Revolution Televised.pdf

22 Reading the Roots of Resistance
Many in the black community recognized its basis in the situational
comedy routines made famous in the days of the TOBA. However,
the middle class felt a sense of shame with respect to performers
from these black communal working-class sites, an embarrassment
that escalated with the movement of these performers into television.
Outside of trying to negotiate the intent of the producers,
one can still see this as a mainstream venue that publicly broadcast
black images and created a sense of community across black
America, derived from seeing black people on television. However,
the show was pulled from production in 1953, and African
Americans once again became practically invisible on mainstream
network television, except for the short-lived Nat King Cole Show
in 1956, in news stories, and in supporting roles. The mid-1960s
signaled the reemergence of African Americans with the premiere
of I Spy in 1965, the four-month-long Sammy Davis Jr. Show in
1966, and Julia in 1968.
The discourse surrounding Amos ’n’ Andy allows us to understand
some of the key concerns over black televisual images. The
overwhelming desire to uplift the race again framed many of the
discussions of 1970s television. Through an understanding of both
the shift between performance in black communal spaces and performance
in mainstream television and the clear class divisions in
African American society, I propose that one look beyond the notion
of positive and negative images. Although I certainly identify
and consider the ways in which the media sought to quell black
voices and often succeeded in doing so, I highlight the many ways
in which black people used the media, specifically television, for
community purposes, as a political voice for social change, for enjoyment,
and for self-affirmation. As the following chapters reveal,
television of this era is complex, and rereading these texts proves
fruitful in unearthing a wealth of information about African American
participation and resistance within the burgeoning medium.
This methodology promotes the recuperation and reassessment
of African American popular culture and is applicable to the interrogation
of the entertainment industry as a whole and television in
particular. An elitist division continues between what is considered
high and low culture. Many forms of popular culture are still seen
as low culture and not worth serious discussion or consideration.
This system of designation is class, gender, and race based and has
to do with the levels of access to different arenas of culture and who