Discussion 4

European journal of American studies

14-1 | 2019 Special Issue: Race Matters: 1968 as Living History in the Black Freedom Struggle

The Black Arts Movement Reprise: Television and Black Art in the 21st Century

Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar

Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ejas/14366 DOI: 10.4000/ejas.14366 ISSN: 1991-9336

Publisher European Association for American Studies

Electronic reference Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar, « The Black Arts Movement Reprise: Television and Black Art in the 21st Century », European journal of American studies [Online], 14-1 | 2019, Online since 05 April 2019, connection on 12 July 2019. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ejas/14366 ; DOI : 10.4000/ejas.14366

This text was automatically generated on 12 July 2019.

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The Black Arts Movement Reprise: Television and Black Art in the 21st

Century

Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar

“How much longer are they gonna treat us like animals? The American correctional

system is built on the backs of our brothers, our fathers and our sons. How much

longer? It's a system that must be dismantled piece by piece if we are to live up to

those words that we recite with our hands on our hearts. Justice for all. Not justice

for some, but justice for all. How much longer?”—Cookie Lyons, “Empire” (2015)

“[The] artist’s role is to raise the consciousness of the people….Otherwise I don’t

know why you do it.”—Amiri Baraka1

1 In 1969, Larry Neal, one of the most visible black writers of his generation, emerged as a

chief exponent of a new artistic movement that was unfolding alongside the Black Power

Movement. For those curious about it, he explained that art had a critical role in the

Black Freedom Movement2 as a force to complement grassroots activism and political

struggle. Black artists were intimately connected to, and profoundly aware of, the black

freedom struggle; and their work reflected this familiarity. “The Black Arts Movement,”

Neal noted,

is radically opposed to any concept of the artist that alienates him from his

community. The movement…speaks directly to the needs and aspirations of black

America. In order to perform the task, the Black Arts Movement proposes a radical

reordering of the Western cultural aesthetic. It proposes a separate symbolism,

mythology, critique, and iconography.3

2 Throughout the United States a new black mood coalesced around aesthetes who

formulated new and audacious articulations of identity and politics that resonated with

wider black America. The Black Arts Movement (BAM) would have an indelible impact on

the cultural landscape of the country. It transformed the arts and literature in

innumerable ways from theatre, to murals, fashion, and more.

3 A half-century after Neal’s decree, there has been an unprecedented explosion of black

arts in the United States, exceeding the depth, scope, reach and influence of the BAM,

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while simultaneously adhering to the fundamental political sensibilities that made the

movement a distinct historical moment. As television has become a hyper-visible medium

for this modern expression, the opportunities for majority-black cast television shows

have grown considerably. There has been a record number of black shows and, for the

first time, majority black dramas that have simultaneously aired more than one season.

These shows, both comedies and dramas, have largely become creative spaces to

showcase black creative work from music, through dance, literature and visual arts.

Significantly, too, they engage major political issues that resonate in the black

community, from sexuality, and gentrification, to class conflict, and police brutality. In

fact, most black shows have explicitly or implicitly addressed the Black Lives Matter

movement—the largest black social justice movement in decades. Several have been as

direct as to mention, by name, some of those unarmed black people killed and victimized

by police. Ultimately, black artists in TV have forged a moment in history that is not only

unprecedented in black visibility, but unchartered in political expression. This movement

embraces many of the fundamental tenets of the Black Arts Movement, moving into a

creative cultural medium that has increased visibility and reach in ways few would have

imagined a half-century earlier.

4 In what ways have these new expressions of black art in television aligned with the

impulse of the BAM? How has the most recent generation of writers, directors and

showrunners made critical connections between entertainment and the politics of the

wider black community? Can these television shows—targeted to a multi-racial audience

—prove commercially viable as platforms of black social and political expression? To what

degree can commercially viable TV speak of and be in dialogic form with a broad-based

black political movement like Black Lives Matter—even if that movement is unpopular

among most whites? How do these shows reflect the evolving gendered readings and

representations of blackness? This paper explores the development, technological and

market dynamics that have given rise to a new space for black television, and,

simultaneously, a new space for the expression of black political art.

1. History of Blacks on TV

5 In the earliest days of television in the United States, race functioned as it had in other,

more conventional, spaces for American popular culture. Whiteness was a normative

expression of the range of the human experience. White characters appeared as leading

men, beautiful and desired women, smart, virtuous, industrious, and brave. They also

appeared as scoundrels, villains, ugly, dumb, stupid, servile, and cowardly. People of color

—from Native Americans, through Asians and black people—were never afforded this

range, and, instead, were largely absent, or used as background props to white-centered

narratives. Despite short-lived shows like “The Hazel Scott Show (the summer of 1950), or

“The Nat ‘King’ Cole Show” (1956-1957), the vast majority of scripted black images on TV

were narrowly constructed. In the role as supporting characters, they generally operated

as servants, like Rochester of the “Jack Benny Program” (1949-1965) or “Beulah”

(1950-1952). In 1951 the wildly popular radio show, “Amos ‘n Andy,” was adapted for TV

for CBS. In its original format, two white actors provided voices for the black characters

who were derived from classic minstrel, blackface routines. When “Amos ‘n Andy” aired

in 1951 with black actors, they remained little more than coarse caricatures. NAACP

protests led CBS to temper the offensive nature, while still satisfying the demands of its

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largely white audience. In 1953 the show was cancelled, yet remained in syndication until

the dawn of the Black Power Movement in 1966.4

2. Black Nationalism

6 By the early 1960s, as the Civil Rights Movement unfolded, projecting new, real-time

images of black people as civilized, peaceful, well-dressed citizens facing down the

ignorant, mean-spirited and savage forces of white supremacy. From the neatly-dressed

and youthful activists like Julian Bond and Ruby Doris Smith speaking to national media,

or peaceful high school children facing down water hoses and police dogs in Birmingham,

these hopeful agents of integration and racial reconciliation stood in contrast to images

of black people long propagated in popular culture as servile, lazy, feckless, and content

with subordination to whites. For the long-suffering, indolent Negroes idealized in white

popular art, the civil rights activists and their national leadership proved anathema.

Simultaneously, another image of blackness entered the popular gaze, challenging white

artistic caricatures as well as those on the front lines of civil disobedience. These black

nationalists were sartorially identical to their integrationist counterparts; however,

ideologically, they vitriolically disagreed with integrationists, with a fervor equal to their

criticism of racist whites who opposed civil rights.

7 There had been no single national figure more prominent than Malcolm X in fomenting

the Black Power Movement. As the Civil Rights Movement unfolded, Malcolm emerged as

the most vocal black critic of its ambitions. The national spokesman for the Nation of

Islam (NOI), the largest black nationalist group in the country, Malcolm castigated the

idea that black people should sacrifice their safety to integrate with whites who were

their “open enemies.” White people’s history of committing vast crimes and abuses

against humanity—rape, enslavement, genocide, lies, terrorism, state-sanctioned violence

and oppression—was evidence of the futility of integration, the NOI argued. Black people,

Malcolm believed, would be best served forming their own nation, separate and distinct

from whites and their wicked ways.5

8 Malcolm often discussed the internalization of black self-hate and ideas surrounding

black aesthetics. As he noted, black people were not only denied access to schools, but

when they did have access, those school books either erased or maligned black people.

Black people were denied access to the professional spaces in which popular culture was

institutionalized in TV and film, even if they were present in grotesque caricatures for

popular consumption. Images of a full complexity of black life and humanity were denied;

and black beauty was oxymoronic. He asked an audience in 1963, “Who taught you to hate

the color of your skin? Who taught you to hate the texture of your hair? Who taught you

to hate the shape of your nose and the shape of your lips? Who taught you to hate

yourself from the top of your head to the soles of your feet? Who taught you to hate your

own kind?”6

9 While the minister chastened black people for capitulating to white popular culture and

its anti-black expressions, he also mocked whites in a range of ways. Echoing the Nation

of Islam’s de-pedestalization of whiteness, Malcolm ridiculed “Negro” supplicants to

white supremacy who had been so in love with their oppressors that they wanted to be

like them. They even applied toxins to approximate their oppressors’ “animal-like”

appearance, from skin whitener, to lye and painful hair-straightening rituals. They

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wanted to be like the “pig-colored” white man, have his dog-like “snout” of a nose and his

“dog-like” hair.7 Whites had never been as publicly ridiculed in the history of the United

States.

10 While there were strains of the Black Freedom Movement that ridiculed whiteness and

white people for a range of deficiencies, from morality to beauty, rhythm, and hygiene,

the core thrust of the movement—inherited from Malcolm—was not about hating whites.

It was, as, cultural studies scholar Reiland Rabaka states, “about loving black people, and

defending them against anti-black racist assaults…both physical and psychological.”8 But,

not only was the denunciation of whiteness anathema to the Civil Rights Movement, the

thrust of a conspicuous celebration of black beauty was also a departure from the

movement, which did very little explicit promotion of black pride. Centered on

philosophies of racial reconciliation, integration and common humanity, the fundamental

basis of the movement was, of course, legal, not social or cultural in nature. The Civil

Rights Movement aimed to realize legal rights for all citizens. And that legal drive was the

destruction of laws that prevented access to voting, justice, schools, hospitals, parks and

every type of public accommodation. Generally, driven by integrationist ambition, the

modern Civil Rights Movement was not theoretically congruent with the mélange of

social, political and cultural blackness in the Black Power Movement.9

11 Malcolm profoundly resonated with a younger demographic of black people who listened

to his lectures and read his speeches. Many joined the NOI or remained on its fringes,

attending local Temples of Islam. Many others, however, were not willing to convert to

the Nation of Islam, or commit to its stringent lifestyle demands, or believe all of its

dogma. Many, for example, did not agree that whites were biologically and immutably

wicked. But the foundational elements of his message were compelling, particularly the

exaltation of black pride, and self-determination. A list of those who praised him or who

credit him for influencing them reads like a who’s who of the Black Power and Black Arts

Movements: Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, Maulana Karenga, Eldridge Cleaver, Amiri

Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Haki Madhubuti (Don L. Lee), Kalamu ya Salaam, and Nikki

Giovanni among them.10

3. Black Power Movement

12 Malcolm X broke from the NOI in 1964, converted to Sunni Islam, aligned with radical

whites and many non-African Americans, and was assassinated in 1965. A year later, the

Black Power Movement emerged, asserting the importance of three foundational

components among an otherwise ideologically diverse movement: black pride, the right

to black self-determination, and self-defense. Far from monolithic, various permutations

of Black Power manifested themselves in diverse organizational forms, such as

revolutionary nationalist groups like the Black Panther Party, and the Revolutionary

Action Movement, to the Black Student Movement, which fundamentally transformed

higher educational across the United States. Black students formed black cultural centers,

black student unions, demanded more black faculty, staff and students. And, importantly,

they demanded a new academic field of study: black studies. In this process they realized

an expansion of epistemological boundaries, forging new points of inquiry and

approaches to study. There were, of course, many critics, black and white, to these

efforts. Integrationist civil rights leaders like NAACP head Roy Wilkins, decried “reverse

segregation” and “black Jim Crow studies,” insisting that it would leave black students ill-

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prepared after graduation.11 Academics who valued the core thrust of Black Power, like

Nathan Hare, challenged Wilkins, explaining in 1969 that the forceful Black Power

demands from students “for more black professors and black students have padded white

colleges with more blacks in two years than the decades of whimpering for ‘integration’

ever did.”12 The first of racial and ethnic studies programs, black studies was followed by

women’s studies, Latinx Studies, Asian American studies, and gender and sexuality

studies programs and departments. These institutions, over the succeeding decades hired

faculty, trained scholars, made important contributions to various disciplines and

established professional associations across the globe.13

13 It may seem ironic that this movement to increase the black presence in white spaces was

not orchestrated by civil rights integrationists. What is critical to note in the exponential

increase of black faculty, staff and students at white colleges and universities is that these

Black Power exponents demanded black self-determinative institutions within these

campuses. These students formed black organizations, homecoming courts, dorms and

even separate graduation ceremonies in some schools. In contrast, the integrationist

drive, for many in the Civil Rights Movement, idealized and envisioned a melting pot

scenario as evidence of their struggle’s greatest achievement. Black people, they hoped,

would be intimately woven into the fabric of the United States, as had various European

ethnic groups. Black power, however, insisted on the same access to resources and

citizenship that was afforded whites, but did not demand nor seek any amalgamation or

dissolution into white spaces. Blackness and black people were too beautiful, too valuable,

too worthy to be lost in a sea of whiteness. Their institutions, cultural, and religious work

and expressions were too precious to be forfeited to whites as the cost for integration.

Desegregation, on the other hand, granted access, while black people could

simultaneously maintain a degree of self-determination and control over their social,

intellectual, religious, and professional work.14

14 Across the United States, black power made critical interventions in the mainstream in

ways not envisioned by integrationists of the Civil Rights Movement who viewed

integration as a “promised land” for people of color. The reach of black power was vast,

affecting every facet of black life. Because racism’s toxicity reached black people across

professional, private and public arenas, black resistive work similarly found expression in

multivalent ways. The hostility to black development in most professions prompted

African Americans to forge professional associations in these respective fields, facilitating

greater mentorship, opportunities, and leadership. African Americans faithfully saw the

power of such efforts to reform space—even those spaces and institutions under the

control of white people. The faith in this level of agency contrasts with what scholars like

Frank B. Wilderson call “Afro-Pessimism,” who argue that only the “revolution that will

destroy civil society as we know it would be a more adequate response” than the efforts

done by these activists. Wilderson insists, that “a lot of repression happens on the level of

representation, which then infiltrates the unconscious of both the black and the white

person. Since these structures are ontological, they cannot be resolved (there is no way of

changing this unless the world as we know it comes an end…).”15 On the matter of

“representation,” artists have fundamentally operated against this thesis, believing,

instead, that they can offer critical and powerful counterhegemonic representations that

subvert anti-blackness. The scope of this belief was so vast that it emerged as a movement

of its own.

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4. Black Arts Movement

15 The black nationalist thrust and its explicit celebration of black beauty, black history and

identity inexorably affected young black artists. Blackness was not deficient or

incomplete without whites. Black humanity, they argued, was always whole, and

appealing to whites for integration was not going to make black people free. Access to

resources and black control of institutions that were essential to their healthy survival

was real freedom. As writer Ishmael Reed explains, young black artists “gave the example

that you don’t have to assimilate. You could do your own thing, get into your own

background, your own history, your own tradition and your own culture. I think the

challenge is for cultural sovereignty and Black Arts struck a blow for that.”16 Nationally,

the reverberations of this new consciousness took root. Various organizations formed in

the BAM that nurtured, trained, and inspired black artists in the performance arts in

particular. From the fine arts students at historically black colleges and universities like

Howard University, to the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School and Negro Ensemble in

New York, the Inner City Cultural Center in Los Angeles, or the Black Ensemble Theater

Company in Chicago, black actors, writers, theatre and film technicians sharpened their

professional skills, positioning themselves to take advantages of expanded opportunities

in TV and film.

16 The political thrust of Black Power understood the utility of the arts, including literature

—especially in its commodified and corporate mediated form—as an extension of white

domination. Consequently, artists found particular value in the words of Frantz Fanon

who wrote about the important role that writers have in liberation movements: “[T]he

native intellectual used to produce his work to be read exclusively by the oppressor,

whether [to charm] or [denounce] him through ethnic or subjective means; now the

native writer progressively takes on the habit of addressing his own people.” This is what

Fanon referred to as “a literature of combat, in the sense that it calls on the whole people

to fight for their existence as a nation.”17 Across the United States, black people utilized

culture as a strategic tool in a multi-faceted freedom movement. It pulled from an array

of sources and intellectual traditions spanning generations. The work was constitutive of

an eclectic mélange of modalities, media and folk expressions, even in its efforts to carve

out innovative interpretative and expressive work. As Kalamu ya Salaam, a BAM-era

writer noted, “do not necessarily be like / anything you heard before & / yet it will still

sound familiar.”18

17 In Los Angeles Maulana Karenga emerged as the most visible cultural nationalist on the

West Coast. As co-founder and head of the organization Us, Karenga promoted the

philosophy of Kawaida, which “called for the reclamation of black Americans’ African

past and identity through a set of cultural, social, and political practices based in the

African value system.”19 On the East Coast, playwright, poet and black nationalist Amiri

Baraka established a strategic and ideological partnership with Karenga and Us, adopting

Kawaida as a guiding philosophy for his work in Spirit House, a Newark-based home for

the arts and political organization.20 While Karenga and Baraka emerged as two of the

most visible adherents of the cultural nationalist thrust of the BAM, the movement was

much more than these two. Across the country black young people embraced the

hallmarks of black power aesthetics: bubas or dashikis, African names, and natural hair

styles.

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18 Like the larger Black Power Movement, the BAM, was not ideologically monolithic,

despite the general belief that culture played an essential component to the black

liberation. Kawaida, for example, insisted on the revitalization of African culture among

black people in America, while others like the Black Panther Party had regarded African-

centered culture as politically impuissant. In 1969, Linda Harrison, a Black Panther,

dismissed cultural nationalism, writing that too many have been duped into believing

“there is a dignity inherent in wearing naturals; that a buba makes a slave a man; and

that a common language – Swahili—makes us all brothers.” The monetization and swift

capitalist exploitation of cultural nationalism, she explained, evinced its impotence. The

“power structure…condones and even worships anything that is harmless and presents

no challenge to the existing order.”21 And, despite her androcentric references above,

many Panthers attacked the cultural nationalist followers of Kawaida for their revisionist

notions of African patriarchy.

19 The Black Panther Party, which had its own internal debates and struggles around

patriarchy and sexism, had, by late 1968 (two years after its founding) become mostly

female and instituted policies against sexism within its ranks. Women led chapters of the

BPP across the country and were central all programs, from its newspapers, to free

breakfast, and health centers. In 1970 the BPP became the first national black co-ed

organization to publicly endorse both the Women’s Liberation Movement, and the Gay

Liberation Movement.22 Unlike the organizations that Karenga and Baraka led, the

Panthers did not demand that women and men operate in separate spheres. As historian

Ashley Farmer details, followers of Kawaida, “steeped in idealism, and the prevailing

patriarchy of the day…originally defined the African Woman as an activist who induced

cultural revolution through child rearing, education, and homemaking.”23 As major

exponents of the belief that culture can move the people closer to liberation, many

women within the Kawaidist tradition challenged what was, in essence, a replication of

the dominant white standards of patriarchy. In fact, across the United States, white

society—its religious, educational, political, military and police institutions—were rigidly

patriarchal and homophobic (not to mention racist). It is remarkable that Kawaida’s

female cult of domesticity was heralded as defiant to white cultural values. As many

women activists observed, these values were more aligned with white Victorianism than a

modern liberation movement.24

20 In the late 1960s black women across the country were agents of a wide expanse of

activist work, and increasingly vocal about and resistive to being relegated to the margins

of any struggle—cultural or otherwise. Given the ubiquity of their critical work, the

conventional proscriptions to place women in their “natural” space in the home fell out

of favor. The Kawaidists in Us in 1969 wrote that “Black Men [were] inspired by Black

women who are capable of carrying on the revolution in their absence… [and] inspired

even more by Black women who can carry on the revolution in their presence.”25 By 1974

both Baraka and Karenga, perhaps inspired (or prodded) by their memberships within

their respective organizations, firmly denounced sexism and revised their dictums

regarding gender. Karenga wrote that black people cannot be free until they purge

“sexism [and] male chauvinism” from their communities. Baraka, who offended many

whites with vitriolic writings and speeches, argued that patriarchy and racist animus

were “counterrevolutionary” and that, instead, an advanced, sophisticated politics of

freedom must denounce “reactionary chauvinism either racial or sexual.”26 For a

movement aimed to disrupt European cultural standards and values, the irony was not

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lost on how some cultural nationalists had simply dressed conventional white American

cultural standards in superficial African trappings. The power of this historical moment,

however, demonstrates that these young activists and artists were not static, but open to

debate, revise, and reconsider their politics.

21 Reiland Rabaka outlines the tensions in the BAM as artists attempted to disrupt old

notions of cultural normativity that were, essentially, racist and sexist. Viewing the

movement from a black feminist or womanist interpretation, therefore, “moves past the

tired tendency to concentrate on the more male-dominated organizations and

institutions.” Women, from Jayne Cortez, Gloria House, Sonia Sanchez, to Elma Lewis,

Gwendolyn Brooks and Nikki Giovanni made foundational cultural expressions—from

plays to novels—to the era.27 The efforts to make critical contributions to the political

struggle of black people through art was fundamental to the BAM. And that advancement

could not abandon half of the black community. Women were involved at every stage—

even in the face of opposition. Their works, like Toni Cade Bambara’s anthology The Black

Woman, or I know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, added depth, dimension, and

served as testimonies to the centrality of women in the wider black community and its

freedom movement. Angelou, Bambara, Baraka, Neal, and scores of others introduced

into national consciousness cultural works that challenged and critiqued various forms of

oppression, while proving dynamic and agile enough to respond to the shifting social and

political circumstances from which they emerged. They remained tethered to the wider

black community, and politically and artistically adapted to new exigencies and

opportunities.

22 The celebrated intellectual and writer James Baldwin, who was older than the literary

figures of the BAM, had a dialogue in 1971 with one of the most visible figures of the

movement, Nikki Giovanni, on the PBS television series “SOUL!” Giovanni respected

Baldwin, as did many of her generation. In recognizing their relationship as writers

across generations, tied by a constant utilization of art as a tool of freedom work, Baldwin

noted that artists bear a particular challenge and responsibility to the people who

consume their work. But as a black artist, in particular, the challenge is made more acute

when the artist forges a counterhegemonic aesthetic as many in the Black Arts Movement

did. He explained that, “it’s hard for anybody, but it’s very hard if you’re born black in a

white society. Hard, because you’ve got to divorce yourself form the standards of that

society.”28 The elder writer also offered a caveat about the copious celebration of

blackness in commodified forms. “The danger of your generation, if I may say so … is to

substitute one romanticism for another. Because these categories — to put it simply but

with a certain brutal truth — these categories are commercial categories.”29 Here Baldwin

warns against the ways in which black art is appropriated, stripped of its most subversive

and powerful components and meanings, and packaged for popular consumption. These

“commercial categories” can also mean a base social construction of racial constructs

that are, themselves, consequences of toxic racial orders that need to be destroyed, not

reinforced by revised notions of blackness. Still, the utility of art as a resistive tool is clear

to Baldwin who later appears to endorse Nigerian literary giant Chinua Achebe who, in a

similar dialogue with Baldwin, explained the importance of political art. “Those who tell

you ‘Do not put too much politics in your art’ are not being honest. If you look very

carefully you will see that they are the same people who are quite happy with the

situation as it is… What they are saying is don’t upset the system.”30 The opportunities for

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black writers to allow their politics to shape the images of blackness steadily grew from

the 1970s.

5. TV in the Post-Black Power Era

23 Reflecting the profound cultural, and social shifts across the country during the Civil

Rights and Black Power Movements, the 1970s witnessed an expansion, though limited, in

black representation on TV. From “Sanford and Son,” through “Good Times,” “The

Jeffersons,” and “What’s Happening,” black comedies emerged, often with high ratings.

Generally, they had white executive producers, mostly white directors and writers. In

fact, when “Good Times,” which was set in a Chicago public housing project, debuted in

1974 with an all-black cast, all of the staff writers were white. Although the creators, Eric

Monte and Michael Evans, were black, the show’s white executive producer, Norman

Lear, assembled an all-white team to bring the show into fruition, with depth, color, and

dimension. The politics of race were evident in the earliest discussions about the cast.

Lear wanted to remove James Evans, the father and husband, from the show, creating a

black household with three children and a single mother in public housing. Esther Rolle,

who was cast to play mother Florida Evans, protested. Rolle later argued that, “I

introduced the black father to this country,” when she refused to accept the part unless

there was a father to the household. This was the first time that a black main character

on TV was both a father and husband. The show debuted on CBS with a white lead writer,

Allan Manings, as a producer.31

24 Typical of the era, Lear assembled a team that crafted a “black” family, including its

speech, interests, political sensibilities, and humor largely derived from the white

imagination. This included the articulations of Michael, the youngest Evans, who was,

himself a Black Power advocate, complete with dashikis and clenched fist. Jokingly

referred to as the “militant midget” by his family members, Michael’s character was the

political reflection of the era, though distilled through white conceptions of black power.

25 In the midst of the Black Arts Movement, with black playwrights, novelists, poets and

other literati, the incongruence between black comedy, a black family and black politics

fully conceived, written, produced and packaged by whites could not be lost. The

commercial presentation of black people was, of course, how American popular culture

had created images of black people since the minstrel shows of the 19th century. The

political currents of the country, however, would demand more than what the white

imagination offered, and the producers expanded their staff, hiring two black writers

from the prestigious Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival. Michael Moye,

one of the two black writers recalls the “cast was happy to see me” as a critical creative

component to the narratives of the show.32

26 The lack of familiarity with the lived experience of black people was so striking, recalls

Moye, who remembers a white writer asking if black girls played with Barbie dolls. (They

did). Moye had to also explain to the white writers that, in general, black people who

were so destitute as to be forced to ask for welfare, were not gleeful, but viewed it with

some degree of disappointment and embarrassment.33 The complexity of black lives,

filtered through the white imagination, was, therefore, often reduced to the limits of

white exposure to black people, as well as constricted by a litany of often hostile images

consumed by whites the entirety of their lives. And though there were no black dramas or

even leading black characters on white-majority dramas of the decade, the dramatic

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mini-series “Roots” hosted a heavily-black cast and became the most watched television

miniseries in history. Based on Alex Haley’s book of the same name, “Roots,” focused on

the author’s family history, traced to an enslaved African from the 18th century. It aired

in January 1977 and its final episode captured an astounding 100 million viewers. In all, it

became the most watched show in history to that date, ultimately honored with over 25

television awards.34 With many white stars as well, the show demonstrated a breadth of

black dramatic performances that was unprecedented on TV. Still, no black-led dramas

resulted from the success of the miniseries.

27 Black characters remained largely marginal on TV shows throughout the 1980s, from

“Dallas,” through “The Dukes of Hazard,” “Cheers,” and “Family Ties,” although they had

become stock sideline characters in a range of dramas, from “Hill Street Blues,” and “St.

Elsewhere,” and “L.A. Law,” with occasional centric stories for the black characters.

Notably, however, “The White Shadow” debuted in 1978 as the first network drama with a

majority black cast. Created by Ken Howard and Bruce Paltrow, two white writers, the

show starred Howard as a basketball coach in a mostly black high school in South Central

Los Angeles, often helping his players with personal crises outside of school. To some

degree the show pandered to white savior tropes, where whites, ostensibly working in the

interests of a black group, push against authority and prove to be more effective than

black leaders.35

28 The 1980s and 1990s also witnessed a range of black comedies that addressed issues in

black communities with a balance of humor and light-hearted engagement. Series like

“The Cosby Show,” “227,” “Family Matters,” “A Different World,” “Martin,” and “The

Fresh Prince of Bel Air” were largely all-black settings, reflecting the largely segregated

social reality of the United States. While they tended not to focus on explicitly black

themes or make racial references like their predecessors in the 1970s, issues like police

brutality, apartheid, and racism appeared in storylines for multiple shows.36 Unlike the

first wave of black TV shows, these series generally had black creators, executive

producers, staff writers and directors. The most significant of this cohort of show was

“The Cosby Show,” (1984-1992), which, itself, exhibited a high water mark in its cultural

nationalist references and allusions.

29 “The Cosby Show” rarely explicitly engaged race in its dialogue, but was fully ensconced

in a palpable black cultural space as no TV show had been theretofore, while winning

dozens of awards and garnering the highest ratings on TV. With black writers, directors,

creators, consultants and a black executive producer, the show, centered on the life of an

upper-middle-class family, headed by a medical doctor and lawyer, featured copious

amounts of African American artistic expression throughout the series’ nine-year run.

Black visual artists, writers, actors, musicians and guest stars from Stevie Wonder, Dizzy

Gillespie, Lena Horne through Nancy Wilson and Mariam Makeba appeared. Additionally,

black institutions from colleges to Negro League baseball teams and Tuskegee Airmen

were referenced.37 This “Cosby Show,” though so firmly grounded in a black-centered

space, eluded white discomfort or alienation by not explicitly engaging in racial matters.

In many ways, it superficially adopted the “race neutral” dialogue of the majority white

sitcoms, while also crafting a litany of cultural markers that reflected the race of the cast

—much as white shows had done. “A Different World,” a spinoff of “The Cosby Show,”

differed from its parent show by openly discussing race and a range of social issues, while

simultaneously celebrating African American culture like its parent show. Real world

events became important stories to episodes.

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30 After the 1992 verdict which exonerated four L.A. police officers in the videotaped

beating of black motorist Rodney King, several TV shows addressed the ensuing civil

unrest in Los Angeles in their storylines. When “A Different World,” announced its plans

to start its sixth season with a story around the L.A. Rebellion, Susan Fales-Hill, the head

writer, and director Debbie Allen, both black women, faced resistance from NBC

executives. After a “tense” round of debates, Allen noted that NBC and the show would

likely suffer if the wider black community and its leaders thought that the network had

silenced the show’s political voice. The network relented and the episodes (Parts I and II)

became part of a wider historical moment in television history when escapist comedic

entertainment shifted to more topical and polarizing issues.38 Some may dismiss these

efforts as part of what philosopher Hubert Marcuse refers to as the ability of oppressive

apparatus to coopt subversive art for its own capitalist exploits.39 But Allen and Fales-Hill,

two black women, operating in a vastly male and white domain, saw their work as

offering social and political critiques. Though their work was not revolutionary,

Marcuse’s essential idea of cooption and exploitation from the controlling apparatus may

have merit. The network was not offering any transformation of society, only a means to

profit from detailing its problems. But the agency of the artists cannot be entirely

dismissed. They are engaged in their own space to resist the pervasive anti-black

representation—leading to violence—that Afro-Pessimists insist permeates society.

31 The covering of the urban unrest was important enough that a critic at the New York Times

reported that the many shows that addressed the L.A. Rebellion were part of a trend of

“the politicizing of TV’s prime-time comedy.”40 It appeared that more black creative

control made these shows more likely to engage the political exigencies faced by the

wider black community. At the same time, however, there was tepid willingness from

studio executives to fully allow substantive or regular engagement with these issues.

Moreover, black shows remained relegated to comedies, often considered too light to

address controversial or serious social issues. While dramas may have more creative

agility, there had been no black dramas with black leads to last a season on TV. New

technologies and shifting demographics, however, would indelibly change the television

landscape and the politics therein after the turn of the century.

6. New Business Models, New Art

32 In 2013 Wired magazine noted that the current crop of prestige dramas in terms of

quantity and quality had surpassed anything witnessed in any prior era of television. The

rise of so many platforms for TV—network broadcast, basic and expanded cable, as well as

new streaming forms from Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and more—has created what the

magazine hails as the “platinum age of TV,” exceeding the superlative “Golden Age of TV”

that many have assigned to the expansive and high quality viewing now available.41 The

competition has generated the best from the creative minds of studios fighting for an

audience. No era has afford a broader representation of a diversity of characters for

actors of color.

33 In the second decade of the 21st century, the expansion of networks and channels led to

disruptive business models that have fundamentally altered the “television” market.

When “Good Times” debuted in 1974, there were three national networks, with a

systematic effort from each to reach the widest market of viewers for high ratings and

advertisement revenue. Given that roughly 83 percent of the country was white, network

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executives, who were all white, created white majority shows with little to no racial

diversity. And, as noted above, white executives placed creative control of people of color

(almost always black people) in the hands of whites who often pandered to the gross

ignorance or expectations of the wider white market. By 2013, the demographic

landscape of the country, network executive leadership and consumer markets had all

diversified considerably. Importantly, so many shows air simultaneously across so many

different networks and platforms—from cable to streaming services—that creating a

series for a general [white] audience does not have the same business advantages that it

did 40 years earlier.

34 Given the racialized viewing patterns of TV, the shift in the delivery of shows has meant

that the power of black viewership has been amplified beyond any point in history. While

representing 13 percent of the country, African Americans are over 20 percent of the

viewing market, consuming TV at a higher rate than any other racial/ethnic group.42 This

means, for example, that if 100 shows are on simultaneously, and 90 are shows with all-

white characters, the white target audience, evenly-divided across the shows would,

theoretically, have a lower average rating than the five black-targeted shows, each, on

average. In addition to black-owned and black-oriented networks like TVOne, OWN, and

BET, black-targeted shows expanded rapidly on networks like Bravo, VH1, and E!, which

have aired several reality shows and scripted shows with majority-black casts. Dozens of

black executive producers, creators, writers, directors have animated and altered the

landscape of television in scripted and reality shows.

35 Between 2011 and 2016, scripted television shows across various platforms increased by

over 70 percent. Between 2002 and 2016, the number of television shows increased from

182 to 455 original scripted shows.43 The opportunities for producers, writers, and

directors of color have expanded to new levels, but the general landscape remains vastly

unrepresentative of the country and viewer demographics. A 2017 report that examined

“all 234 original, scripted comedy and drama series airing or streaming on 18 networks

during the 2016–17 television seasons” found that “65 percent of all writers’ rooms had

zero black writers, and across all shows, less than 5 percent of writers were black.”

Furthermore, it found that,

Over 90% of showrunners are white, two-thirds of shows had no Black writers at all,

and another 17% of shows had just one Black writer. The ultimate result of this

exclusion is the widespread reliance on Black stereotypes to drive Black

character portrayals, where Black characters even exist at all—at best, ‘cardboard’

characters, at worst, unfair, inaccurate and dehumanizing portrayals.44 (Emphasis

in original).

36 While five percent of showrunners, or executives who hire and fire staff, were black, (all

other people of color combined accounted for 3.9 percent of showrunners), black

showrunners universally hired diverse writing staffs, including white writers, even for

black shows. At the same time, however, 69 percent of white showrunners hired no black

writers.45 Though incredibly limited, the opportunities for majority-black cast television

shows have resulted in a record number of black shows and, for the first time in history,

majority black dramas that have simultaneously aired more than one season. These

shows, ranging from comedies to dramas, have largely proved to be more than just vapid,

escapist entertainment. These shows have become part of a veritable movement of black

artistic expression, highlighting black culture, history, politics and more. This movement

aligns closely with the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s in a host of ways.

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7. Black Lives Matter and Social Justice Movements

37 Before HBO’s “The Wire,” (2002-2008) no majority black drama had lasted for more than

one season on network or cable TV since “The White Shadow” (which, of course, centered

on its white lead). ABC’s “Lincoln Heights,” (2007-2009) stands out as a renewed, multi-

year black drama on network TV. The second decade of the 21st century, however,

witnessed a vast expansion of black series and dramas in particular. As of the 2017-2018

season, there are at least a dozen majority-black American TV dramas on cable and

streaming that have been renewed for at least once: “Queen Sugar,” “Greenleaf,” “The

Haves and Have-nots,” (OWN); “Power,” (Stars) “Empire,” (Fox) “Luke Cage,” “Seven

Seconds,” (Netflix); “Being Mary Jane,” “Tales,” “The Quad,” (BET); “Black Lightening,”

(CW), “The Chi” (Showtime) and “Underground.” (WGN). Unlike earlier majority-black

cast dramas, these universally have black creators, executive producers, writers, and

directors. In various ways, the echoes of the earlier Black Arts Movement are manifested

in these series. Of course, black control and self-determination had been a fundamental

component of the Black Arts Movement—as with the broader Black Power Movement.

And while these series have all developed outside of the original major three networks

(ABC, CBS, NBC), they did not arrive without some precedent of black showrunners. As

Angelica Jade Bastién notes in The Atlantic, this proliferation of black shows “is built on

the success that showrunners like the powerhouses Shonda Rhimes and Mara Brock Akil

have worked for in recent years. When Scandal’s Olivia Pope sauntered onto television

screens in 2012, she was the first black female TV lead in almost 40 years.”46

38 But more importantly, the notion of black self-determination was predicated on the

principle that black art would always address, complement and be in dialogic form with

the social, political currents of the wider black community. In his most subversive stage,

Amiri Baraka went as far as to say that, “the black artist’s role in America is the

destruction of America as he knows it.”47 As a virulent critic of racism, militarism and

imperialism, the context of Baraka’s charge was significantly farther-reaching than the

agendas of most members of the current cohort of black creatives in Hollywood. Most of

these writers, for example, do not emerge from the political activist or black nationalist

tradition that characterized so many of the BAM. Few, for example, give homage to

political groups or leaders or tout their militant bona fides. The notion, however, that

black artists and their work be substantively tied to the interests of the black community

certainly resonates with Baraka’s later charge that the “artist’s role is to raise the

consciousness of the people….Otherwise I don’t know why you do it.”48 Like Sonia

Sanchez, Askia Muhammad and dozens of others have noted, art cannot be isolated from

the community it represented.49 It constantly operates as a reflection of its cultural,

social, political tensions, interests, and impulses. This principle is most salient in the

degree to which black television shows have grappled with the largest black social justice

movement since the Black Power era.

39 Fomented by the high-profile killings of unarmed black people and subsequent acquittals

of the killers, Black Lives Matter emerged in 2013 when founders, Alicia Garza, Patrisse

Cullors, and Opal Tometi, initiated #BlackLivesMatter on social media in response to the

acquittal of George Zimmerman, who stalked and killed unarmed black teen Trayvon

Martin in 2012. Across the country hundreds of small-scale rallies, as well as massive

marches with thousands of people have brought BLM into the political arena as no social

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movement in decades. Utilizing peaceful actions based on civil disobedience, activists

have initiated crowds so large as to stop traffic on major highways, and streets in major

cities from New York to Chicago to Los Angeles in ways not witnessed even during the

Civil Rights era. Like the poets, singers, literary figures and playwrights of the Black Arts

Movement, the creative forces behind the large corpus of black television have engaged

the politics of BLM with creative dexterity.

40 In the spirt of black artists and intellectuals of the Black Power era, writers and producers

of these new black dramas have found their work inextricably tied to the wider social and

political currents of the black community. Every show mentioned above has explicitly

addressed racial bias in policing. The types of police actions have ranged from menacing

police stops, verbal harassment, to corrupt planting of evidence, beatings, and killing.

Some have gone as far as to graphically depict police malfeasance and brutality.

41 “Queen Sugar,” created, directed and executive produced by Ava DuVernay, with Oprah

Winfrey also an executive producer, is one of several dramas that have created storyline

arcs across a season addressing Black Lives Matter. Premiering September 6, 2016, the

series centers on the three Bordelon siblings: two sisters and a brother in rural Louisiana.

One sister, Nova, is a New Orleans-based journalist. The character speaks at rallies, and

writes about cases of police terror in the black community, providing the show a space to

even recognize and name real victims of lethal police force. The other sister, Charley, a

wealthy businesswoman, is horrified when her teenaged son, Micah, falls victim to an

abusive police officer who forces his pistol in her son’s mouth, traumatizing the child,

and, ultimately, inspiring him to join a BLM high school activist group. The only brother,

Ralph-Angel, who works on his sister’s sugar cane farm, had been formerly incarcerated,

creating a nod to the carceral state of Louisiana, which infamously imprisons more of its

citizens than any other state in a country that incarcerates more of its citizens than any

country on earth.50

42 “Queen Sugar’s” thematic multivalence offers critiques of race, class, gender, and

sexuality with sublime nuance. Storylines detail characters who wrestle with issues often

explored by social scientists, activists and policy makers, like drug addiction, class

conflict, and the carceral state. More than an undifferentiated whole, class and

ideological differences play out within the Bordelon family, as when the wealthier

Charley bails out and assumes control of the family business—itself with roots dating to

the enslavement of black people in the 19th century. And a prominent white family, with

inter-generational wealth and landownership, offers a foil to the Bordelons. Avoiding

easy caricatures of southern racism, the white family’s effort to disrupt the black-owned

sugar plantation is treated without stock racist vulgarity and clichéd coarseness. Yet, the

civility and respect the white family displays for Charley Bordelon appears perfunctory,

and even as a deceptively insidious attempt at cooption. In some respects, this

relationship operates as a metaphor for the overtures that some white elites have offered

black elites as a surreptitious means of minimizing threat and shoring up white

hegemonic control. And while the intersection of class and race are explored, the show

has remained closely-tied to the current events of police killings of black people. In the

first two seasons (with every episode directed by a woman, most of them black), the series

addresses BLM, even showing a mural featuring some of the most well-known victims of

violence where their killers, mostly police, were all acquitted: Mike Brown, Eric Garner

and Trayvon Martin.

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43 In March 2017, FOX premiered a ten-part limited series, “Shots Fired,” that follows the

federal investigation of a shooting of an unarmed white teen by a black police officer. An

inversion of the racial profile for most of the high-profile police shootings, the show

features a black federal investigator and a black federal police agent. A black officer’s

killing of an unarmed white teen prompts a federal investigation, as a premise, challenges

the viewer to reconcile the power of law enforcement which operates with virtual

impunity when it comes to killings of civilians in the U.S.—regardless of the race of those

involved.51 The show demonstrates, over the span of the season, the complexities of

power, class, and race, which are never neatly separated. The black investigators are

sensitive to the endemic racial inequalities in the fictional southern town, Gate City— as

they carry federally-sanctioned authority. They find themselves confronted with

systemic racial discrimination against blacks, even as the black officer benefited from

some degree of protections from the wider police department, where he serves as the

only officer of color.

44 Show creators Gina Prince-Bythewood and Reggie Rock Bythewood have created, written

and directed TV series for more than two decades, and in each case adding depth to black

characters, while anchoring their experiences in the political and cultural fabric of wider

society. In this case, the salience of social justice and the scrutiny of police action is a

stark departure from the general narrative of TV crime dramas.

45 Crime dramas, universally, depict the police as capable, non-racist, sincere officers of the

law and justice, even with personal flaws. Since the 1970s, most have included capable

black law enforcement characters, even if they are almost never leads. In “Shots Fired,”

unlike nearly every crime drama since the 1950s, the police—and the justice system more

broadly—do not appear unfettered by the endemic racism that, in reality, marks the

criminal justice system.52 As the story unfolds, police malfeasance, cover-ups and gross

class inequalities lay bare a world that is not a neat binary of white affluence, black

poverty, white power and black impuissance, although these tropes remain convenient

shorthand for the political, economic, and social landscape of both the show and the real

world. References to private for-profit prisons, compromising politicians, passionate

social justice activists and career-driven officers make the drama a rich text for

subverting a popular genre without facile attempts at neat conclusions.

46 The production of the show was not without some deep emotional investment in the

storyline and a strong sense of engagement with the issue of police misconduct, brutality

and corruption. In fact, filming of one essential scene (when the young black officer

shoots an unarmed white teen) was scheduled the day after a Minnesota officer killed an

innocent black motorist, Philando Castile, which happened to be recorded live. Mack

Wilds, who portrayed the officer on set, was horrified by the Castile killing. Wilds noted

that upon entering his trailer, “the first thing I see is the … recording. I broke into tears.

Like, inconsolable-nobody-could-tell-me-anything tears…I didn’t want to work that day.”

The creators, Gina Prince-Bythewood and Reggie Bythewood met with the actor and

explained that the show was an important tool to address the very issue that had so

disturbed him. “We’re doing this for a reason. It’s more than just trying to make great

television,” they noted. “We’re trying to make something. You are one of the voices

helping us do it.” Similarly, Aisha Hinds, who plays an activist who protests police

brutality, details how emotionally vexing—and important—she found her work. “It was

incredibly purposeful,” Hinds stated,

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because you felt like you were doing work that was important, necessary … and

relevant. These things were happening so frequently that before you sat and really

went through all the emotions of one experience and one encounter and one

injustice, another one was behind it. Your emotions were getting muddled to the

point where people’s emotions were becoming numb. You couldn’t keep up with

your own grief. People needed to cry out, and this show presents an opportunity to

cry out, and continue the conversation.53

47 “Shots Fired” was so tied to the coverage of police shootings that one reviewer noted

that, at moments, the episodes “feel more like a documentary that chronicles the

aftermath — in a small southern American city — of the murder of a black teen as well as

a young white man. Law enforcement and media responses are starkly different based on

race. Just like in real life.”54 The intention to weave popular black political interests into

black art had been a foundational concern for the Black Arts Movement. Fifty years later,

creative voices, operating with more power and influence than any other era in American

popular culture, have found their professional space an important arena for a resistive

form of black art that was simultaneously mainstreamed. Price-Bythewood did not

equivocate on her and her co-creator’s agenda with their work. “We had an intent —

absolutely — to raise consciousness and say something dealing with these shootings. For

Reggie and [me] and many others, [this] is the civil rights issue of our day. When you see

these shootings happen, it seems like one of the first things the victim loses is their

humanity. And when they lose that …they lose everything.”55

48 The many direct references and allusions to Black Lives Matter are stark. The fall 2015

premiere of the second season of the most watched black drama, “Empire,” the main

characters host a concert which simultaneously operates as a rally against mass

incarceration and a protest against the main character’s arrest. The improbably popular

main character Cookie announces that the people must resist the incessant harassment

and racist treatment from police and courts. The episode opens with a guest appearance

from real life hip-hop super producer Swizz Beatz. Beatz informs the concertgoers — as

well as the millions of viewers on TV—of the vast numbers of (several hundred thousand)

black men who are currently being held in mass incarceration. The season opener was not

the only reference to the concerns of the wider black community around police and

criminal justice. When police arrest Cookie Lyons in a later episode, she announces to

onlookers “If I die in police custody, I did not commit suicide,” an allusion to the death of

Sandra Bland who was arrested after being stopped for not using a turn signal in July

2015. Her death in her jail cell was ruled a suicide. It was not the only show to exercise a

degree of “edutainment” (a marriage of education and entertainment) regarding

imprisonment statistics and black people.

49 Season 4, episode 7 of the hit comedy “Black’ish” opens with a quote from Russian

novelist and philosopher Fyodor Dostoyevsky, “The degree of civilization in a society can

be judged by entering its prisons.” The main character, Dre, then gives a series of

sobering numbers of the prison industrial complex, noting that although comprising 13

percent of the U.S., black people are 36 percent of those in prisons and jails, while Akon’s

song “Locked Up” plays.

50 The finale of the third season of “Being Mary Jane” (December 2015) ends with the main

character’s niece being stopped by a hostile police officer who follows a script nearly

identical to the Sandra Bland stop. Similarly, “The Quad,” in its second season (2018)

features a storyline of the black female president of fictional Georgia A&M University

pulled over and arrested by a hostile officer. In the spirit of #SayHerName, a social media

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and grassroots effort to keep the name of victims of police harassment and violence who

are women and girls, an episode of “Shots Fired” actually, repeats the threat that a Texas

State Trooper, Brian Encinia, gave motorist Bland, “I will light you up!”56

51 Resonating with BAM writers, the executive producer of “Empire,” Sanaa Hamri, explains

that, “‘Empire’ is fearless in talking about what is current, what is really happening,

whether it’s about bipolar disease in the black community, whether it’s being a gay male

in the black community … So with that said, of course we’re going to tackle issues like

black lives matter because it matters to us.”57 And while Shonda Rhimes’ “Scandal,” Irv

Gotti’s anthology series “Tales,” and Craig Wright’s “Greenleaf” have all created episodes

centered on police killings of unarmed black people, the creative power of the new wave

of black television is also characterized by its agility to explore black art, beyond the

vitiation of black rights and the subversion of justice. The creative contours venture

beyond these themes, often providing a fierce celebration of the wider black community,

beyond trauma.

8. Black Art and Its Inheritors

52 In a wider society where black alterity is normalized, and black writers complain that the

wider white staff constructs cardboard black characters with very little substance, these

black shows have made vast intertextual allusions to black creative predecessors of

various platforms. Across shows, many episodes have been homages to the literary canon

of black writers, musicians, intellectuals, and political leaders. The episode, “I Get

Physical,” (Season 2, episode 4) of “Luke Cage,” alone, references former Congresswoman

and U.S. presidential candidate Shirley Chisholm, early aviator Bessie Coleman, heavy

weight champion Joe Louis, hip-hop artists Mobb Deep and D-Nice, corporate leaders

Reginald Lewis, Earl Graves, anti-lynching activist and suffragist Ida B. Wells, and musical

superstar Beyoncé. Passing references to these figures are made organically in a way that

demands viewer familiarity with the names, while simultaneously not disrupting the

story arch. These allusions operate as important components to enrich and add

verisimilitude to the depictions black communities. They are also resistive gestures to

Hollywood’s historic tendencies to evade black complexity, history, and agency.

53 Like the Black Arts Movement, these shows, largely created, written and directed by

African Americans, have forged a salient line of inheritance from cultural antecedents of

black art. Unlike the BAM artists who often viewed their work as bolder, blacker, and

more defiant than the work of those whom they succeeded, there is a copious amount of

references to black artists in these shows, evincing a continuity, rather than a break in

creative expression. “The Quad” has done this with aplomb, referencing titles of literary

classics as episode titles from Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible

Man, Maya Angelou’s I Know why the Caged Bird Sings to Zora Neal Hurston’s Their Eyes Were

Watching God and James Baldwin’s Go Tell it on the Mountain. Often tied directly to the

theme of the episode, the writers do not give short shrift to hip-hop, actually playing

Kendrick Lamar’s informal anthem of BLM, “Alright,” during a protest scene and episode

titles derived from hip-hop songs, like Tupac’s “Holla if Ya Hear Me.” Note that just as the

BAM was not solely occupied with assailing against racism, these shows have offered a

conspicuous celebrations of black arts— across mediums.

54 Hip-hop songs as titles for episodes has been a prominent device among these shows,

most of which have been created by those of the Hip-Hop Generation.58 The titles of all

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episodes of “Luke Cage” come from hip-hop groups Gang Starr (season one) and Pete Rock

& CL Smooth (season two) song titles.59 In addition to “The Quad,” the “Black’ish” spinoff,

“Grown’ish,” which centers on the college life of eldest child of the Johnson family, has

episodes named after hip-hop classics, like Kanye West’s “Late Registration,” Wu-Tang

Clan’s “C.R.E.A.M. (Cash Rules Everything Around Me),” and newer hits like The Weeknd’s

“Starboy,” and Drake’s “If You're Reading This, It's Too Late.”

Conclusion

55 The expansion of black creative control in television is remarkable in many ways. The

access to power from executive positions as showrunners, through executive producers,

directors and writers is not without significance. Black directors, such as veterans like

Neema Barnette, and Mario Van Peeples, through Oz Scott, Regina King, Salim Akil, Kasi

Lemmons, Salli Richardson-Whitfield, Seith Mann, Millicent Sheldon, and many others

have been afforded professional space to engage their craft. In realizing their talents,

they have achieved notoriety, awards, honors and acclaim. This had occurred while

bridging chasms across black creative space, politics and culture. Showrunners from Ava

DuVernay, Lee Daniels, Courtney Kemp, Shonda Rhimes, and Cheo Hodari Coker have

unprecedented access to influence and power, even as they universally offer art that

complements wider social justice activism, politics and critical critiques from the margins

of society. And like the BAM, they reflect a gender balance that far exceeds that of the

white mainstream. Black women are central—if not dominant—in this movement. They

have created black female characters in virtually every show from university presidents

to powerful Washington insiders who influence the geo-political landscape, that defy

constricted representations generally found in white-scripted shows. The power of the

self-determinative spirit resoundingly manifests itself in these shows.

56 The core thrust of the explosion of black shows must be understood as a convergence of a

wide range of forces, including pressure from black creative communities, new

technologies and platforms for viewing shows, and Hollywood studios responding to

demographic shifts in its market and the allure of profit making. In fact, one report found

that “broadcast network TV advertising expenditure “focused on black audiences

(defined as ad dollars placed on programming with greater than 50% black viewers) …

increased by 255%” between 2011-2015.60 But more than just access to influence in

television, the black creative class in television has been careful to provide a critical view

of the social and political tensions in black communities and the country more broadly.

They have, most importantly, upended and challenged conventional narratives of police

and the criminal justice system, giving a critical voice and visibility to black political

concerns. There is little question that this is an apogee of black creativity and exposure in

the arts. No moment in history has witnessed a greater visibility of black people, their

lives, beauties, flaws, strengths and weaknesses. And essential to this movement are the

salient allusions to the creative antecedents who struggled, pushed and forged art that,

while invisible to most white Americans, had always given depth, and humanity to the

black community. The early 21st century finds these articulations and creative works

consumed by millions of Americans across racial and ethnic lines. These shows—unlike

much of the work of the BAM—are consumed by non-African American audiences,

although racialized viewing patterns remain solidly in practice. All-white, or mostly-

white casts have a significantly higher percentage of viewers who are whites. Similarly,

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European journal of American studies, 14-1 | 2019

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majority-black cast shows have higher percentages of black viewers.61 Despite divergent

TV viewing habits, non-blacks have been central to the success of many black shows. The

reach, therefore, of this art is exponentially more far-reaching than the bulk of work

from the BAM-era artists. Whether this translates into the power, political, and social

impact that artists may want is another matter.

57 Even as the degree of access and influence remains limited, and the exigencies of racism

remain, the rise of a this black creative class in Hollywood, its assiduous efforts to

maintain black self-determinative work, give homages to black art, and celebrate the

fullness of black humanity are core elements to the creative agenda that overlaps

perfectly with the ambitions of the Black Arts Movement. Though not necessarily

revolutionary in their artistic expressions, the BAM, itself, was never monolithic. Some

art addressed sexism within the black community, while others glorified love, the joys of

dance, song and family. Its artists understood the multi-dimensionality of black people. It

also understood the utility of art in protest and social justice. In space where black

humanity and complexity are systematically absent, the assertion of the fullness black

humanity is a resistive act. This is especially acute with social justice struggles. As Larry

Neal explained in 1969, BAM was the “aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power

concept.”62 In some ways, many black artists have utilized their roles in television to

become the artistic wing of the social justice struggles of their day.

58 Proper names:

Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, James Baldwin, Mara Brock-Akil, Sanaa

Hami, Malcolm X, Ishmael Reed, Chinua Achebe, Michael Moye, Ava DuVernay, Shonda

Rhimes, Gina Prince-Bythewood, Reggie Rock Bythewood, Sandra Bland, Salim Akil, Cheo

Hodari Coker, Lee Daniels.

NOTES

1. “Revolution Song,” The Guardian, 3 August 2007, https://www.theguardian.com/

books/2007/aug/04/featuresreviews.guardianreview12, accessed 6 August 2018.

2. Historians have come to call the modern, roughly 20-year struggle for black freedom in the

United States the Black Freedom Movement. It captures the ideological diversity of two separate,

but related movements: civil rights and black power. See Hasan Jeffries, “Black Freedom

Movement,” in Keywords for African American Studies (New York: New York University Press, 2018),

22-24, eds. Erica R. Edwards, Roderick A. Ferguson, Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar.

3. Quoted in Reiland Rabaka, Hip Hop’s Inheritance: From the Harlem Renaissance to Hip Hop Feminist

Movement (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2011), 105.

4. Donald Bogle, Heat Wave: The Life and Career of Ethel Waters (New York: Harper-Collins,

2011); Elizabeth McLeod, The Original Amos 'n' Andy: Freeman Gosden, Charles Correll and the 1928–1943

Radio Serial (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005).

5. E.U. Essien-Udom, Black Nationalism: The Search for an Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1962), 154; Malcolm X, “Message to the Grassroots,” in Malcolm X Speaks, ed. George

Brietman (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 6-8.

The Black Arts Movement Reprise: Television and Black Art in the 21st Century

European journal of American studies, 14-1 | 2019

19

6. Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, “Black Power: The Looks,” in Black Power 50, edited by Sylviane Anna Diouf

and Komozi Woodard (New York: The New Press, 2016), 126.

7. Ibid.

8. Rabaka, Hip Hop’s Inheritance, 99. (Emphasis in original).

9. For more on the Black Power Movement, see Ashley D. Farmer, Remaking Black Power:

How Black Women Transformed an Era, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,

2017); John H. Bracy, Jr. Sonia Sanchez, James Smethurst, editors, SOS―Calling All Black

People: A Black Arts Movement Reader, (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014);

Peniel E. Joseph, ed. The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era,

(New York: Routledge, 2006).

10. Komozi Woodard, A Nation Within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Black Power Politics

(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), xii; Rabaka, Hip Hop’s Inheritance, 96-100,

111; Jerry Watts, Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual (New York: New York

University Press, 2001), passim.

11. The body of scholarship on the Black Power Movement has expanded vigorously in

the last decade. See Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Black Power: Radical Politics and African American

Identity, Revised Edition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019); Ibram H.

Rogers, The Black Campus Movement: Black Students and the Racial Reconstitution of Higher

Education, 1965–1972 (New York: Palgrave, 2012), 137; Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting ‘Till the

Midnight Hour (New York: Holt, 2006).

12. Rogers, The Black Campus Movement, 137.

13. Martha Biondi, The Black Revolution on Campus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014),

1-4; Stefan M. Bradley, Upending the Ivory Tower: Civil Rights, Black Power and the Ivy League (New

York: New York University Press, 2018), 10-21.

14. Biondi, The Black Revolution on Campus, 1-4; Rogers, The Black Campus Movement, 1-2, 115, 192;

Bradley, Upending the Ivory Tower, 10-21.

15. Frank B. Wilderson, “Public Talk, Ohio State University,” https://english.osu.edu/events/

frank-b.-wilderson-iii-afro-pessimism-and-ruse-analogy-public-talk, accessed 13 February 2019.

16. “The Black Arts Movement (BAM) by Kalamu ya Salaam,” African American Literature

Book Club, https://aalbc.com/authors/article.php?id=2087, accessed 12 August 2018,

accessed 17 January 2019.

17. Reiland Rabaka, Hip Hop’s Inheritance, 102.

18. Kalamu ya Salaam, “Food for Thought” in New Black Voices, edited by Abraham Chapman (New

York: Mentor, 1972), 378-79.

19. Ashley D. Farmer, Reclaiming Black Power, 97.

20. Komozi Woodard, A Nation within a Nation, 2, 66-67.

21. “On Cultural Nationalism,” The Black Panther, 2 February 1969, 6.

22. Ogbar, Black Power, 100-106.

23. Farmer, Remaking Black Power, 94.

24. Ibid., 100.

25. Ibid., 101.

26. Ibid., 122.

27. Rabaka, Hip Hop’s Inheritance, 114.

28. “James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni’s Extraordinary Forgotten Conversation About the

Language of Love and What It Takes to Be Truly Empowered,” Brain Pickings.com, https://

www.brainpickings.org/2016/04/04/james-baldwin-nikki-giovannis-dialogue/, accessed 23

August 2018.

29. Ibid.

30. Ibid.

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31. Gregory Simms, "Ja'Net DuBois Tells Diet And 'Good Times' Secrets During Swing Through

Chi," Jet 52:25 (8 September 1977): 62–63; “E! True Hollywood Story: Good Times,” 20 August

2000.

32. Michael Moye, interview from “The Interviews,” American Television Academy Foundation,

YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7T6qEAuwcv8 and https://www.youtube.com/

watch?v=v9ndj3LOkmY, accessed 11 August 2018. See also Kathleen Fearn-Banks, The A to Z of

African-American Television 49 (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press), 169.

33. Michael Moye, interview from “The Interviews,” American Television Academy Foundation,

YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7T6qEAuwcv8, accessed 8 January 2019.

34. “Top 100 Rated TV Shows Of All Time,” 21 March 2009, https://

tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/reference/top-100-rated-tv-shows-of-all-time/, accessed 17

February 2019.

35. Kathleen Fearn-Banks and Anne Burford-Johnson, Historical Dictionary of African American

Television (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005), 57.

36. Among other shows, “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air,” NBC’s Season 1 Episode 6 addressed police

harassment, as did “A Different World” (1992) in its sixth season debut in 1992.

37. Ron Krabill, Starring Mandela and Cosby: Media and the End(s) of Apartheid (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 2010), 102-105. See also Kathleen Franz and Susan Smulyan, Major

Problems in American Popular Culture (Boston: Cengage Learning, 2011), 375-378; Henry Louis Gates

and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, African American Lives (New York: Oxford University Press,

2004).

38. “How ‘A Different World’ dealt with the L.A. riots and set the stage for a more political

TV,” The Washington Post, 27 April 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/

entertainment/tv/how-a-different-world-confronted-the-la-riots-25-years-

ago/2017/04/26/ffe9bea0-28fa-11e7-b605-33413c691853_story.html?

noredirect=on&utm_term=.a48fe043482a, accessed 17 August 2018.

39. “Herbert Marcuse,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/

marcuse/#AesDim, accessed 17 February 2019.

40. John J. Connor, “Critic’s Notebook; The Politicizing of TV’s Prime-Time Comedy,” New York

Times, 21 October 1992, https://www.nytimes.com/1992/10/21/news/critic-s-notebook-the-

politicizing-of-tv-s-prime-time-comedy.html, accessed 17 August 2018.

41. While many have called television of the 1950s the “golden age,” critics have recently applied

that appellation to this current era’s explosion of creativity. See “Welcome to the Platinum Age

of TV,” Wired, 19 March 2013, https://www.wired.com/2013/03/platinum-age-of-tv/, accessed 5

August 2018; Todd Leopold, "The New, New TV golden age," CNN, https://

www.cnn.com/2013/05/06/showbiz/golden-age-of-tv/, accessed 24 January 2015; Lee Cowan,

"Welcome to TV's second "Golden Age"," CBS, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/welcome-to-tvs-

second-golden-age/, accessed 24 January 2019.

42. “Who's Watching What: TV Shows Ranked by Racial and Ethnic Groups,” USA Today, 28

June 2017, https://eu.usatoday.com/story/life/tv/2017/06/27/whos-watching-what-tv-

shows-ranked-racial-and-ethnic-groups/103199848/, accessed 19 August 2018; “For Us By

Us? The Mainstream Appeal of Black Content,” Nielson.com, 8 February 2017,

http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2017/for-us-by-us-the-mainstream-

appeal-of-black-content.html, accessed 19 August 2018.

43. “The New, New TV Golden Age,” CNN, https://www.cnn.com/2013/05/06/showbiz/golden-

age-of-tv, accessed 14 January 2019; Littleton, Cynthia, "Peak TV: Surge From Streaming Services,

Cable Pushes 2015 Scripted Series Tally to 409," Variety, Variety Media, LLC, 16 December 2015,

accessed 12 January 2016; David Carr, "Barely Keeping Up in TV's New Golden Age," The New

York Times. Accessed 24 January 2019.

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44. Darnell Hunt, “Race in the Writers’ Room: How Hollywood Whitewashes the Stories

that Shape America,” Foreword by Mara Brock Akil, https://

hollywood.colorofchange.org/, accessed 18 August 2018.

45. Ibid.

46. “Claiming the Future of Black TV,” The Atlantic, 29 January 2017, https://

www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/01/claiming-the-future-of-black-

tv/514562/, accessed 17 August 2018.

47. Amiri Baraka, Negro Digest, 14:6 (April 1965): 65.

48. Jerry Watts, Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual (New York: New York

University Press, 2001); see Woodard, Nation Within a Nation.

49. David L. Smith, “Amiri Baraka and the Black Arts of Black Art,” boundary 2 15:1/2

(Autumn, 1986 - Winter, 1987): 235-254.

50. Correctional Populations in the United States, 2013 (NCJ 248479). Published December 2014 by

U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). By Lauren E. Glaze and Danielle Kaeble, BJS statisticians,

https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=5177, accessed 6 August 2018; Adam Gopnik,

“The Caging of America,” The New Yorker, 30 January 2012.

51. It is exceedingly rare for a police officer to be found guilty of killing someone while on

duty. Studies reveal that over 99 percent of police killings of civilians are never convicted.

In fact, although about 1,000 people are killed by police annually, none was convicted in

2014 and 2015. Matt Ferner and Nick Wing, “Here’s How Many Cops Got Convicted Of

Murder Last Year For On-Duty Shootings,” The Huffington Post, 13 January 2016. https://

www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/police-shooting-

convictions_us_5695968ce4b086bc1cd5d0da, accessed 11 February 2019.

52. Dozens of studies have documented widespread, national, historical and

contemporary racial bias in the criminal justice system, from rates of police stops,

convictions, sentencing, in every region of the country. See Michelle Alexander, The New

Jim Crow: Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness (New York: The New Press, 2012); John F.

Pfaff, Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform (New

York: Basic Books, 2017).

53. “Real life is the spoiler alert for Fox’s new ‘Shots Fired,’” The Undefeated, 21 March 2017,

https://theundefeated.com/features/fox-shots-fired/, accessed 19 August 2018.

54. Ibid.

55. Ibid.

56. “‘Being Mary Jane’ Finale Addresses Police Brutality Against Black Women In

Disturbing Closing Scene,” The Urban Daily, 16 December 2015, https://

theurbandaily.cassiuslife.com/3081496/being-mary-jane-finale/.

57. “‘Empire’ is Fearlessly Tackling Black Live Matter,” Screener, 28 September 2016, http://

screenertv.com/television/empire-season-3-tackles-black-lives-matter-police-brutality/,

accessed 2 August 2018.

58. The term “Hip-Hop Generation,” has been adopted by some scholars and journalists to

describe those African Americans born between 1964 and 1982, raised with hip-hop music

as a salient cultural marker in an era after both the Civil Rights and Black Power

Movements. Additionally, this makes a critical demographic distinction between the

white Generation X that overlaps temporally with this group. These two generations,

though of the same age, matured in very different social, political and cultural contexts,

thereby necessitating different nomenclature and theoretical framing. See Jeffrey O. G.

Ogbar, Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (Lawrence: University Press of

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Kansas, 2007) and Bakari Kitwana, The Hip-Hop Generation Young Blacks and the Crisis in

African-American Culture (San Jose: Civitas Books, 2003).

59. “Luke Cage Season 2 Episodes Are Named after Pete Rock & CL Smooth Songs,”

Complex, 7 March 2018, https://www.complex.com/pop-culture/2018/03/luke-cage-

season-2-episodes-named-after-pete-rock-cl-smooth-songs, accessed 20 August 2018.

60. “For Us By Us?”.

61. The country’s highest-rated show on cable TV, “The Walking Dead,” hosts a

multiracial cast, with main characters who are black, white, and Latino. https://

www.usatoday.com/story/life/tv/2016/11/01/robert-bianco-why-tv-needs-

diversity/92839696/; Alex Welch, “‘The Walking Dead’ Returns on Top,” 15 February 2019,

https://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/weekly-ratings/cable-top-25-feb-4-10-2019/,

accessed 17 February 2019; “Who's Watching What: TV Shows Ranked by Racial and

Ethnic Groups,” USA Today, 28 June 2017, https://eu.usatoday.com/story/life/

tv/2017/06/27/whos-watching-what-tv-shows-ranked-racial-and-ethnic-

groups/103199848/, accessed 19 August 2018; “For Us By Us?”.

62. “The Black Arts Movement (BAM) by Kalamu ya Salaam,” African American Literature Book Club,

https://aalbc.com/authors/article.php?id=2087, accessed 12 August 2018.

ABSTRACTS

Beginning in the late 1960s, the Black Arts Movement grew as the cultural wing of the Black

Power Movement. It was represented by a rich cross section of artistic work, often forged by

young urban artists in genres as diverse as music, dance, visual arts, literature and theatre. No

aesthetic was unaffected by inflections of this new black consciousness. This article explores the

ways in which, a half-century after the Black Arts Movement, African Americans in television

have cultivated an aesthetic and politics that resonate with the core thrust of the Black Arts

Movement, one that sets black people in the center of their own cultural and political narratives,

and inextricably bound to the wider movements of social justice in black communities.

INDEX

Keywords: Black Arts Movement, Black Lives Matter, Black Power Movement, TV, Arts

AUTHOR

JEFFREY O.G. OGBAR

Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar is Professor of History and Director of the Center for the Study of Popular

Music at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, Connecticut, USA. His research has centered on

African American history. He has developed courses, lectures, and published articles on subjects

as varied as pan-Africanism, African American Catholics, civil rights struggles, black nationalism,

and hip-hop. Professor Ogbar has held fellowships at Harvard University’s W.E.B. Du Bois

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Institute for Afro-American Research. Here he completed work on his book, Black Power: Radical

Politics and African American Identity (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), which won Choice

Magazine’s “Outstanding Academic Title” in 2005. His book Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and

Politics of Rap (University Press of Kansas, 2007) won the W.E.B. Du Bois Book Prize (Northeast

Black Studies Association, 2008). He is also editor of multiple books, including a co-edited

volume, Keywords for African American Studies (New York University Press, 2018).

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© 2019. This work is published under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5 (the “License”).

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