Mr. SOUL!

Today, whites have every hour on television available to them.

The Blacks have none.

The following program is brought to you

in living color on NBC.

This is an ABC color presentation.

CBS presents this program in color.

This is NET, the public television network.

All of you know that your tax dollar and mine

is helping to pay for the maintaining of segregation.

This money's given to keep you and I

second-class citizens here in this great country.

Although we are not integrationists,

that doesn't mean that we in any way condone

what those crackers are doing in Birmingham, Alabama.

It was only after the Negroes began to strike back.

It was then that Kennedy called in the army.

Now, now, now, now.

We had a richness of Black voices

speaking to the problems of our time.

This is the fruit of what Martin Luther King

and the protest movement had done.

They had awakened a generation.

If you don't want any trouble,

keep your filthy white hands off our beautiful Black children.

It just seemed that this was not just foolish racists,

that this was some kind of attack.

You gonna kill the president of the United States.

You gonna kill Malcolm X.

They killed Bobby Kennedy,

and they killed Martin Luther King.

So that whole period was an assault

on any kind of progressive face of America.

We are determined to raise our people

to their traditional greatness.

The Black community is very conscious

of how it is being oppressed, and it means to change that.

We needed to reimagine ourselves

on this American landscape.

Somebody had to be first...

and it was Ellis Haizlip.

"SOUL!" offers Black performers

a chance to be meaningful, to be relevant

to the Black experience, to say,

"Just present me as a man or a woman

without justifying my Blackness."

Ellis, to me, was, like, the first citizen of New York

in that New York was absolutely his city.

I met Ellis in New York in the summer of '64,

and we became friends.

He was doing real art.

He was producing dance.

He knew Donnie McKayle.

And that's where I got to know him,

and through "Black New World," touring Europe.

He knew Alvin Ailey.

He was producing James Baldwin's plays in Europe.

I knew that television had a place for his thinking

and his artistry.

I got the Boston station, and I got the Pittsburgh station

and the New York station to do an interconnect

called "Talking Black" on art in the Black communities.

So by now, Ellis had done two shows,

and I think he was really primed to do something big.

From the Ed Sullivan Theater on Broadway...

Ellis came at a time when there were

so few African-American images on television

and certainly so few positive

African-American images on television.

- I'm a Negro. - You always been a Negro,

or are you just trying to be fashionable?

When Black folks appeared in the news,

it was as a problem.

Violent crime rate is up 71%.

Media had been weaponized to argue

for the inhumanity of African-Americans.

If you sit here in the central ward of Newark

in the Negro ghetto...

This tool was used from its very inception

to denigrate human life as much as it could liberate it.

By then, there was an occasional

mainstream breakthrough,

when people like Nat King Cole and Harry Belafonte

were given variety shows on national television,

but they didn't last very long.

Harry Belafonte would dance with a white actress on-screen,

and the people in the South would go crazy.

And so they dropped the show.

The period was filled with great upheaval.

It was an upheaval that was necessary.

Cities across the country were erupting.

There were riots in Los Angeles, in Detroit, in Newark.

There were riots popping up all over the place.

There was a commission that was impaneled...

The Kerner Commission...

To investigate why this uprising had happened.

The Kerner Commission Report in March of '68 said,

"We are drifting towards two nations,

one Black and one white,

and the media is largely responsible for this."

One of the findings of the Kerner Commission

was the sense that African-Americans,

Black people, had no voice in broad media.

That led to the impetus to say, "Why don't we use educational TV

to make sure that those voices

that had not had access could present their stories,

specifically African-Americans?"

Produced in New York by WNDT.

A number of programs

were created for public television.

"Black Journal," which was a program

that came out of New York; It was a documentary program.

There were programs like "Say Brother"

that came out of WGBH in Boston.

Shows like "Like It Is" were public-affair shows.

- Hello, I'm Jim Lowry. - And I'm Roxie Roker.

Welcome to "Inside Bedford-Stuyvesant."

Public television, which had been

called educational television,

was less comfortable with live performance

as a way of serving its public

the way that educational TV imagined service

and also imagined its public.

This is NET, the National Educational Television Network.

Even though I had known this, I said,

"We don't have a single person of color on our staff

producing anything.

We gotta do something about that."

When I realized that Ellis was beginning to like television

and understood how it could get his message across,

I said, "Look, what do we see on television?

We see riots. We see poverty.

We see cameras going through Harlem,

showing how the garbage isn't picked up.

I don't hear that from you. What I hear is how lively

the renaissance of the arts are

in Black communities around the country."

Ellis wanted to legitimate all of the variety of expression

in the arts, in particular in the Black community,

and that's not "The Tonight Show"...

Or, you know, that's not the format.

I think I came up with the idea

of a Black "Tonight Show" on my own

before I even talked to Ellis, and Ellis said, "Unh-unh.

If we're gonna do something

for the New York Black community,

it's gotta be a lot deeper,

jazzier, even more controversial."

- Black power! - We want Black power.

- Black power! - We want Black power.

So we wrote up a proposal for the Ford Foundation,

and we got money very quickly.

Ellis said, "What are we gonna call this show?"

I said, "Got any ideas, fellas?"

He said, "What about 'Soul'?"

I said, "Yeah, if you put an exclamation point after it."

I never forget when the show started

and he'd strike up the band.

It's just "Wow," you know,

"Live and in color, the SOUL! Show."

Live and in color from New York City,

"SOUL!" welcomes...

And now, the very first musical performance of our show,

Sarah Dash, Nona Hendryx, Patricia Holte,

also known as Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles.

I mean, look at the first show.

Essentially, we got stars and future stars.

Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles,

yes, they'd been around,

but not on television.

The first show was... it was... I don't know how to explain it.

The air was electric.

We were all very excited

because we knew it was something new and special.

The very first show starts, and Novella Nelson's face

is the face of the introductory sequence.

Ellis would bring in people who he had seen or heard or knew.

Novella Nelson, who had never been on television.

And then there was Billy Taylor,

who was known in the jazz world but not in the television world.

We were so excited about someone who at last

was beginning to do something that really wasn't done

often enough for us on radio and television

and helping people understand what Black music was about.

Ellis did that very well.

And the moment that went on that television,

it went boom, you know?

"We bad. Ain't we bad?"

Yeah, you walked down... You walked down the street,

and you were dripping badness, you know?

Very quickly, the word got out about this show.

Just seemed to spread like lightning across the country

that there was this true Black show,

true to the Black experience; No subjects were taboo,

provided you could put them in decent language;

And that it was our show.

With this Black priority,

we don't have to become a multipurpose program.

Black people turn us on every week

because they know they will see

an undiluted Black show.