In 1968, the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King led to widespread uprisings by African Americans in inner-city neighborhoods throughout the United States. That same year, President Johnson's Kerner Commission, examining the causes and preventions of urban violence, published its report, which quickly became a best-selling paperback book. The report leveled blame on the news media for ill-serving both black communities and the whole nation by either ignoring African American voices or neglecting to provide much-needed context for the country to understand why black “ghettos” were erupting into rage and disorder.

On the night of King's killing, Boston was one of the few major cities that did not experience significant rioting. The popular black R & B performer James Brown was scheduled to play a concert that night. Not only did the show go on, but WGBH, Boston's public television station, carried the concert live, following hasty talks with city officials and urgent pleas to black residents to stay home and watch the show rather than venture forth into the streets.

As Devorah Heitner shows in Black Power TV, the fears of white Americans generated by the black uprisings of the late 1960s single-handedly led American television to open up its programming to African American voices in unprecedented ways. For a few years in both national and local public television, as well as in local commercial television, black Americans took hold of the means of televisual production and broadcast representations of their own communities, diverse politics, arts, culture, and struggles. A new genre was born: the black public-affairs show produced and staffed largely by blacks for blacks and about the complex and varied black experience. This is a remarkable and little-explored moment in the history of American television, as well as in the history of the civil rights/black power movement. Only the long-lived show Black Journal (later Tony Brown's Journal) has received much scholarly attention. Heitner provides an important intervention into both twentieth-century African American and media history in uncovering this brief opening up of American television, particularly to the radical voices of the black power movement, the black arts movement, black feminism, and community-control politics.

Heitner focusses on four programs: two local shows and two with national reach. Broadcast over New York's leading independent commercial station, Inside Bedford-Stuyesant focussed on a predominantly black Brooklyn neighborhood typically in Harlem's shadow. Say Brother was Boston WGBH's attempt to provide public programming to its African American viewership. With funding from the Ford Foundation, NET (the precursor to PBS) provided a strong financial base for a polished and highly professionalized public-affairs show, Black Journal, available to all public stations around the country. And finally NET's flagship Channel Thirteen in New York provided Soul!, a mostly arts, music, and culture show for national distribution.

Numerous primarily local, black public-affairs shows appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but, as Heitner notes, few of the shows have left the archive. Television, especially at the local level, was considered disposable, making it difficult to reconstruct the history of the medium or to investigate questions of representation. These four shows, however, have left enough of a record for Heitner to examine with some degree of rigor how they represented “blackness” in this important moment in the black empowerment movement. Heitner also interviewed key production personnel for most of these shows, providing crucial insights into the production process and struggles over control. Since three of her case studies involve public television programs, she also makes good use of available memos, letters, and collected papers to flesh out her histories of the shows and their production and reception context.

The book's particular value is in showing how all of these programs constituted a distinctly black public sphere. For instance, in mainstream media coverage Bedford-Stuyvesant was typically reduced to a symbol of the crisis around abysmal urban housing. Inside Bedford-Stuyvesant countered that one-dimensional image with portrayals of a vibrant community attempting to revitalize itself with redevelopment funding. The show's male and female hosting team filmed the entire show outside in the neighborhood rather than in a studio. They invited community members to speak as experts on issues that concerned their lives, rather than focussing only on those with academic credentials to speak on schools, welfare, or urban renewal.

All of the shows grappled with the politics of black power and invited leaders to discuss the politics of black revolution. While the mainstream media typically reduced the Black Panthers and figures like Stokely Carmichael to images of menace and heated anti-white rhetoric, when these political radicals appeared on black public-affairs programs hosts created an open and engaging environment for genuine dialogue.

Heitner does a particularly good job of chronicling how black staff had to struggle to gain control over their shows from often well-meaning white executives. When Black Journal staff demanded and finally got an African American executive producer and host, the show signaled to its viewers that it was now effectively under black editorial control by showing one of the daishiki-clad hosts making a black power fist to the camera.

Black Power TV chronicles a remarkable moment in American television when African Americans did truly “seize the time” (to quote Black Panther Bobby Seale), creating a short-lived but powerful black public sphere.