New Voices in the 1960s
While the major production categories of music, lecture, panels, drama, and documentary from the 1950s remained conventional in educational radio, and later public radio, for decades, the 1960s saw some changes in the topics and guests on programs. NAEB member stations responded to political and social changes, particularly in the final years of the decade, with more series focusing on contemporary debates and problems. Shifts were particularly notable in the attention to the perspectives and experiences of women and people of color and the presence of their voices in NAEB series, even as some issues from the earlier decades of educational radio persisted.
The presence of underrepresented voices, particularly Black voices, increased in the programs distributed by the NAEB during the 1960s, but only in certain contexts and roles. This increase mirrors, in the context of educational radio, what Devorah Heitner found in her study of Black public affairs television, as educational and commercial television started Black programs after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Heitner 2013, 23). While many programs Heitner analyzes featured Black hosts and guests, most NAEB programs that focused on the experiences of Black people still had white people as their hosts and key creators. This approach of featuring people from underrepresented groups as guests, rather than the decision-makers and creators of a broadcast, appears frequently in NAEB programs from the 1960s.
Comment on a Minority, a thirteen-episode series from 1960, exemplifies how educational broadcasting began to address race more frequently in the 1960s, although the voices highlighted by the programs were not always speaking about their own experiences (Richter 1960). Produced by WBAA and Purdue University in Indiana, the program presents seven Black interviewees across its thirteen episodes. These speakers worked toward civil rights in various fields, such as the sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, ministers Benjamin E. Mays and William Borders, lawyer and author Pauli Murray, and Howard University history professor Rayford Logan. The guests or speakers in the other episodes were all prominent white civil rights activists or other white people involved in issues of discrimination and race relations. Even in programs that focused on Black experiences in the United States and included Black experts as some of the interviewees like Comment on a Minority, white guests often featured prominently, and the hosts were almost always white men, although a few series with Black hosts were later produced through a 1968 NAEB initiative responding to national events.
The March 1968 release of the Kerner Report, President Johnson’s commission to investigate civil and racial unrest after the race riots between 1964 and 1967, and the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. the following month contributed to a feeling of urgency in addressing our country’s huge racial inequalities across professions, including broadcasting. By May, the NAEB announced the formation of two committees to “examine the role of educational broadcasting regarding programming and employment practices for minority groups,” according to the third report on the initiative, called Programs for the Disadvantaged, from June 13, 1968 (Hobbs 1968, 7). Directed by Kenneth A. Clark from the Metropolitan Applied Research Center (MARC), one committee operated under the auspices of National Educational Radio and the other under Educational Television Stations (divisions of the NAEB), with each reporting back out to NAEB leadership and member stations. Between roughly June and September of that year, Clark and his team began a campaign to gather and disseminate information from and between member stations requesting that they return reports about both their programming for urban and rural audiences. Clark did not wait for all reports to come in before disseminating their contents back out to NAEB leadership and membership. He began issuing weekly reports to both radio and television station members almost immediately, highlighting content being produced and programs being undertaken to encourage training and employment for minorities.
The Programs for the Disadvantaged initiative brought attention to series by and about underrepresented groups, including Seeds of Discontent. The series had an atypical production background for educational radio, as it was actually produced by a Black creator in addition to frequently highlighting Black people’s experiences. The documentary format of Seeds of Discontent also contrasted with the historically typical approaches of mass media overall and educational radio specifically. As a series produced by WDET and distributed by the National Educational Radio Network, Seeds offered an example of audio recorded outside of a studio and capturing interview subjects where they lived and worked. While the genre contained some variety, educational radio had tended to prioritize lectures and in-studio interviews with experts throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s, with narrative series sometimes experimenting with formal possibilities more than other categories. Series like Seeds of Discontent, with the less controlled style of documentary recording, illustrated that alternate formats were possible in nonfiction projects, if still uncommon.
A link to the full eighteenth episode of Seeds of Discontent.
The Programs for the Disadvantaged initiative brought attention to series by and about underrepresented groups, including Seeds of Discontent. The series had an atypical production background for educational radio, as it was actually produced by a Black creator in addition to frequently highlighting Black people’s experiences. The documentary format of Seeds of Discontent also contrasted with the historically typical approaches of mass media overall and educational radio specifically. As a series produced by WDET and distributed by the National Educational Radio Network, Seeds offered an example of audio recorded outside of a studio and capturing interview subjects where they lived and worked. While the genre contained some variety, educational radio had tended to prioritize lectures and in-studio interviews with experts throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s, with narrative series sometimes experimenting with formal possibilities more than other categories. Series like Seeds of Discontent, with the less controlled style of documentary recording, illustrated that alternate formats were possible in nonfiction projects, if still uncommon.
For example, in the eighteenth episode, Smith focuses on Black-led advocacy organizations and interviews Rennie Freeman, director of the West Central Organization, which helped inner-city Detroit residents organize. Early in the episode, Smith states, “We will open the program with his point of view about the July riots, its causes and consequences,” in a clean recording of his measured speech, presumably from the WDET studio. The episode then cuts to a different soundscape with ambient noise, where Smith begins his interview with Freeman. As the men speak, we hear music in the background, doors opening and closing, and other sounds like the thuds of items dropping. While the balance of host commentary and interview was also typical in the 1950s, the less controlled style of documentary recording, with ambient sounds and music, became more common in the 1960s, unlike the carefully controlled shifts between environment, speech, and music in earlier educational radio documentaries.