It's Been Beautiful: Soul! and Black Power Television

Abstract

It's Been Beautiful: and Power Television by Gayle Wald (with photographs by Chester Higgins). Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 288 pp, ISBN-10: 0822358379, reviewed by Todd Steven Burroughs.This book examines the right story to tell-one of, in author Gayle Wald's words, fragile alliance of liberal and radical interests, both public and private-and, thankfully, arrives at the right place (p. 39). Soul! (1968-1973), a nationally distributed public television program that could loosely be described as the radical sister of the more commercial Soul Train, fired the imagination and reflected the multi-faceted sensibilities of its community of viewers. Using largely untapped wells of research about the early days of American public television vis-a-vis America, Wald relates a nuanced story of how the condescension of white American public television officials seeking to provide an outlet for the angry community in the late 1960s, led to a (largely) Black-controlled showcase of the Arts Movement on (largely) aesthetic terms. It is the restrained approach, however, of choosing as this book's scholarship basis intellectual sources outside the soul of Black/African folks that makes this book strangely appealing and more than a little irritating.Soul! (episodes of which can be found online) was first a product of insurrection. Reacting to that outpouring of anger and violence, white funders, somewhat accidentally, allowed a producer, Ellis Haizlip, to have his way. WNET-Channel 13 (now known as Thirteen), then and now the New York-based flagship station of the PBS collective, wanted a companion show to Black Journal, its newsmagazine. initial and white idea of a Black Tonight Show developed under Haizlip into a Arts salon that was cooler than the The Flip Wilson Show and Don Cornelius' large Afro. Wald wisely includes as much of Haizlip's life story into this book as she can fit. (Mr. Soul, a documentary film on Haizlip's life and work done by his niece Melissa Haizlip, is struggling to get funding.) letters of support Soul! received are well used in Wald's book. They show the involvement of the community instead of just describing the appreciation of an audience.It's Been Beautiful builds somewhat on Devorah Heitner's Black Power TV, a pioneering 2013 intellectual narrative on the early days of East Coast public affairs television, and does so with great intellectual gusto. Wald, a professor of English and American Studies at George Washington University, rightly uses the New York-based Soul!-a program that would feature, for example, Nikki Giovanni interviewing James Baldwin or a studio performance of Last Poets, or Earth, Wind and Fire-to find key TV text of the era or as a cultural project joined by common cause to 1960s and 1970s political struggles (p. 4).The show's arc matches its era: Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed two weeks before the grant to create the show was submitted and it was cancelled because PBS's funders, facing the onslaught of the Nixon era and the fading of the Power movement, wanted to create programming that would have Blacks and whites interacting (p. 63).Hence, the author discusses Soul! as a program, along with its performers and producers-are worth the price of the book alone. Wald does not shy away from explaining American culture in all its glory and anger. But she does not seem to want to dig into the African, non-Western roots of what she is seeing and describing. …