Black America on British airwaves

• Read more | The history of the BBC

And when it came to covering that November’s US presidential election, it would be BBC Radio, not Television, that came up with the year’s most original idea: a blockbuster series about the black American civil rights struggle that would expose British listeners to sounds, voices and opinions they were unlikely to have ever heard or seen before.

BBC Radio had an uneven history when it came to diversity and racial politics. In the 1930s, listeners to the National Programme would have heard music from black artists such as Paul Robeson and Guyanese bandleader Rudolph Dunbar with his ‘Coloured Orchestra’.

In the 1950s, the Home Service broadcast hard-hitting reports about the racism experienced by Britain’s ‘Windrush Generation’ of immigrants. Yet, whatever their fine intentions, broadcasters had often slipped into stereotyping black contributors: if they weren’t playing walk-on parts as entertainers, they were appearing as part of a ‘problem’ to be solved.

• Read more | The forgotten history of Windrush

This was symptomatic of a wider failure. When the veteran features producer Geoffrey Bridson told the Home Service he wanted to make a programme about “the integration struggle” in the US Deep South, it had been rejected out of hand – as had his other proposals about the atom bomb and anti-nuclear campaigners.

The Home Service, he reckoned, just “never regarded itself as a pacemaker for public opinion”. Even in the 1960s, when the BBC’s new director-general, Hugh Carleton Greene, urged programme-makers to give audiences a healthy shock or two, the radio schedules still had an air of stolid, unadventurous safety about them.

So it seemed all the more novel and exciting when, in July 1963, the Third Programme’s controller, Howard Newby, proposed a whole series focusing exclusively on what he called “the Revolt of the Negro”. It would offer an important perspective on a coming US presidential election in which race looked like being a prominent issue. It might also demonstrate the continued vitality – the continued relevance – of radio itself.

To no one’s surprise, it was Bridson who leapt at the chance to produce the series. He promptly told his boss that the original title was no good: what was needed was something that conveyed the contribution of black creativity to US life – and how this creativity had given the black American what Bridson called “the self-respect out of which his demand for integration springs”.

Bridson had one other condition. Newby had suggested enlisting the writer James Baldwin as a part-time adviser; Bridson asked for the great poet of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes, to be hired instead.

“Apart from what he can contribute himself,” Bridson explained, “he would be the best possible contact for securing the co-operation of all leading negro artists.” It helped that the two men had a friendship stretching back to the war, when Bridson had been in the US collaborating with Hughes on programmes and discovering a shared joy in poetry, jazz and progressive politics.

Hughes was offered – and accepted – the role of co-producer. Bridson spent the spring and summer months of 1964 in New York City, meeting leading civil rights activists, visiting the jazz clubs and record stores of Harlem, watching off-Broadway shows, and talking long into the night with Hughes at his East 127th Street home. By August, there was enough material ‘in the can’ to create 19 programmes. Their umbrella title would be The Negro in America.

• Listen | US Civil rights: fighting for freedom podcast series

Rights denied

The series launched at the end of September. The first programme, advertised in The Sunday Times as “an ideal pace-setter”, was supposed to have been a broadcast of Martin Duberman’s recent New York stage drama In White America, which traced the black American story “from the War of Independence to the present day”. Unfortunately, US rights holders withheld their permission at the last minute. An anthology of black American poetry was hurriedly brought forward instead.

Listeners were left distinctly underwhelmed, telling the BBC’s team of audience researchers that many of its items were “nearer to prose than to poetry” and characterised by “bitterness”. Some said that they wanted to like the poems but failed to understand them because of the “strange accents”.

Other programmes endured a similarly bumpy reception. A survey of jazz curated by The New Yorker columnist Nat Hentoff was condemned for featuring music that was “harsh, complex and disturbing”. Many found Trouble in Mind, Alice Childress’s comedy about a theatre troupe from the Deep South attempting to stage a play in New York, generous in spirit but “slow-moving”. Hughes’s own musical, Jerico-Jim Crow – a huge off-Broadway success – was found by British listeners to be either “too blatantly sentimental” or too full of “hysterical yelling”.

The professional critics were largely more tolerant. The Listener found hearing poetry set to jazz “enormously exciting”. The Glasgow Herald described Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro, an off-Broadway play about a young black girl’s fraught relationship with her white lover and white landlady, as “a ruthless, forceful piece”.

It was clear, however, that in 1964, even the supposedly discerning minority of Third Programme listeners were discomfited by a series so full of material that was unfamiliar in content and style – and with culture that had a distinctly political edge. When it came to the jazz programmes, they were exposed not just to a modern, experimental form, but to voices explaining that this shift was in part a reaction against the assumption that black American musicians were there merely to entertain. In Jerico-Jim Crow, they were confronted with something more than an enjoyable bit of musical theatre: it was what Bridson called “a piece of impassioned pleading”.

The problem of tone haunted the series. If ordinary listeners found the poetry rough-edged, yet The Sunday Times wanted more “raw anguish”, how could such conflicting tastes be accommodated? Hughes and Bridson were aware of the precarious balancing act. Whether in poetry, music, drama or politics, they wanted to give airtime to a uniquely black American voice.

They also – like many black American artists they featured – wanted to address a predominantly white audience. They wanted to avoid giving listeners at home the feeling that they were being attacked, but had to convey the anger of a people oppressed – and the point that anger was often the most important engine of creativity.

Events stateside complicated matters, though. The Negro in America had been scheduled to coincide with an important political moment, but this very timeliness soon added to Bridson and Hughes’s difficulties. One of their programmes was a conversation they had recorded with each other earlier that year. It sounded exactly what it was: two old friends enjoying each other’s company late at night. Bridson had even asked Hughes beforehand to bring some extra laughter into their conversation: “As we cannot see your beatific smile on radio we should very much like to hear it.”

Ever more fractious

Unfortunately, since the recording was made, the atmosphere in the US had changed dramatically. In July, rioting had broken out in Harlem after police fatally shot a 15-year-old black American boy, and violence quickly spread to other parts of New York City and beyond. The series had been conceived in 1963 in a spirit of hope – that the civil rights issue was about to reach some sort of final settlement, that ‘integration’ would succeed. Instead, the US seemed to be becoming ever more fractious.

• Read more | Who were the key figures of the civil rights movement?

So when the conversation between Bridson and Hughes was finally broadcast in December 1964, its geniality felt peculiarly inappropriate. The Listener’s critic said that it sounded as if the two men were travelling through the States “sitting in deep chairs in an observation car, drawing at long cigars and sipping highballs”. Where, he asked, was the clash of opinion?

In fact, there were clashes aplenty in the documentaries that formed the spine of the series. Ten Years of Integration traced the history of the civil rights movement across three densely illustrated episodes. Freedom Now! focused on the struggle for integration in Birmingham, Alabama in May 1963, at a time when white racists set off two bombs, nearly killing Martin Luther King’s brother and his family.

Narration was kept to a minimum in all of the programmes; the main witness in Freedom Now!, American reporter Dale Miner, was constantly in the thick of it, his microphone capturing the immediate aftermath of the bombing inside the family home and the confusion and anger as a second bomb exploded nearby. As one listener put it, “The fact that it was often a blurred mass of sound added to its authenticity... It let us... be present at that awful time.”

This was vivid, raw, up-close, subjective, immersive – the radio equivalent of what Tom Wolfe later hailed as “the New Journalism”. It allowed listeners to understand the black American experience in a visceral rather than abstract way. And it had been achieved through a radio language that was strikingly new to British ears.

Black perspective

When the series was over, Hughes expressed his delight. “The BBC – I love it!” he wrote. The press, too, had been persuaded of its merits. The Glasgow Herald called it “Not only the best series of the year, but possibly the best of all time.” “Plays, poetry, music, and documentaries,” it said, “have fitted together to make one composite feature.” And The Listener cheered the BBC’s shift from analysing events with its usual detachment towards allowing listeners to see things from a distinctively black American perspective.

The Negro in America was an augury for a radio medium that would match the egalitarian spirit of the decade. The late 1960s would see more and more of the BBC’s programme-makers leaving the studio and using their portable recorders to capture the subjective experience of life “out there”. There would be less of the scripted and polished stuff, more of those raw tape recordings used so brilliantly for Freedom Now!

As for any wider impact on racial politics in Britain, it would be expecting too much of a series broadcast to a tiny minority of Third Programme listeners – perhaps fewer than 100,000 – to be transformative. Even as the series was being aired, a Conservative Party candidate unexpectedly won a parliamentary election in the West Midlands constituency of Smethwick, despite having endorsed explicitly racist language – evidence that it was not just the US that harboured stubbornly deep reservoirs of anti-immigrant prejudice.

• Read more | Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech: Britain and race in the mid 20th-century

Bridson had always hoped that a survey of the American scene would inform debates about race relations in Britain. And there were some signs of progress. In 1965, rattled by the events at Smethwick, the Labour government brought in the first Race Relations Act. One minister, Maurice Foley, also asked Hugh Carleton Greene, “about the role broadcasting can play in breaking down barriers”.

Within months, the corporation was planning its first regular programmes for immigrants: Make Yourself at Home. Yet change proved horribly uneven. The BBC’s anachronistic peak-time Black and White Minstrel Show survived for another 13 years.

There is, however, a postscript to the story of Hughes’s and Bridson’s landmark series: it went on to play a small part in the belated downfall of the Black and White Minstrel Show. In the early 1960s, when Bridson had been attempting to rekindle his links with Hughes and life in Harlem, the man who helped him most was Barrie Thorne, based at the BBC’s New York office. Through working with Bridson and Hughes, Thorne became captivated by the cultural ferment of the civil rights movement.

And it stayed with him. Years later, and back in London as the BBC’s chief accountant, it was he who would lead a campaign within the corporation that eventually saw the Black and White Minstrel Show axed in 1978 – a ripple in the broadcasting universe that would undoubtedly have cheered the two creators of that pivotal 1964 series.

This article was first published in the Christmas 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine