got that. You might be lucky. What we are seeing, then, is a very small segment of the media belonging or relating to the Black population, and with minuscule advertising support compared to that which their white counterparts get. Robert Chrisman: In addition to its monopoly character, this white media is also very racist. I'd like to quote here Carl Stokes, who is a moderate figure in his political convictions. When he was elected mayor of Cleveland, he became the first Black mayor of a large American city. He found immediately that there were two major forces that he could not control, at least two; one was the police, another was the media, and the third was the democratic party, of which he was the standard bearer. But the police and the media remain persistent problems for any national or major Black politician. Since this article was written, we remember the problem that Maynard Jackson had when he found out he could not fire the chief of police in Atlanta. Which tells you something about the power politics that are involved in Black electoral politics. We find the same pattern occurring in Rhodesia, where Ian Smith says, "We'll have racial integration as long as we control the police." Robert Chrisman: But Stokes said, "The news media are antagonists of another sort. They are more than a random collection of individuals. They are a business institution operated to make money from people who have money. They are a white institution that reflects white racism in its employment and operational functions. Their responses, their social values, their world outlook coincides with their class positions and the economic structure of this society. Their influence is pervasive, and they are aware of it. They are often giddy and reckless and wielding their power because they are free from counter institutional assault. It is not so much that they rally to opposition, but that they confuse and neutralize potential allies. To that extent, the news media are a constant abrasive. It was only natural that they would attack a Black mayor attempting reform." Robert Chrisman: This is very important, what Stokes says here. "The point of saying that the pen is mightier than the sword is not that the sword is a less efficient solution to human conflict, but that the pen is, in fact, a sword itself." Again, "The point of saying that the pen is mightier than the sword is not that the sword is a less efficient solution to human conflict, but that the pen is, in fact, a sword. It cuts and it can kill. Several of the writers who have covered my administration indulge themselves in a form of steady, slow assassination. The newspapers are protected by our most cherished social contract, the Constitution. They have virtually no limitations." Robert Chrisman: Now, the matter, then, of how ... We'll just talk briefly ... how this enormous organism operated during the period of 1954 to 1970 ... Excuse me, let me get this together here. The thing we have to bear in mind, as we said, is that media does not operate in a vacuum. As you can see, it operates integrally connected to all of the other elements of the political economy. It's part of Big Business, it's part of big machine politics, it's part of the prevailing philosophy of the ruling class of the United States. And as I pointed out, it is not owned by small fry. However glamorous a newspaper or a television station might be, or seemingly liberal, it is nonetheless owned by forces that operate throughout our society in very conservative fashion, so that if Gulf presents a special documentary on Africa on public service television at the same time it's exploiting Africans in Angola and Mozambique, that does not mean that they are involved in a contradiction within their own policy. You can assume that, for whatever reason, this documentary on Africa is a direct extension of their African economic policy. Robert Chrisman: I detect, in a sense, two approaches toward the image of Black people in the various media owned by whites from 1954 to 1970; one is the benign image, and the other is the malevolent image. In essence, as long as the struggle for Black equality was dominated by a philosophy of nonviolence and nonresistance to evil, we were given a benign press, and we were seen as victims. Robert Chrisman: Once Black people began to fight back ... to get angry, to riot, to destroy slums and so on ... then we're treated as malevolent creatures. By the same token, as our institutions and our political organizations began to shift from the Christian ethos, the nonviolent ethos, from the ethos which believed unequivocally in the American dream and the idea that Blacks could make full progress within the American framework, to the radical, counter cultural, critical, nationalistic ... in some cases socialistic ... approach to the Black problem in the United States ... As those organizations began to shift and develop ... as SNCC moved to Black power, as CORE moved to a form of Black power, as the Black Panthers emerged, as RAM ... Revolutionary Action Movement ... emerged, as Us emerged, as the Republic of New Africa emerged, as the Nation of Islam and the Black Muslims began to emerge in their power, then the press, the media, television, the radio shifted the image. Blacks became malevolent. They became irresponsible. They became hateful. They became passionate. They became vengeful. Robert Chrisman: None of this is new, by the way. We have always been saddled with these two images, in white media, of benign ... the meek, the docile slave ... or the bad nigger. Whether it be Nat Turner or Uncle Tom. And it's very interesting that, in researching an article I did on television, Roots ... which is really an update of Uncle Tom's Cabin ... Kunte's crawl, or what everyone would call it ... I found out that the most popular theatrical production of all time in the United States has not been Macbeth, has not been Hamlet, has not been Death of a Salesman, but ... you guessed it ... Uncle Tom's Cabin. It ran consecutively in various forms from 1865 to 1900 throughout the United States. It has had a life run of some 35 years, which tells us that there is something in the sensibility of the white American culture that needs this image, not only of Blacks who are victimized, degraded, frightened, obsequious, servile ... or wicked and uppity ... but also needs this image of whites. So that the images of white sadism that permeated Roots evidently provide some thrill of satisfaction for their white counterparts. Robert Chrisman: Sadism is, of course, an emotion that we associate with a repressive society, and it's an emotion that I find pervading more and more of popular media. If you turn on the television, for example, you see nothing but police programming, and brutal, violent programming; people getting shot and killed wantonly. The nouvelle vague of violence that is represented by Sam Peckinpah and Taxi Driver and many of the other current films I think reflects the same sadistic preoccupation. Well, we've been there a long time, not only as our treatment as a people testifies, but as our treatment in media so symbolizes. Robert Chrisman: Briefly, looking at the sequence, television to film, treatment of Civil Rights demonstrations ... up through I would say 1965 and 1966 ... emphasized the oppression of the demonstrator by the police, by white mobs, by bullies, and by thugs, so that while the coverage was never accurate, the sensationalism pointed out the dilemma of the Black person's plight. You remember in the early '60s you would have pictures of demonstrators sitting in front of courthouse steps being hosed down with a water canon, police dogs being unleashed on children, and tactical police forces moving in with billy clubs. This, of course, was not staged. It happened. So the inflammation of national consciousness that we got as a result of this struggle was ours because we did it. We fought for it, and we deserve it. And there should have been much more. Robert Chrisman: [inaudible] media tends, generally, to emphasize the immediate and the sensationalistic rather than the historical context, the contingent conditions, and the background, so that for every brutal assault that one saw in Selma or in Jackson, Mississippi, or even in Detroit, we did not get the context that explained to us as a people why and how Black people were so and are so oppressed, and white people are so brutalized as to behave in that fashion to continue this oppression. Robert Chrisman: Had that been taught during, before, and after these sensational confrontations, we might have come a much longer way in our march toward freedom. But, after ... and beginning with 1966 ... Blacks became the heavies and became the villains, and we can date that with the Watts riots. The nation was shocked to see live coverage by helicopter of the Watts riots. Not only shocked because it showed the extent of the anger and the violence and the virulence of the Black masses who were exploding the ghettos, but the relentless oppression and repression of the military forces that were unleashed. Robert Chrisman: I did a calculation once from the Kerner Commission, as a matter of fact, some FBI statistics, and the Black struggle for civil rights far exceeds ... in casualties, in deaths, in a number of arrests ... the struggle that has been going on in Northern Ireland for the last 15 years. Now, that again is a media phenomenon, because the media chooses to see Northern Ireland as a sovereign nation embattled, whereas we become a social problem and a disturbance, not an oppressed people. Robert Chrisman: That was one shift that occurred. A parallel shift occurred in newspapers. The important thing to bear in mind is that, in all cases, the treatment is sensationalistic. Another thing that was important was, at this time, talk shows involving Black people began to emerge with the Civil Rights Movement. So we began to see James Baldwin on television, and we began to see James Farmer on television, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X on television, which was an electrifying experience, believe me. As one critic, however, pointed out, very often when you saw Baldwin or Leroy Jones on television, they were as speakers for whether or not Selma should be desegregated. They were not having their own works of art performed, which could reveal to the American people, in a much profounder way, the reality of the Black experience, and the white experience vis-à-vis racism. And again, we return back to my theme of the quick hit sensationalism of the media. Robert Chrisman: In some cases, this worked very well ... Jones and Baraka and Baldwin are eloquent speakers ... but, in some cases, not very well, because you cannot always have someone who's primarily a sociologist or an artist or a novelist speak on an issue which is not their forte, in the context, which after a certain point became degrading. "Will you please sit down in front of Johnny Carson and tell us about your problems?" You see? It ceased to become news and became a form of entertainment. Robert Chrisman: I was in England about three years ago, and was watching a talk show conducted by three editors; one was a conservative, one was a liberal, there was a moderator, and a Black man named Darcus Howe, who was editor of a militant publication called Race Today. It was déjà vu. This was 1975, and I was watching 1965 USA again. The same inane questioning by both the conservative and the liberal. The conservative saying, "Mr. Howe, really, why don't the West Indian people get jobs? Why do they like being on welfare?" Then, of course, Darcus Howe getting very angry, and then the liberal saying to the conservative, "You must understand that this is a profound sociological problem. This cannot be answered by a simple laissez-faire economics," and on and on it goes. Robert Chrisman: So the talk show itself became a form of entertainment, and one that did not always accurately deploy the talents of the speakers involved. In fact, if they were too talented, they were not seen very often, as was the case with Malcolm X. Robert Chrisman: Another very important element in media at this time, which was subsequently suppressed once again, like the talk shows which have faded out now ... you will notice that there are very rarely Black/white encounter talk shows. What you have now is maybe a Black person being grilled by four professional journalists rather than debates and encounters between Black and white leaders in a given context. Robert Chrisman: Very important also was the telecasting of proceedings at the United Nations, and this, again, is no longer done. I submit that we have less freedom in television programming now than we had when it first began. Which, again, is logical, because when television first began as a kind of tabula rasa, open field, they had no idea of what to do to properly control the input and the stimulation that people would get. For example, I remember watching, in the early '60s, the UN debates on disarmament. This was the first time in my life ... I was in my early 20s ... that I had ever seen Gamal Abdel Nasser or Krishna Menon. Or heard them. Robert Chrisman: They got up, and they looked kind of like me. They were colored people. They spoke better English than President Eisenhower, even though it wasn't their native tongue, and they said very clearly, with a profound analysis and articulation, what I was sensing about a lot of stuff. Don't mention Fidel or Che Guevara on television as well. And Nkrumah. This was a magnificent period. Robert Chrisman: And it ended. We do not see the UN proceedings being debated anymore. Ironically, this year the United Nations is having another conference on disarmament. I remember tuning in on the last conference on disarmament, which was held on television, which was during Eisenhower's last years, which was, I believe, 1958 or '59, but now we do not see it. It's just as important now as it was 20 years ago. But I think the reason we do not see it is because it would enlarge our consciousness too much of the international community, which is a third-world community of color, and we cannot afford, I don't believe, as an oppressive state, for our citizens to have too much understanding of our victims. Robert Chrisman: A final significant area here was the emergence of certain types of films in the white media, which at that time tended to always emphasize the reconciliation of Black with white, or the bad nigger gangster who meets a bad end, or the exotic Black. I have in mind three films; one called The Defiant Ones, which starred Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis, which was a very interesting problem movie of a Black and a white convict who escape a chain gang in the south, chained together ... in more ways than one, of course ... and it's finally concluded when they have escaped. Tony Curtis gets involved with a white woman who lives alone on a farm. She is jealous of his relationship to Poitier, and as the posse is moving in to catch them, she gives Sidney Poitier a bum steer and leads him into a dangerous swamp as he attempts to escape. Curtis recognizes this, goes to rescue Poitier. It closes with him running on a train, and Poitier, of course, since he can run and jump, getting on the train. Sidney was on the train, and Tony Curtis couldn't make it. Robert Chrisman: So, it's ambiguous, either trying to rescue him or letting go, yields his advantage and ends up with Tony Curtis. As Baldwin pointed out, the ramifications of that movie have not yet been totally explored. One of them, of course, is the fact that the deepest relationship is the relationship the white man has to the Black man, not to the white woman. This is precisely what the white woman senses when she betrays the Black man in the first place. Baldwin saw it in Harlem, and he said that when Sidney decided to stay with Tony Curtis, they probably tore the joint down, quite understandably. So that was one thing that white America wanted us to believe about ourselves, and wanted them to believe about us. Robert Chrisman: Odds Against Tomorrow was almost a prototype of the modern Black exploitation movie in many ways. It had, not only a gathering of some of the top Black talent of the time ... John Killens wrote the screenplay, the Modern Jazz Quartet provided the score, Harry Belafonte played the lead, and I think [Ruby Dee] was his wife in the movie. Robert Ryan was the gangster racist. But, what happens is that Harry Belafonte is a musician who gambles too much, gets compromised, and has to pull off a bank robbery as a collaborator with a group of white gangsters; one of whom, Robert Ryan, is such a virulent racist that he refuses to cooperate with Harry Belafonte, so they end up blowing the job and killing each other in a final shootout. And, of course, the message there is pretty obvious, too. If you want to rob a bank, do it yourself. Robert Chrisman: But I was reminded of ... This super alienated character that Harry Belafonte portrays, I was reminded of the SuperFly movies, and of some of the other Black Lumpen movies, where you have a dope dealer or a gangster or a bounty hunter or a private detective, as in Shaft, who operates in that fashion; lonely, alienated, separated from his wife or his lover, embattled. Robert Chrisman: The final prototype, which we see at this point even now, was Carmen Jones, which came out in 1955, with again, Harry Belafonte, Dorothy Dandridge, Max Roach, Cab Calloway, many others, and this was again the exotic Black. It was a remake of the story of Carmen, but with Black people instead. Pearl Bailey was in it, and so on. And again, you had song, dance, beauty, color, exoticism. This was the image that was projected of us. And finally, rather infantile and rather benign, harmless people, as in the case of Harry Belafonte, who simply could not control his sex drive, and Carmen Jones, who for the most infantile reasons, control hers and everybody else's, leading to the destruction of all Blacks in the final closeout of the movie. Robert Chrisman: It's interesting to point out, of course, that in its original form by Prosper Mérimée, who wrote the novel Carmen, there was the same motive. This was written by a French romantic who was talking about the exoticism of Spanish gypsies. For the same reasons. Robert Chrisman: To close out here briefly on this first section, another significant element was the element of athletics. Because it was discovered, of course, that filming and programming athletics was a major source of revenue. This, I think, remains one of the major contradictions of media at this point. To film top professional and amateur athletics, you have to film Black stars. And to film Black stars doing their thing is to run contrary to the ideology of racism that the media promulgates at all levels. It is very hard to promote the idea of Black inferiority when you have Muhammad Ali beating the hell out of everybody, or when you have Dr. J making slam dunks after a space walk of five feet. It becomes very hard to do this. And yet you cannot make the money unless you portray the athletics. Robert Chrisman: I've watched the championship series where it's particularly obvious in the last few years. I've been detecting a strategy there which is ... Sometimes it makes you wonder about your sanity. I was watching the playoffs last year, Philadelphia and Portland, with a bunch of Black fellows, and [Chinua], the African writer, was with us. We were all rooting for Philadelphia, and he says, "Philadelphia? What? What's this about Philadelphia?" I said, "It's the Black team." He said, "But there's four Black men on each side." I thought, "Am I insane, or is this stuff getting very subtle?" I said, "Look, it's just very subtle, [Chinua]." I said, "These guys play Black, and these guys don't. Not only that, but Bill Walton is white, but he plays white basketball. Doug Collins is white, but he plays Black basketball. Do you understand?" Robert Chrisman: And he didn't, so I finally realized that one of the basics of it was that the style of Philadelphia is playground style, and the style of Portland is academy style. Academy style is usually dominated by white coaches who work in the colleges and in pro basketball. Playground is confrontation, Black-on-Black basketball, and the moves are different, and so on. Eventually, the moves of playground basketball get integrated into the academy, into the conservative style, but that's what's going on. Robert Chrisman: The way the media purported it, of course, was that ... Alas, Bill Walton, who said, "I don't want to be a white hope" ... The idea was to build a white star out of the championship series, and a Black goat. And the Blazers won, so that was easy. But in the process, they ignored Maurice Lucas contributions, and the Black goats ... all the Black sheep was the Philadelphia 76ers. Robert Chrisman: This time, the goat that they're building up is Elvin Hayes, so that Elvin Hayes will score 20 points in a game and they'll say he only scored five of them last quarter. But if you divide it, four times five is 20. By the same token, this, I believe, is the compromise they have reached in the Super Bowls and professional football teams. They will not let Blacks into the "smart positions", like quarterback and middle linebacker and running guard and so on. Most of you are familiar with the crucifixion of James Harris, the first starting Black quarterback in professional football. Much of that was done on media. If John Brodie or Joe Namath threw six interceptions, they had a bad day, and if James Harris threw six interceptions, he was a coward or he was incompetent. This was reported quite candidly on the media, even though the man consistently finished in the top five passers every year of his career. That struggle, I believe, continues in the white media as to what to do about the Black athlete. Robert Chrisman: I think the final thing that we can see in this first section of the white treatment of the Black presence, is that when we get down to the [reductual] of it, on national television, Blacks are presented as mercenaries. We are presented, whether we're private detectives, whether we're cops, whether we're pimps, whether we're dope dealers, whether we're hookers, whether we're maids, whether we're on welfare, or in reality as professional athletes, we are presented as people who believe that money is number one. Particularly the white USA money. And we do what we have to do to make that dollar. Robert Chrisman: Unfortunately, many Blacks are even absorbing this as their own ideology, so that you will hear OJ Simpson or James Brown, Jimmy Brown ... either one of those Browns ... saying, "Man, it all lies in the dollar. That's what it's about. Money talks, and money's green. It ain't Black, it ain't white, it's green, and that's the scene." The fact of the matter, of course, is they aren't making any money. They're into Black capitalism, but where is their capital? Their capital is in their vocal chords, in their knees, in the speed of their fists. It's not in oil wells. It's not in mineral resources. It's not in transportation systems. It's very ephemeral. Robert Chrisman: If we're even going to think about operating in a capitalist system, we have to learn the difference between cash flow and assets. If you have assets, you always have money, but if you have money, you don't always have assets. If you have five or 10 apartment buildings, you have wealthier, whereas if you have $500,000, you don't necessarily have wealth, because that could go somewhere. Still another alternative is if the people have all the assets, which would be, in this society, the redistribution of wealth. Robert Chrisman: What I would like to do at this point is move rather quickly on and show slides, and then talk about the emergence of Black media, if we could do that. Mr. Darwin, I think we're running. Oh, okay. Darwin Turner: [inaudible] Robert Chrisman: Yes. And, in fact, while we're doing that, I will [inaudible]