In Broadcasting Freedom: Radio, War, and the Politics of Race, 1938-1948, Barbara Dianne Savage argues, “The World War II era was a pivotal period in the history of American race relations; that African American activism created important shifts in racial ideology and federal policies that were necessary precursors to the modern civil rights movement; and that the mass medium of radio served as a newly important public forum for ideological debate about racial equality and racial injustices” (pg. 2). Further, of the radio programs she analyzes, Savage argues, “Because they were presented on a national mass communications medium, these broadcasts help us understand how the political issue of race was constructed for a large, diffuse audience and how that construction evolved into a search for a national language of consensus on the question of racial equality” (pg. 3). Savage continues, “Encapsulated here are the persistent themes that have driven African American political thought about the relationship between media and racial politics: a recognition of the sheer ideological force of public media, a struggle for access to that marketplace of political ideas, and, ultimately, a fight for the power of self-representation in all forms of public culture” (pg. 9).
Examining the radio show Americans All, Immigrants All and its African American audience, Savage writes, “The conflict among African Americans about which image to present obscured their implicit agreement about the political importance of media images and their frustration about their limited opportunities to exert control over their self-representation” (pg. 43). She continues, “Bolstered in part by New Deal rhetoric, many African Americans at the beginning of the World War II era were poised to demand not only inclusion by also, more important, the full benefits of Americanness, a strategy pursued into the 1950s and 1960s” (pg. 45). Turning to the program Freedom’s People, Savage writes, “The recurring theme of Freedom’s People was that blacks had contributed significantly to American culture and history and had earned the right to be free and fully accepted as Americans” (pg. 78). The showrunners linked black achievement to American history to increase black pride and, Savage argues, “thought the show could help teach whites tolerance and appreciation of blacks” (pg. 78). Savage cautions, however, that the show “stopped short of doing more than conferring the label ‘American’ on blacks” due to network restrictions (pg. 103).
Discussing the controversy over the OWI pamphlet Negros and the War, Savage writes, “There was no intellectually honest way to develop a message promoting inclusiveness of African Americans without endorsing or appearing to endorse their claims to equal opportunity – one message begged for the other because the two were inextricably linked” (pg. 134). Some tired to use popular entertainment to mask political motives. Savage writes, “Embedding serious messages in nonthreatening entertainment was a radio technique that some African Americans criticized even though they realized that political restrictions usually mandated such a strategy” (pg. 162-163). Savage continues, “National radio’s treatment of the race issue is a tale of caution and restriction. Network officials carefully scrutinized the political risks associated with federally sponsored programming, even as the federal agencies themselves adhered to their own strict tests of what was ‘speakable’ about African Americans” (pg. 246). Further, “By the end of the 1940s, the radio and advertising industries realized that many major urban areas had been transformed by the massive black migration of the war years…It was this new black urban audience that local radio stations – and local advertisers – were beginning to ‘see’ for the first time in the postwar period” (pg. 260).
Savage concludes that radio “programming allowed a new black voice to be heard on the radio, a voice that challenged accepted portrayals of black abilities and placed African American contributions and culture at the heart of American history. Perhaps more important, these radio shows helped to redefine and expand the concepts of Americanness and freedom in a decade that ended with the banning of discrimination in federal employment, the phasing out of segregation and discrimination in the armed forces, and the delineation of a litany of rights that would serve as the map of discovery for the new racial frontier pioneered in the modern civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s” (pg. 271). ( )