Revolution Televised.pdf

Conclusion 177
nels take more risks and include topical material in their original
films and programming. 15 The increased black viewership of these
cable networks has correlated with the rise in films dealing with
African American subject matter. These films play a role in recuperating
lost African American stories within wider U.S. historical
memory. Many of these stories are disregarded in official accounts
of American history.
Three films relevant as examples of little-recognized stories finding
a space on television are the Tuskegee Airmen (HBO, 1996),
Miss Evers’ Boys (HBO, 1997), and Boycott (2001). The Tuskegee
Airmen relays the story of the fight for the black airborne to
fly air combat in World War II; Miss Evers’ Boys, as previously
mentioned, discusses the victims of the Tuskegee experiment; and
Boycott deals with the early days of Martin Luther King Jr. and his
participation in the Montgomery bus boycott.
In American film and television, history is recuperated in two distinct
ways. Hollywood revisions of black history include films such
as Mississippi Burning (1988) and Ghosts of Mississippi (1996),
and they use white protagonists as docents of black history. 16 For
instance, Rob Reiner’s Ghosts of Mississippi begins with the assassination
of Civil Rights leader Medgar Evers and tells the story of
a white lawyer’s fight to prosecute Evers’s murderer in 1989. The
story focuses on the lawyer and his victimization by the white racists
in Mississippi. The audience is barely given any information
about Medgar Evers, and therefore the film does little to increase
the public’s knowledge of the fallen leader. Indeed, the construction
of the narrative leads the audience to care less about the story of
a racist prosecuted for a heinous crime than about the lawyer and
whether he or his family will be hurt because he went, as the advertisement
for the film indicated, “beyond the call of duty.”
Although cable participates in this type of historical recuperation,
it has at times created a forum to temper the process typical of
films such as Ghosts of Mississippi. Miss Evers’ Boys unquestioningly
places the blame for the syphilis experiments on the shoulders
of the U.S. government, which conceived of the plan and carried it
out. The story is heard from the perspective of Miss Evers through
her first-person voice-over and portrays her interactions with the
men who went untreated for the curable disease. The Tuskegee
Airmen clearly establishes the role of black men in World War II.
African Americans have played a significant role in every U.S. war,