In 1963, the NAACP unveiled a plan to integrate television. They asked for greater African American representation onscreen and behind the scenes. They chose the family sitcom Hazel as their test case. Like most sitcoms of the era, Hazel had an all-white cast. It was something of an ironic target. The title character in Hazel was a maid.
The NAACP told the production company, Screen Gems, that if they did not start hiring African Americans onscreen and off, they would register an official complaint under California’s Fair Employment Practices Act.
“Any other teleseries or features that go into production after the start of Hazel must also have integrated crews,” reported Variety. “If integration is not effected by Hazel’s fall production start, the NAACP is prepared to hit Ford, who sponsors the program, with a nationwide consumers boycott.”
Godfrey Cambridge, the popular Black comedian, suggested federal action. “Not only the FCC, but the Interstate Commerce Commission, should intervene,” he said. “The government should enforce anti-discriminatory statutes in the Communication Act.”
“The average Negro actor is starving to death,” said veteran Black comedian Nick Stewart. “Dogs have shows! Monkeys have shows! Lassie! Mister Ed!”
Luther James, a Black production assistant on the NBC drama Dr. Kildare, said civil rights legislation was being “thwarted by the picture we have on TV, which is that of a segregated nation. When there are Southern stations that won’t carry a show because Negroes are on it, or they involve racial issues, it is the function of the government to prevent segregation in programming … Their licenses should be revoked until they can show they serve the interests of the people.”
Screen Gems hired several Black actors to play incidental parts and an African American assistant to work with Hazel producer James Fonda. Production companies in Hollywood seemed willing to proceed with affirmative action, but they were often stopped by advertisers.
The Farmer’s Daughter, an ABC sitcom starring Swedish American actress Inger Stevens, was another Screen Gems presentation. It was threatened with cancelation when its sponsor, Phillip Morris, learned Stevens had a Black husband in real life. Gossip columnist Rona Barrett was ready to run a series of articles on the controversy when Screen Gems paid her to squash the story.
The costar of Hogan’s Heroes, Werner Klemperer, was instructed not to embrace singer Leslie Uggams on a CBS variety program because she was Black. “I must reiterate what was related to me in our last pre-production meeting,” Klemperer told Variety. “It was that one should avoid this situation because … the sponsor or somebody would be upset.”
General Motors tried to kill an episode of the popular western Bonanza because it dealt with discrimination. The episode, titled “Enter Thomas Bowers,” concerned a famous Black opera singer, played by William Marshall, falsely accused of being a fugitive slave. Denied accommodation at a local hotel, he’s hosted by the one Black family in town. When the family is targeted by racist vigilantes, it’s up to Hoss and the Cartwright family to fight back.
“General Motors last week was applying all the pressure it could muster in an attempt to force NBC-TV to shelve a ‘Bonanza’ episode,” reported Variety. “General Motors raised its objections on the premise of not wanting to whip up national anxieties during the current integration crisis.”
General Motors withdrew its advertising. Roy Wilkins of the NAACP scoffed, “This is no time for a major American corporation to line up in open support of exclusion based upon race. It is a time for men and corporations to take affirmative action in behalf of human rights for all.” The episode aired without General Motors commercials—and without further incident. It went down as one of the best episodes in Bonanza history.
The stars of Bonanza—Dan Blocker, Lorne Greene, and Michael Landon—did regular publicity tours throughout the United States. When they were booked at the Mississippi Commerce and Industry Exposition in Jackson in January 1964, Landon announced they would only appear if the venue was desegregated. “If I get a guarantee with the proper language—not Mickey Mouse style—that there won’t be segregation, we will appear,” he said. “If they will put all seats on sale for anybody, we will keep our date.”
The fair organizers complained that the Bonanza stars would be in violation of their contract if they refused to appear. Furthermore, they said that even if they wanted to integrate the audience, to do so would be against Mississippi law.
Dan Blocker, who played the character Hoss, responded with a telegram: “I have long since been in sympathy with the Negro struggle for total citizenship, therefore I would find an appearance of any sort before a segregated house completely incompatible with my moral concepts—indeed repugnant.”
Jackson mayor Allen Thompson was livid. He called Blocker’s telegram “the greatest insult to the intelligence and activities of the people of Jackson” and called on all Mississippians to “help destroy” Bonanza.
A letter in the Jackson’s Clarion-Ledger accused the actors themselves of bigotry: “Since Dan Blocker, Lorne Greene, and Michael Landon refused to perform before a group holding views opposing theirs, I find it ‘repugnant’ to watch a performance by any one so extremely prejudiced.”
It was a common argument. Anti-racists were the actual bigots because they were prejudiced against prejudice.
“We White Southerners are accused incessantly of using foul and unfair methods of intimidation against our Negro neighbors, while in fact it has been the club most frequently and effectively wielded by CORE, NAACP and other Negro pressure groups,” said a letter to the editor published in the Clarion-Ledger. “I should like to see WLBT, which carries the program ‘Bonanza,’ replace it with one whose stars find our company and traditions less ‘repugnant.’”
The organizers decided to violate the contract themselves and canceled the appearance. “Nobody would come to watch them after this,” said one fair organizer. “There is no possibility of them drawing a crowd now.” With the loss of Hoss, they booked Donna Douglas from The Beverly Hillbillies instead.
Pernell Roberts, another Bonanza cast member, joined a civil rights protest in Torrance, California. Sponsored by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), protestors objected to a discriminatory housing complex euphemistically advertised as a “selective community.”
An image of Roberts holding a sign that said “Fair Housing For All” was published in TV Guide. The Bonanza star said it was time “to stop hating, start loving.” Roberts was hounded by a counter protester with a sign that said, “Down with CORE.” The letter C was shaped like a hammer and sickle.
Marlon Brando and Rita Moreno also participated. Moreno, best known for her starring role in West Side Story, explained her presence to the Los Angeles Times, “I think recent events have shown that demonstrations do work. Apparently they’re the only way to make people realize the problem. I can’t see how anyone with a conscience could possibly not want to contribute what he could to the cause for equal rights.”
When they arrived in Torrance, the actors were confronted by a hostile mob. A man shouted at Brando, “Communist! Communist!” A small boy in a Klan outfit carried a sign that said, “Down with CORE.” An adult Klansman held a sign that said, “Brando is a stooge for Communist race mixture!” And a maniac wearing a full Nazi uniform held a placard that said, “Marlon Brando is a [N-word]-Loving Creep.”
Thirty members of the Torrance Police Department and seventy reserve officers were assigned to protect the housing complex. Twenty-four civil rights marchers were arrested and charged with trespassing. The City of Torrance filed an injunction against Roberts, Moreno, and Brando. LAPD chief William Parker insisted the civil rights demonstration had no support in the Black community.
*
“When God has drawn a line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line,” said a young Baptist preacher named Jerry Falwell. “Integration would destroy the white race.”
Twenty eight years old at the time, Jerry Falwell rejected the idea that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was following the teachings of Christ. “Jesus was not a pacifist,” insisted Falwell. “He was not a sissy.”
In the name of balanced reporting, anti-MLK viewpoints received mainstream coverage. The Saturday Evening Post, one of the most widely circulated magazines in America, ran an editorial in April 1965 by Baptist minister Clayton Sullivan in an attempt to present both sides of the civil rights issue:
“I wonder if it ever has dawned upon critics of the South that one of the reasons Southerners find the idea of integration so abhorrent is because of the rural Negro’s physical uncleanliness … White Southerners do not relish the idea of instantaneous integration with people who live under such primitive conditions.”
In reaction to the Civil Rights Movement, the defunct genre of blackface minstrelsy had a resurgence in the mid-1960s. In a run-down Atlanta strip club, a comedian named Cotton Watts applied burnt cork and sang minstrel songs. He used shocking blackface imagery in his advertisements, and he inserted Dr. King’s name into old, racist street jokes.
A folk trio from South Carolina called the Mavericks toured the nightclub circuit singing pro-segregation folk songs. Its members—Ronnie Gammon, Arnie Gammon, and Freda Burrell—delivered their repertoire in blackface.
Performing at the Top Hat Supper Club in Windsor, Ontario, in January 1965, the Mavericks told a local journalist “only Communists from up North” complained about their act and were “consistently pounding on the fact that Negroes were being made fun of by these jokes.”
“The average Negro never took offense until he was told he should,” said Arnie Gammon. They claimed their biggest fans were the Black janitors and dishwashers in the nightclubs where they appeared: “They love it.”
Philadelphia’s annual Mummers Parade featured blackface for a century, but conceding that times had changed, festival organizers announced a new no-blackface policy in 1964. A newspaper editorial in Salt Lake City said it was evidence that the Civil Rights Movement had gone too far:
“And what, we ask, does the presence of blackface clowns in a parade have to do with civil rights? It would be bad enough if CORE were merely thin-skinned … they cannot evade responsibility for building up a potential for riot. The episode will hang like an albatross around the neck of the civil rights movement.”
As ratification of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 neared, a man in blackface stormed the US Capitol Building. UPI reported, “Clad in black from head to foot and wearing blackface minstrel makeup, he pranced and grimaced before the stunned House members, shouting, ‘I’se de Mississippi delegation.’ He waved a large, unlit cigar and wore a jaunty, slightly crushed top hat. A fur loincloth hung from his waist. Capitol policemen, caught unaware by the bizarre invasion, surged onto the floor … He later was charged with two counts of disorderly conduct and released after forfeiting a $20 bond … Chairman Emanuel Celler, D-N.Y., of the House Judiciary Committee said he was irked at the relative lightness of [the] fine. He said he would have ‘thrown the book’ at the intruder … It seemed incredible that a man so dressed could have obtained entrance into the Capitol at all.”
The Lions Club in Camarillo, California, announced plans for a blackface show in April 1965. A debate over its merits played out in the letters to the editor section of the local paper. A reader from Ventura wrote, “The black-face minstrel show … was retired some time ago and why the shortsighted members of the Camarillo Lion’s Club should choose to revive it at this sensitive time is beyond comprehension.”
The Lions Club insisted there was “nothing derogatory to the Negro race in the use of blackface” and suggested those objecting to it should acquire a sense of humor. The NAACP called the Lions Club plan “a cruel and unjust hoax” and “an outright insult to all Negroes.” The ACLU, usually quick to defend all forms of speech, turned down a request to defend the Lion’s Club. An ACLU spokesperson explained, “It was felt that a form of comedy belittling to the Negro people should not be included in any entertainment.”
Dr. Ted Greathouse of Oxnard, California, wrote, “At the risk of being branded ‘racially prejudiced,’ I would like to suggest that the [protesters are] being somewhat ridiculous and highly over-sensitive … If in the Negro’s quest for dignity, equality and social maturity he loses his sense of humor or ability to laugh at himself, then his cause is a forlorn one … This attitude, presently popular among some Negroes, of ‘either do as we say or we’ll fix you’ is the method used by Al Capone, the KKK, Hitler and the playground bully.”
A reader from Ojai responded, “I would like to ask Dr. Greathouse whether he thinks I was over-sensitive when I objected to a so-called comedian, in a Ventura night club recently, who told anti-Semitic, anti-Mexican and anti-Negro jokes and ended with, ‘I don’t have anything against [N-word]s.’ I wonder if I am over-sensitive because I say that the terrible things that have been done to human beings in the past is no excuse for these things being condoned in the year 1965.”
*
“I don’t have anything against [N-word]s, I’m just sick and tired of making excuses for being white.” It was a line from the act of a famous stand-up comedian whose persona was that of a ne’er-do-well, straight-talking, chain-smoking preacher.
Brother Dave Gardner sold millions of comedy records in the early 1960s. After a successful appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jack Paar, he was signed to RCA, released several comedy albums, and was placed under contract to NBC. For five years, 1958 through 1964, he was one of the top comedians in the country. But by the end of the decade, he had all but disappeared from the scene.
Fans wondered what became of the comic. Intent on solving the mystery, Harper’s magazine commissioned journalist Larry L. King to write a piece titled “Whatever happened to Brother Dave?”
Gardner was initially a musician in the “dingy bottle clubs” of the “Bible and boll-weevil belt.” He recorded a calypso number, “Fat Charlie,” and was part of the house band on Wink Martindale’s Nashville-based show.
Music gave way to stand-up. Gardner paid his comedy dues in rough roadhouses throughout the Deep South. With an affected preacher cadence and a cigarette between his fingers, he punctuated his routines with the phrase “belove-ed.”
His first national television appearance was on The Garry Moore Show, the variety series that had made Carol Burnett famous. But it was his first time on Jack Paar’s Tonight Show that led to the three-year contract and “sixty-odd appearances on the Paar show alone.”
“Brother Dave rattled off a monologue presenting Brutus in the execution of Caesar,” wrote King. “Paar received a thousand letters and telegrams begging more. He appeared in a Broadway play, banked up to thirty thousand dollars per week for campus one-nighters, and made connections with Las Vegas gambling emporiums.”
With his new wealth, Gardner purchased a yacht, several Cadillacs, a thirty-two-room mansion in the Hollywood Hills, and a fancy new home in Biloxi. And he started hanging out with other wealthy Southerners, including the billionaire oil tycoon, and financier of the John Birch Society, H. L. Hunt.
“I got interested in Mr. Hunt’s patriotic work about six years ago,” said Gardner. “So I checked him out and he checked me out and we got our heads together. We’ve become real good friends.”
Long before the emergence of the Koch brothers, H. L. Hunt used his tremendous oil wealth to manipulate American politics in his favor. He was the ultimate reactionary oilman, often ridiculed in the pages of MAD magazine. Hunt felt anyone who collected welfare should be denied the right to vote, and he called Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. a fraud. “I cannot detect that King has any regard for the truth, religion, sincerity, peace, morality,” said Hunt. His former assistant recalled, “Mr. Hunt believed that Jews controlled Wall Street, banks, press, radio, and TV.” And most famously, he ran a syndicated radio program called Life Line. On the morning of November 22, 1963, Life Line broadcasted “a dire warning” about President John F. Kennedy’s “leftist plot … to deprive the people of their right to bear arms.”
Larry L. King drove to the Pecan Grove Club in rural North Carolina to see Gardner perform. On his way to the gig, King passed a billboard that said, “Welcome to Klan Country.” When he arrived, the comedian was missing and the manager was issuing refunds.
King phoned Gardner’s house to find out what happened. His wife answered and said, “We were detained by some Indians. I’ve called in the FBI. I’m not sure I trust the telephone.”
Brother Dave picked up the other receiver and shouted, “Aw, man, don’t you know what’s happening? Who attacked a meeting of the Klan here in North Carolina two or three years ago, when the Klan cats wasn’t doing nothing but burning crosses and singing hymns?”
“The Cherokees?” asked King.
“Damn right,” said Gardner. “They’re part of this thing!”
Brother Dave Gardner showed up at the Pecan Grove Club the following night, but the crowd was sparse. Among the few attendees was an African American family. The manager walked over and told them, “I don’t think this is your type of show.”
Brother Dave took to the stage and opened, “James Baldwin is a lowlife, bug-eyed, queer [N-word].” He gestured to one of the Black patrons and said, “Here’s one of them bastards.”
The heckling started immediately. Gardner powered through the jeers. “We gonna get our country back someday,” he said. “I’d love to join a patriotic outfit like the Klan, only I ain’t got enough morals.” He went into a spiel about the Middle East that was full of racial slurs and then did the same with Vietnam: “I think we ought to go in there and blow them damn slopeheads off the damn map.” He complained there were too many words you couldn’t say anymore: “This here’s a thought for you—cause this here’s about this little boy and he’s with his mammy. I don’t know whether you can say ‘mammy’ anymore. I don’t care. I tell ya, listen, I just go so far with them civil rights.”
King saw a table of “good old boys” roaring with laughter, but most of the audience walked out. “Ask him to leave that offensive material out,” a patron told the manager. “People want to hear the old routines that made him famous, not this crap.”
“I’m losing my ass,” the club owner confessed. “I’m paying this guy a thousand bucks a night. And look at the [empty] house … I had him here about three years ago and made good money. He was doing more straight comedy then—not so much of this political nonsense. A year later he was deeper into the political thing and I just broke even. This time he’s knocking everything—religion, the colored, even the dead Kennedys. It’s a disaster. People are calling up to complain.”
Asked about his drastic shift in personality, Gardner said, “Well, everything grows and events change too. For ten years there I was paralleling the Civil Rights Movement. I’m a Southerner, so I’m not gonna change that accent to appease ignorance. You dig it? I never had a demonstration against me anywhere. We got off the colleges because we saw this thing building.”
King joined Gardner at his home for a lengthy interview. As the tape recorder rolled, Brother Dave dismissed Bob Hope and John Wayne as too left-wing. He said he was grateful for the break provided by Garry Moore “even though he’s a Jew.” And he started quoting The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and speaking of a Jewish plot: “Hell, man, the Rothschilds put FDR in. The House of Morgan. And they started us toward one-world government. And now, belove-ed, we can’t even control our kids. We can’t even be white without having to make excuses for it, and I’m sick and tired of making excuses for being white.”
Gardner’s young son ran into the room and interrupted. “Dad, quick, J. Robert Jones is out here.” J. Robert Jones was the grand dragon of North Carolina. He had released a vinyl record titled Why the United Klan Burns the Rugged Cross. Jones was there to personally thank Brother Dave for performing at his birthday party. Gardner excused himself and left his son alone in the room with King. Breaking the awkward silence, Gardner’s son told the journalist, “The Klan watches over Dad everywhere he goes.”
*
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was an inspiration to millions of Americans, but he was also relentlessly criticized, condemned, and defamed during his many campaigns. He was not revered in life as he would be in death.
On April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Two months later, on June 6, 1968, presidential candidate Robert Kennedy died the same way. Conservatives blamed violent TV shows. Liberals blamed the National Rifle Association. Extremists blamed Dr. King.
Variety said post-assassination outrage “focused chiefly on two issues, violence in the popular arts … and the fact that America, with an estimated 100,000,000 firearms in private possession, has no Fed statutes on registration of guns nor curbs as to who may acquire same. As has often been remarked in recent days, the U.S. is the only civilized western nation without such controls. Efforts to legislate gun clubs have repeatedly been stymied by the tax-exempt National Rifle Assn.”
The John Birch Society resisted gun control proposals. “The real purpose of such enforced registration would be to make ultimate seizure of such firearms by the government both easier and more complete,” said Birch leader Robert Welch. “As the Communists get nearer to taking us over … the pressure for this firearm legislation grows stronger.”
Showbiz was hypersensitive during the mourning period. The Academy Awards were delayed several days while violent clips from the Oscarnominated Bonnie and Clyde were deleted. An episode of the sitcom The Second Hundred Years was shelved because it took place in a funeral parlor. The secret agent sitcom Get Smart was rewritten so that Don Adams and Barbara Feldon would no longer carry guns. ABC pulled an episode of The Flying Nun that featured a political assassination, and Ed Sullivan briefly removed all comedians and rock acts.
Newspapers paid tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., but letters to the editor were full of vitriol. “I come into contact with a lot of people every day of my life and I have yet to find one who is prostrate with grief over King’s demise,” said a letter published in the Livingston County Daily Press. “He preached nonviolence yet … violence followed him wherever he went … I fail to find any place for any great sorrow in my heart for his death.”
Racist politicians had only negative eulogies to deliver. Republican senator Strom Thurmond said King only “pretended to be non-violent.” Democrat senator Robert Byrd said, “He usually spoke of non-violence [but] violence all too often attended his action.” Georgia governor Lester Maddox said King “carried out the policies and programs of Communists in this country [which] led to the burning of Washington, Watts [riots] and murders during civil rights disturbances.” Maddox called for a congressional investigation into public television station WETV for airing A Tribute to Martin Luther King. “We’re just inquiring why it’s being shown,” he said.
Carol Burnett appeared on The Merv Griffin Show and made a plea for world peace in memory of Dr. King. Holding a wristband up for the camera, she explained, “These are the bands that we have been wearing in support of a non-party organization. In other words, if you are for peace—we all are—to kind of even show it—and say yes you are … in hopes that some good might come … It couldn’t hurt!”
The audience applauded.
CBS cut it out.
“Griffin Show Edits Out Pleas for World Peace,” said the AP headline. “Two appeals to send mail for world peace to Mrs. Martin Luther King Jr. were edited out of two Merv Griffin Shows in accordance with what the Columbia Broadcasting System said is its official policy.”
Variety believed CBS was afraid of being punished after Vice President Spiro Agnew accused the media of bias: “Apparently hypersensitive to anything which might upset the White House, CBS-TV censors jump-cut text out of peace appeals made by Carol Burnett.”
“I felt like an absolute jerk,” said Burnett. “It made me look like I said something dirty, or off-color—or maybe un-American.”
Vice President Spiro Agnew delivered a speech in Des Moines, Iowa, in November 1969, written by White House staffer Pat Buchanan. The speech characterized the news media as a collection of pompous snobs, “a small and unelected elite,” who slanted news in favor of “violent protesters and demonstrators.” Agnew accused the media of promoting “campus unrest, antiwar marches, lawlessness on picket lines, police brutality, and the apparent bankruptcy of the American system.”
The speech was widely debated, praised, and condemned—and it became the defining moment of Agnew’s political career. Bob Hope joked, “Spiro has a new show coming out—Beat the Press.”
In the weeks that followed, large volumes of hate mail were addressed to journalists, newscasters, and reporters. New York magazine said Agnew’s speech “elicited record numbers of letters with words like ‘kike,’ ‘homo,’ ‘Jew bastard,’ ‘[N-word] lover,’ and ‘Commie.’”
Merv Griffin said that after the Agnew speech, network pressure to balance opinions was intense and irrational. Griffin said CBS “used to keep track of the hawks and the doves and any references to the Vietnam War. By that time there was nothing but doves … Trying to even that up was impossible.”
While many showbiz luminaries like Carol Burnett and Merv Griffin were concerned about the ramifications of political assassination, Oscar-winning actor Walter Brennan was “not sorry about it.” Revered for his iconic performance in John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Brennan had great success starring in the long-running sitcom The Real McCoys. But offscreen he was a difficult man.
“He feels strongly that there is a plot,” said a TV Guide profile, “not just a plan, but a plot—to take over the country. This operation is run by the Communists, of course.”
Brennan was devastated when he found out that Kathleen Nolan and Richard Crenna, his costars on The Real McCoys, voted for John F. Kennedy. “How can I do this?” asked Brennan. “How can I work with these Commies?”
Brennan endorsed American Party candidate John G. Schmitz for president after concluding that Richard Nixon and George Wallace were too far to the left. Schmitz had been ejected from the John Birch Society for being too extreme. According to the American Party’s platform, “women’s liberation is an insidious socialistic plan to destroy the home, make women slaves of the government and their children wards of the state” and the United Nations was “an organization controlled by communists, run by communists and contrived by communists.”
Irving Pincus, creator and executive producer of The Real McCoys, said Brennan was the “world’s biggest anti-Semite [and] very verbal about his feelings.”
“Walter showed me his bunker,” said production assistant John G. Stephens. “He was positive the Russians were going to invade the United States. He had firearms and a two-year supply of food.”
Brennan even recorded a spoken-word album on which he railed against the tyranny of “zip codes, area codes, and interstate highway signs.” Reflecting on the Watts riots, he said, “They could have stopped that thing in Watts with a machine gun. I’d have made them observe the laws.”
And while Brennan’s viewpoint was extreme, it wasn’t totally uncommon. A survey published in a Tampa newspaper in July 1968 asked television viewers whether they were “offended by jokes against church, government, charities etc.” Of those polled, 53.9 percent replied that they were indeed offended by such humor, 74 percent of senior citizens were disgusted, 53 percent of middle-aged viewers were appalled, 35 percent of those under the age of twenty-five felt comedy had gone too far, and 44.9 percent of all those surveyed felt there were “too many Negroes on TV.”
*
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission conducted an investigation into the film and television industry in 1969. They wanted to determine if the studios were upholding their end of the Civil Rights Act or if they were engaged in a “practice of discrimination.” Executives from Disney, Warner Bros., Universal, and 20th Century Fox were summoned for an all-day hearing. Network executive Perry Lafferty was asked if CBS had any Mexican American producers, technicians, or news reporters. Lafferty said no, but it would be unfair to characterize that as racist.
Latino actor Ray Martel came to the opposite conclusion during his testimony. Martel had appeared on Mission: Impossible, I Spy, and The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. He told the commission that “the entire industry” practiced “overt racism” and that the studios were run by “bigoted and racist dogs.” Martel said he intended to destroy bias in the television industry “even if we have to tear these studios down.”
Lack of diversity was seldom noted in the press, but frustration was evident. The Dean Martin Show featured a chorus of beautiful women each week and a letter published in TV Guide noted, “The bevy of girls surrounding Dean all conform to the white, Anglo-Saxon version of beauty. Not one is black, Oriental, or even Latin.”
A number of programs were created to diversify the industry. The Writers Guild started its Open Door Workshop for aspiring Asian, Black, Latino, and Indigenous screenwriters in June 1969 and CBS promised to cover the cost.
Budd Schulberg, the screenwriter responsible for classic films like On the Waterfront and A Face in the Crowd, started a similar program. After the Watts riots, Schulberg wanted to use his position to help in some way. He met with Jack Valenti of the Motion Picture Association of America to discuss the “problem of whiteness.”
“Lots and lots of buildings were in rubble,” said Schulberg. “I saw this building called the Westminster Neighborhood Association. I parked, went in, and said, ‘I’m only one person, but as a writer maybe I can start a writing class.’ So I did. I simply put up a notice saying: Creative Writing Class—Every Wednesday—3 O’clock.’ I came back a week later. People had written suggestions as to what I could do with my workshop and where I could put it.”
Nineteen-year-old Charles Eric Johnson attended one of the first classes. “Nate Monaster and Stanley Shapiro were there,” recalled Johnson. “They were the writing team that did all the Rock Hudson–Doris Day films like Pillow Talk and That Touch of Mink. We talked about film and they invited me out to Universal. They took me under their wing. I ended up following them around the lot, smoking their Garcia y Vega cigars, and I started wearing an ascot just like them. They taught me screenwriting. They had an office above a tailor shop on Santa Monica Boulevard. They gave me a key and said if I wanted to go in there and write, I could use it … They introduced me to Walter Newman, who won the Academy Award for writing Cat Ballou. Walter told me, ‘You have to feel and care. It can’t just be for the money. You have to have a vision and speak to something … and never dehumanize people.’ With that, he gave me my foundation for writing.” Johnson became the go-to screenwriter for Black action films in the early 1970s like Hammer, That Man Bolt, and Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off.
Schulberg named his project the Watts Writers Workshop. “It was amazing,” he said. “Just amazing. It was like all of Watts could write. An awful lot of people in Watts had a lot to say.”
Harry Dolan graduated from the Watts Writers Workshop and sold a script to The Partridge Family. In his episode, the Partridge Family’s multicolored bus breaks down in a Black neighborhood. They’re confronted by an unwelcoming pair of Black Panthers, portrayed by Lou Gosset Jr. and Richard Pryor, but the family wins them over. By the end of the episode, a young Danny Bonaduce is gifted a black beret and made an honorary Panther.
The Watts Writers Workshop acquired a solid reputation and evolved into a full-fledged theater. Sammy Davis Jr. donated a piano, Quincy Jones taught music classes, and Sidney Poitier taught acting. But as a prominent new center for Black culture, the FBI considered it a threat.
The FBI assigned an informant, Darthard Perry, to infiltrate the workshop. He scored a job as an audio-visual assistant and used his position to wire the venue, just in time to spy on a speech by Black Panther leader Bobby Seale.
“First I planted two mics in the workshop office,” recalled Perry, “slipped their wires up through the ceiling and down onto the stage where I hooked them into a big Ampex recorder. When Seale showed up I took him into the office and got him talking privately about all sorts of Panther activities. During his talk I photographed the entire audience with a wide-angle 35mm camera. And when he was finished I videotaped a nice long interview for the workshop. When I brought all this material back to FBI headquarters, my superiors were barely able to contain themselves.”
The FBI’s next step was to destroy the venue—literally. “The Bureau had it burnt down,” confessed Perry. “I did the arson. At the time … it looked like there was a possibility of a grant [but] if there was no theater, there would be no grant. Two cans of kerosene, Purex bottle, gasoline, and a flare.”