Television

Images of African Americans

Some of television's earliest nonfictional representations of African Americans arose in relation to the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. News coverage of the movement tended both to generate and to record spectacular violence against black people engaged in nonviolent protest. Such coverage brought the problem of southern racism into stark relief, thus collating the black body in pain with that of a suffering national body still wounded by sectionalism and southern intransigence. During the same period, network documentaries such as CBS's The Harlem Temper (1963), NBC's Sit-In (1960), and ABC's Cast the First Stone (1960) explored the effects of racism in an extended exercise of national soul-searching. In general, then, informational programming during the early 1960s tended persistently to link depictions of racial identity to broad social ills.

Shows that were much more optimistic about race relations tended to link individual black characters to the fortunes of their race, as exemplified by The Bill Cosby Show (1969–71). This program, Cosby's follow-up to I Spy (1965–68), told the story of Chet Kincaid, an athletic coach in an integrated urban high school. In the 1970s, the various sitcoms produced by Norman Lear's Tandem Productions, including All in the Family (CBS, 1971–79), Sanford and Son (NBC, 1972– 77), Good Times (CBS, 1974–79), and The Jeffersons (CBS, 1975–85), definitively established the link between racial representation and social problems. This link developed because of these series’ “liberal” intentions, as the project of representing racism (All in the Family); racial striving, deracination, and assimilation (The Jeffersons); or raced poverty (Sanford and Son, Good Times) effectively combined racial subjects and race-as-problem.

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