Black Omnibus was a thoughtful response to a segregated and unequal America. Too bad it didn’t last
When the media wasn’t adequately representing black lives, Black Omnibus showcased black art and thought in effortless ways
In a 1973 performance of “Don’t Explain,” the singer, actress, and dancer Paula Kelly sits alone, bathed in a golden light, sometimes vignetted with a soft seventies bokeh. Her performance took place in an episode of Black Omnibus, a variety and public affairs show hosted by James Earl Jones. The music swells, shifts from its slow jazz into a sensuous funk as Kelly rises from her seat to meet a male dancer and the two perform an emotional duet.
The change from singing to dancing, from torch song to sinewy R&B, is seamless, a tight three-minute history of the range of black arts. It’s not an anomaly. Black Omnibus was meant to showcase black art and thought in effortless ways. When Kelly’s performance ends, Jones, seated in front of a stark black background, lists an impressive roster of black women and notes, “Black women have risen to impressive prominence in every category and endeavor. They have excelled and often led the way. We as black people can be proud of that fact.” He then introduces his next guests, tennis legend Althea Gibson and Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, the first black congresswoman from California, to talk about race, gender, and their intersections. There’s no confusing Black Omnibus’s point of view: art, music, culture, and politics all viewed through a distinctly black lens. The show lasted for only 12 episodes, but those episodes were groundbreaking and were part of a much larger movement of culture-shaping black arts programming.
The nationally syndicated show (described by its executive producer Hal Graham as being “the first major black-oriented series designed for nationwide commercial television”) began filming in Los Angeles in 1972. Each week, more than 60 stations aired the program. As Jones explained in a 1973 interview with Jet magazine, “My guests are from … the whole spectrum of black culture. Underlying the idea, though, is the contribution made by black men and women to the American culture.” Black Omnibus’s format certainly wasn’t new. It was based loosely on an earlier arts and public affairs program called Omnibus, hosted by Alistair Cooke from 1952 to 1961. Unlike Omnibus, however, as Graham told the Indianapolis Recorder before the show’s premiere, “[Black Omnibus] will serve as a showcase for young and unexposed black talent.”
The show was revolutionary, but it was also really fun. Rufus Thomas, who’d had hits with “Walking the Dog” and “Do the Funky Chicken,” showed up on Black Omnibus in electric pink shorts and shirt, complete with matching cape and boots, to talk about the history of black dance and to demonstrate a new dance, “The Funky Robot.” Richard Pryor spoke about his life and career, causing Jones to barely keep it together at times as Pryor charmed him, the studio audience, and anyone watching. And Lou Rawls wowed a smoke-filled studio with a velvety performance of “In the Evening (When the Sun Goes Down).” Jones managed to seamlessly move from a discussion with a pre-Roots Alex Haley to Willie Bobo’s Latin Jazz, with full recognition that all of it — music, literature, politics — was a vital part of the black experience.
Black Omnibus wasn’t the first to bring this sort of programming to television. It was part of a sustained movement to present black art and thought to the American people at large. These shows wanted “to connect the dots between black culture and black arts,” professor Gayle Wald, author of the book It’s Been Beautiful: Soul! and Black Power Television, told Timeline. When Black Omnibus premiered, in 1973, it joined the ranks of shows like Soul!, which aired on New York public television from 1968 to 1973; Black Journal, which premiered in 1968; and Say Brother, a public affairs program produced by Boston public television, also introduced in 1968. These shows, Wald says, “were infused with a sense of possibility.”
These shows weren’t created in a vacuum. Rather, they were a real and visible response to a segregated and unequal America. With the memories of 1967’s “long hot summer” uprisings all across the country still fresh in Americans’ minds, the Johnson administration formed the Kerner Commission, a panel tasked with finding out the root causes of the uprisings. One of its findings was that the media wasn’t adequately representing black lives: “The Commission’s major concern with the news media is not in riot reporting as such, but in the failure to report adequately on race relations and ghetto problems and to bring more Negroes into journalism.” There needed to be more black people in every level of journalism, the report argued more reporters, editors, commentators, and executives. Without black journalists, black lives were just an abstraction. Public affairs programs like Black Omnibus took those abstract lives and made them real, presented them to an audience that was aching to be heard, to be seen.
Black Omnibus, and the earlier regional shows, saw their programs as an opportunity to both present topics that were of interest to black viewers and move black writers, producers, and journalists into prominent positions. As media studies professor Devorah Heitner writes in her book Black Power TV, there was a growing sense that “representation was a right, not a privilege.” Black Omnibus featured Jones as a writer, and, with the exception of the director and the producer, all crew members working on the show were black. “We planned it that way from the beginning,” Jones told Jet in March 1973.
Later that year, Jet announced that the show would be returning for a second season, this time with 20 episodes. It would still be about introducing audiences to unheralded performers and thinkers, but it would also feature big names like Nina Simone, Aretha Franklin, and Hank Aaron, although “for much less than usual money.” But it wasn’t to be. Black Omnibus, along with Soul! and another public affairs program called Black Arts, all had gone off the air by 1973. “There was discomfort [with these shows],” explains Wald. “They were always under siege, and having to justify themselves from the very beginning.”
In the first episode of Black Omnibus, Jones introduces the show by invoking the arrival of the first slave ships on the Virgina shore. “That,” he says, “was the birth of the blues.” He continues, hailing the spirit of black people who were able to survive those dark days and linking it to the present: “This is a tribute to that spirit and to the fact that today it is very much alive in music and poetry and art.” There is something light in his voice, perhaps the pride in this new venture, and the thought of all it could become. “Black Omnibus,” he tells the audience with a smile, “is the whole wide world of the black experience.”
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