The black image in the black mind: The history of African Americans' access to cable television in Boston and Detroit, 1963--1989

Within the history of the cable television system, a history dating to the end of the 1940s, there has been a constant practice of African American community empowerment and community building particularly during the last third of the twentieth century. Analyses of blacks' experience with cable television reveal the evolution and little discussed history of the black image in the black mind. The idea that public access and cable television services were community property helped germinate the idea that communications technology could give the power of information to citizens equally across colorlines---despite its incomplete execution even today. This new form of television production and consumption offered African Americans of the post-civil rights era, a group who had been forgotten, ignored, silenced, or marginalized in the mainstream mass media, the opportunity to produce their own collective memory, to achieve self-representation, and to create a sense of community membership. In this way, cable television worked as a vehicle of community justice for African Americans.;Employing a framework comparing Boston, Massachusetts, and Detroit, Michigan as case studies, this dissertation argues that since the early 1970s African Americans in these cities possessed and exercised political and social agency and influenced the decision making processes in their respective municipalities. By using cable television as a concept and as a technical medium, they raised their self-esteem through empowerment, strengthened community ties, and they reversed the negative images of blacks that had disseminated in visual-media dependent American society.;This dissertation draws theories from American Studies, African American Studies, and Media Studies: community justice, Afrocentric media, the black image in the white mind, infrapolitics, and three scholarly responsibilities. Community justice is an important concept because this project examines not only individual justice or justice for all African Americans but also on events at the community level. Alice Tait and Todd Burroughs borrowed Molefi Kete Asante's method of Afrocentricity to establish the idea of Afrocentric media and to investigate media and media content created by those of African descent reflecting their perspectives. Similar to these two scholars, I owe the overall framework of this study to George M. Frederickson's theory of the black image in the white mind. Infrapolitics is another key concept in this study focusing on grassroots and street-level movements that cannot be explained justifiably by reviewing the master narrative of the history of media and television. My dissertation is a narrative of African Americans striving to obtain access to cable television and their commitment to its development. Last, Manning Marable's theory of black intellectual tradition explains the fundamental objectives of this work. It is descriptive in that it reconstructs the little studied history of African Americans and media, corrective that it generates and advances a new interpretation of that history, and prescriptive in that it suggests to community leaders and members how they can learn from this history so that similar efforts can be made today.