“All in the Family”: Black Power Television and the Legacy of Soul! by Mark Anthony Neal
It was a homecoming. Stokely Carmichael, now Kwame Touré, the charismatic Black Power leader, returned from his exile in Guinea, and took a seat across from Ellis Haizlip, the equally charismatic, if not enigmatic, host and producer of Soul! The scene is notable, if only because we’d be hard-pressed to think about an exiled Black American figure as significant as Carmichael, who held leadership positions in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and The Black Panther Party, returning to the kind of electronic homecoming that he received during this 1973 broadcast.
As Gayle Wald, author of It’s Been Beautiful: SOUL! and Black Power Television suggests Carmichael’s appearance was a “noteworthy departure from the antagonism characteristic of Carmichael’s network TV appearances.” A homecoming: an apt term for a public television series for which every creed, color and ideology of Negro possible, was in the family, in a manner that remains unmatched 50 years after Soul! left the airwaves.
The title of It’s Been Beautiful, Wald’s fine study of this singular era of Black media and cultural production, is drawn from Haizlip’s conversation with Carmichael in what would be the last season of the series. As Wald notes, Haizlip utters the phrase twice, “both times the phrase serves as a heartfelt affirmation of Soul!’s achievements in the face of imminent demise.”
Indeed, Carmichael himself argued that the future of the Black liberation movement lay in control of Black representation in US media. A half-century later, SOUL! remains, perhaps, the best example of the possibilities of progressive Black media.
Soul!’s emergence occurs within the context of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, the Kerner Commission on race, and the early years of the Public Broadcasting System (1969). The impact of Soul!, which ran from 1968 until 1973, has been obscured, save those who were witness to its genius. That it was a contentious five years — both in terms of challenging White Supremacist representations of Blackness and so-called Black community concerns about the public face of Blackness — goes without saying.
Soul! was unapologetically Black, and therein were the tensions that framed the show’s very existence. With the Block literally hot, as major American cities were going up in flames, the onus on Public Television and the major networks was to address years of under-representation, misrepresentation and disinformation about Black life in America.
Yet Haizlip outright rejected such a role for Soul! telling the New York Times “We cannot again sacrifice the black audience to educate white people…They will have to find their education elsewhere.” And for Haizlip, Black knowledge was more the product of what one of his media progeny Tom Joyner would later call “partying with a purpose.” As Wald writes “In Haizlip’s alternative formulation of ‘educational television’, a concert by (Curtis) Mayfield and the Impressions might be ‘more meaningful that a three-hour lecture’.”
None of these issues would have mattered if not for the genius at the center of it all. There is simply no contemporary figure that even remotely equates with Ellis Haizlip — unless we were to reimagine Jimmy Fallon as a Black, Queer, less funny, smarter, and more cosmopolitan man — and even then, the translation fails.
From a 21st century framing, Haizlip’s queerness reads inconsequential, even an afterthought. Figures like Haizlip carried heavy loads negotiating an emergent hypermasculine Black nationalist discourse; witness Eldridge Cleaver’s homophobic screed on Baldwin in Soul on Ice. Haizlip’s strategic affect was more Dick Cavett, than Jason Holliday of Portrait of Jason fame.
This didn’t mean that Haizlip foreclosed the possibilities of tweaking notions of Black Respectability. Although Haizlip’s diction was clearly classed, in that talented-tenth manner that still held sway in the late 1960s, Haizlip, as Wald observes, made audible his queerness. Haizlip was “not only defying the social contract that demanded silence around the presence of so-called sissies, faggots, and bulldaggers in black communities,” Wald writes, “but also channeling and amplifying that which was already audible in his spoken performances.”
The irony is that in the context of mainstream audiences for which Blackness was by default “queer,” Haizlip actually had quite a bit of freedom to push the envelope, particularly in the context of Black performance. As the term “Soul” represented both a new Black aesthetics and politics — even James Brown’s boldly proclaimed the significance of “Soul Power” — Soul!, Wald writes “created a space for the sonic exploration of Pan-Africanism as a political orientation or ideology that cut across national, linguistic and ethnic divisions.”
Instructive are two successive episodes from November of 1972. The first featured the music of Willie Colon’s orchestra with Hector Lavoe on vocals, Tito Puente, and a young Felipe Luciano, a co-founder of The Young Lords and original member of The Last Poets. On the following episode, Haizlip paired legendary Afro-Cuban musician Mongo Santamaria (“Watermelon Man”) with the vocal trio LaBelle. Haizlip chose to dispense with a host, allowing, as Wald explains, the music to articulate the “previous episode’s thesis of the common Africanist roots of New World Black musical practices.”
Haizlip’s boldness was not lost on audiences when he sat down for an hour-long conversation with Nation of Islam (NOI) national spokesperson Minister Louis Farrakhan. The episode was broadcast in the fall of 1972, three years before the death of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad and more than a decade before Farrakhan became a national figure during Rev. Jesse Jackson’s Presidential campaign in 1984. Both host and guest were keenly aware of who each other was, and their meaningful political differences, particularly regarding homosexuality.
Min. Farrakhan remains such a fascinating figure within Black America — hence Haizlip’s respect — if only because of his longevity; here is a man who was in the trenches with Malcolm X (and eventually competing trenches) and at the height of Black Lives Matter hosted young Black activists in his Chicago home. Haizlip’s conversation with Minister Farrakhan remains one of the boldest moments of Black non-fiction television.
Indeed, when Arsenio Hall symbolically signed-off on his popular late night television show in 1994 by inviting Min. Farrakhan to appear for an hour-long interview (months before the show was cancelled), he likely took a cue from Haizlip’s example; as a teenager Hall appeared on Soul! as a magician in 1971.
Soul!’s eventual demise was not a surprise as it came as the Nixon administration was pushing back against government funding of public affairs programming that raised critical issues about the ongoing Vietnam War. There’s no strong proof that Soul! was specifically targeted, though there were folk in the administration aware of critiques from entertainers on the Black Left. Eugene McDaniels, for example, was essentially dropped from Atlantic Records after the release of his anti-Nixon Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse (1971).
Though not directly linked to the White House’s efforts, the Corporation for Public Broadcast decided to defund Soul!. There were no crowdfunding options or digital platforms available at the time, so the dream of progressive Black television died on the vine.
In his obituary for Haizlip, who died of lung cancer in 1991, the late Amiri Baraka wrote “So we remember Ellis as we remember the times when we were winning.” For many who consume Black-oriented media, it would be beautiful to feel like we are winning again.
Mark Anthony Neal is the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of African American Studies and Professor of English and Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at Duke University. The author of several books including Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities and Black Ephemera: The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive, both from NYU Press. His next book Save a Seat for Me: Meditations on Black Masculinity and Fatherhood will be published by Simon & Schuster.
