Tony Brown’s Journal Provoked Thought…and Now It’s Gone
Tony Brown’s Journal was one of a series of shows on PBS that was a part of our Black Landscape
As children, we take a lot of things for granted.
Although we were the children born into a world of integration, growing up Black in the 70s and 80s still meant that we lived in an insular community.
Many of the stores we frequented were Black, and even in Denver, Colorado, outside of one white family, the only time we were around anyone other than Black was at school.
Our standard of beauty was mostly the Jet Beauty of the Week and we also found out what records were charting in Jet. Ebony, a monthly magazine, provided a broader picture of what was going on in Black America — that’s where we would find essays on the issues facing our people or artist exposes. Soul Train was the place to see the latest dances and your favorite artists lip synch to their hits.
But if you wanted to know what the intelligentsia was thinking or what books were coming out by Black authors, you could switch over to PBS (Channel 6 for us) and check Tony Brown’s Journal.
This was a part of our Black Landscape.
It’s been nine years since PBS’ longest running show ended its 40 year run but it’s certainly missed.
Long before Frances Cress Welsing or Minister Farrakhan appeared on Donahue or Nightline, they could be found on Tony Brown’s Journal.
Where most white host would ask the controversial, exploitative questions, Brown, the well-read host with a BA in Social Work and MA in Psychiatric Social Work, always challenged his guests by asking the questions that the informed person would ask.
It’s also worth noting that the majority of his guests were extremely articulate and held strong views so by the time they were sitting in front of Mike Wallace or someone, they were composed and resolved.
I don’t have a memory of a first episode or an “A Ha” episode. It was just a show that was always there. Like I would later do with the Arsenio Hall Show, I would turn to Tony Brown’s Journal, see who the guest would be, maybe watch for a few minutes, if it grabbed me, I would stay.
Tony Brown’s Journal was where I first learned of AIDS…and not in a conventional sense. His show had various episodes that either challenged the notion of what AIDS was and how it was transmitted or how one should treat the disease. But that was just one topic.
Tony Brown’s Journal, a six month, weekly show, included a variety of topics ranging from Black theater, the disproportionate rate of Blacks being diagnosed with cancer, to the four part series like “Thank God,” that focused on the historic significance of the Black Church or “The Color of Freedom” which focused on the economic situation of modern Black folk, which was also in four parts.
These episodes dealt with us and our conditions.
Tony Brown’s Journal was Black. In fact, it used to be called Black Journal.
Trumpet player turned cab driver, John Smith, was driving a middle-aged woman passenger around 9:15pm on a sweltering July night in 1967 when he was pulled over by Newark Officers Pontrelli and DeSimone. Smith had a suspended license. This must have really upset Pontrelli and DeSimone because they beat him to the point where local residents thought Smith dead as the officers dragged him into the Fourth Precinct.
Over the next six days, Newark turned into a war zone, the worst in a series of uprisings which began in Watts in 1965. Newark was the icing on the 329 rebellions cake which spawned the Kerner Commission. The controversial report sent liberals scurrying for answers. National Education Television (NET) with backing from the Ford Foundation commissioned Al Perlmutter to make a documentary on these uprisings.
Perlmutter thought a better idea would be to make a show that gave a voice to the people in question. From that, Black Journal was born with Perlmutter as the Executive Producer…but that didn’t last long. The staff recognized the contradiction in the NET advertised “by, for and about Black people.” Three months in the Black staff ousted Perlmutter.
Charles Hobson, who would later go on to work on Like It Is, remembers it like this:
When I went to work for Black Journal in its early days, more than two years ago, it wasn’t like it is now. I helped lead a walk-out by most of the Blacks on the show…
Hobson was one of the 11 staff members who went on strike, made the incident public via a press conference. This garnered a lot of attention and press:
…which resulted in them naming William Greaves executive producer.
Black shows exploded on Public Networks between 68 and 71 to the tune of 13 shows: Our People (WTTW), A Black’s View of the News (WCIU), For Blacks Only, Minority Matters (KCTV), Black Voices (KTCA), Job Man Caravan (SCETV), Black Horizons (WQED), Like It Is (WABC), Inside Bedford Stuyvesant (WNYW), Soul! (WNET), and Colored People’s Time (CPT) to name a few.
At the time of the Black Journal’s start, Tony Brown was a few months behind with Detroit’s Colored People’s Time. Like, Newark, Detroit had suffered serious uprisings the past year. Local officials were seeking answers and also working to build shows for “the troubled” Black population.
Although CPT was not yet the serious, hard-hitting force of news that Brown had envisioned, the aim of the program, as see in the original proposal, was clear:
Blacks are either invisible or stereotyped on TV, and their actions and statements are continually misunderstood and misinterpreted. The program will further attempt to correct these distortions by emphasizing the positive aspects of black and other ethnic cultures, and by allowing their entertainers to conceive and direct their own project and performers. American Black Journal
By this writer’s estimation, CPT — from the jump-cut, jazz infused opening to the performance art ending segment, is still more progressive than the majority of the Black shows that have been on the air since.
Meanwhile back East, William Greaves decided after two years that he wanted to get back to independent filmmaking and Tony Brown took over for him. The year was 1971.
When Greaves was the lead, the NET money was still flowing and Black Journal was able to train young, Black, documentarians who would populate many of the Black-centered shows mentioned above. The staff were trained by being able to go out and make mini-docs; the first episode had reports from Oakland, Harvard, Harlem, & Atlanta.
But after Greaves departed, the budget was cut in half and the Black Journal had to find a new way of making money. This is when the genius of Tony Brown kicked in.
When I first started someone said to me, ‘Tony, money makes things happen.’ I really didn’t know what that meant. I heard the words; I just hadn’t seen what I’ve seen in the last six years. Money does make things happen. Money makes people treat you nice. Money makes people give you better times. Money makes people concerned about you. Money makes people give you things — if you don’t need it. Producing is a business. Tony Brown
Tony Brown took the program from PBS to syndication and back to PBS, initially raising $225,000 from Pepsi in 77 and by 1980 getting that number up to $2 million. By the mid 90s, Brown had grown his weekly audience to over 5 million people.
Tony Brown was always ahead of the curve. As early as 1970, Brown advocated that cable was the future for Black television, predating the actual ascent of Robert Johnson’s BET by ten years. He also saw the way forward in 1996 where Brown stated that a computer should be in every Black home and took his show online that same year. For perspective, Yahoo! was launched in 1995.
Despite that, the world is ever-changing and most people under 30 have never been exposed to his show. Any hopes of turning them on to the show is futile. Where most older shows can be found on Netflix, Hulu, etc, Tony Brown’s Journal episodes are locked behind a paywall on his site.
My older brother and I recently watched this clip:
Not only were we blown away by the level of Tony Brown’s questioning (“You say that culture is the variable in success which means conversely that culture is the variable in failure…”)but we were astonished by how prepared Dr. Thomas Sowell was and how quick he was able to fire back answers (he spoke of ‘selective migration’). But even more confounding to us was the fact that we watched Tony Brown’s Journal as children.
And, while we may have taken it for granted, this level of discourse shaped and formed our minds and prepared us for Public Enemy, KRS One, African Studies, Islam, and all things conscious.
Having positive images that challenged our everyday form of thinking, once a week for six months a year is not something to take lightly. I recognize that now when talking to the generation below me, many of whom are just now being introduced to these type of ideas in their 30s.
Consider the generation after them, people just coming into their 20s…
I can’t tell Mr. Brown how to monetize his site but if his legacy is important to him and he wants the younger generation to have the blessing of over 1,000 shows to show them where they come from and how far we’ve made it (and how many steps we took back), I would hope that he would release the stranglehold on his archives and let a few episodes go on YouTube. Because not only is his show gone from the air, for the most part, it’s gone from the memory of the people and Tony Brown’s Journal is too important to be forgotten.
Below is a look at some of the ads that were posted in Ebony, Jet, Crisis, & Black Enterprise in the 70s & 80s:
