Looking back over the past 20 years of television, we see what appears to be an extraordinary mirror of the changes in our society vis-a-vis the Black community. One searched nearly in vain 20 years ago for a Black face on the screen.' In the popular media-the newspapers, magazines, radio-there were, 20 years ago, separate Black outlets. In every large city with a sizable Black community, there was a separate newspaper, there were a few Black radio stations, and Ebony, a Black imitation of Life, had begun to reach a national audience from its home base in Chicago, all of which served as an antidote to the solid white press and radio. But television was too expensive; there was not sufficient Black money to finance a separate TV outlet. It was 22 years ago that the Supreme Court decreed that separate education was unlawful. And 20 years ago that Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus. And in the intervening years, these two dramatic events led to a change in television. More and more Blacks began to appear on the screen, though at first only on news programs as victims, victims of cattle prods, water hoses, and all the other devices used by white citizens and police to deter them from seeking their civil rights, though no doubt some people saw them not as victims but as aggressors, demanding privileges rather than rights. We also watched on television Black children and their parents and Black college students having rocks hurled at them, invectives screamed at them, and even the governor of a southern state block their entrance to a school door as they attempted to enter previously all-white schools, though the violence of early efforts to desegregate schools was mild by comparison with that of more recent years. By 1968, the news on television regularly featured some civil rights events and then, in that year, all other news was overshadowed by the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the news of the fierce reaction across the country to his death, the burning of white property in Black sections of major cities.