TV, Civil Rights and President Obama

When Barack Obama took the oath as President of the United States, I felt a surge of pride and hope, like just about every other American. But I also felt a personal connection because of work I did in the late 1960s—work that finally came to full fruition that cold January morning in Washington, D.C.
From September 1967 to March of 1968, I served as chief research assistant and writer for the Chapter on Media and Race Relations of the Kerner Commission report on civil disorders. Few remember now that in the mid-1960s, the United States sometimes felt like it was coming apart at the seams. President Kennedy had been assassinated in 1963. Violent protests against the Vietnam war were on the rise. In the summer of 1965, racial riots exploded in the Watts area of Los Angeles. In the summer of 1967, it was the turn of Newark and, most ominously, Detroit, where rioting continued for several days and left 43 people dead.
In July 1967, a deeply worried President Lyndon Johnson formed a commission to investigate the causes of the riots and make recommendations. At the time, most white people thought the cause was communist agitation and media exaggeration. Black people—“Negroes” in the parlance of the time—lived happy lives and had nothing to riot about.
President Johnson knew this wasn’t true, but needed a commission and a report to give him political cover to do anything. He named Otto Kerner—the governor of Illinois—as its chairman, and appointed David Ginsburg, a smart, savvy Washington lawyer, its executive director. David, in turn, hired a Harvard Law School professor, Abram Chayes, to supervise the Chapter on Media and Race Relations. Both Johnson and Ginsburg knew that this chapter would be the biggest hot potato of the entire report. The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution prohibits government infringement on freedom of the press, and, in those days, the press guarded that right zealously.
So, Ginsburg chose Chayes, who had been his law partner—and before that was President Kennedy’s State Department legal adviser and a key player in the Cuban missile crisis—to deal with his hot potato. Ginsburg said at the time: “I trust Abe Chayes more than anyone in America.”
Which is where I came in. I was a third-year law student at Harvard and, through no fault of Harvard’s, bored. I didn’t really want to be a lawyer. Before law school, I had been a civil rights reporter for Life magazine, and that’s where my heart still was. I had met Abe the year before, and he knew all this. So, he called me in on the first day of school, explained that he was taking on this assignment, but I would do most of the work—which involved talking to “media” people all over the country and writing the first draft of the chapter.  Plus, I’d be paid. It sounded too good to be true, but this was one of those rare cases where it wasn’t. I spent the next six months traveling around the country—often with Abe—exploring, analyzing and ultimately writing about the media and race.
The Commission’s findings were famously summed up in its opening sentence:  “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” Our chapter reflected this, praised the media for care and restraint in much of the riot coverage, but made it clear that newspapers and TV were a white person’s world. Run by whites, staffed by whites, and aimed at white audiences. We said until that changed, little else would change either.
Somewhat to our surprise—but to Abe’s and my great satisfaction—our chapter was generally well received by the media community, and slowly but steadily change began to happen. Newspapers hired black reporters and gradually made some of them editors. TV stations, sometimes more slowly than steadily, began to hire black people as on-air talent. During the 1970s and 1980s, black faces began to appear in TV dramas and sitcoms, and by the 1990s, I noticed many more black faces in TV commercials. Gradually, the mainstream media discovered a black audience and reached for it, in the process accustoming white people to the part of America that was black.
Obviously, there were many factors at work in all of this besides the Kerner Commission report. But as an author of the media chapter, and an observer of the American media ever since, I believe ours was the first voice to make these points and get the people who mattered to pay attention. Forty years later—not so long a time for peaceful social revolution—Barack Obama became the President of the United States. I’m proud to have had a small part, many years ago, in that drama.     
Bruce Paisner is the president and CEO of the International Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.