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"Racial Discourse and Censorship on NBC-TV, 1948-1960."

by

Bob Pondillo, Ph.D.


College of Mass Communication
Middle Tennessee State University
Box 58
Murfreesboro, TN  37132



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AEJMC HISTORY DIVISION


For presentation consideration at the AEJMC
Annual Convention, August 2005, San Antonio, Texas



(Copyright © 2005)


"Racial Discourse and Censorship on NBC-TV, 1948-1960."
(Required 75-word abstract)


This research explores postwar racial discourse in television 
programming at the National Broadcasting Company (NBC-TV).   It 
analyzes the era vis-à-vis actions taken by Stockton Helffrich, 
director of NBC-TV's Continuity Acceptance (i.e., censorship) 
Department from 1948-60. The work concludes Helffrich's politically 
progressive notions were significant in altering television's 
complicated race negotiations after the Second World War—a period of 
transition between an inequitable system of racial hierarchy and a 
more culturally liberal postwar order.



-1-

   "Racial Discourse and Censorship on NBC-TV . . ."
	


"Racial Discourse and Censorship on NBC-TV, 1948-1960."


At the dawn of the U.S. civil rights era, black stereotypes—the 
shiftless coon, termagant Mammy, servile Uncle Tom—remained the order 
of the day in popular American mass entertainment.  These stereotypes 
were toned-down considerably after the Second World War but, with the 
exception of a few celebrated black entertainers and sports figures, 
such was still the case on radio and in motion pictures.  Still, some 
believed commercial network television might be different.
Could TV break the stranglehold of American apartheid?  In May 1950, 
Variety offered perhaps the overstatement of the decade on that 
question, with the headline, "Negro Talent Coming into Own on TV 
Without Using Stereotypes: A Sure Sign That Television is Free of 
Racial Barriers."[1]  A month later Ebony echoed the theme despite 
lingering postwar dilemmas of racist stereotyping.[2]  In a later 
Ebony interview, Ed Sullivan remarked television helped "the Negro in 
his fight . . . to win the guarantees [of] his birthright [by taking 
the civil rights battle] into the living rooms of America's homes 
where public opinion is formed."[3]  To Sullivan's credit (and the 
occasional consternation of anxious advertisers), he regularly 
featured African American musicians, singers, dancers, and comedians 
on his popular variety program.  Also, during television's 
experimental years—prior to the Second World War and into the early 
postwar years—black performers seemed to make significant inroads 
toward eliminating the color barrier.[4]  The medium's insatiate need 
for programs and talent meant that African American entertainers were 
seen regularly on local and network shows and had not yet been cast 
as caricatures as they were on radio and in movies.[5]  Television's 
breezy attitude toward race before and immediately after the war, 
Donald Bogle argues, was due in large part to its early absence of 
significant audience—not enough people were watching to incite 
controversy, and especially not yet in Southern markets.  Bogle 
claims at this juncture television was still relatively free of "any 
particular social or political pressures . . . [and it was] not yet 
driven by the concerns of big advertisers."[6]  But as millions of TV 
sets invaded American homes and more network programming was 
consumed, commercial sponsorship along with the many restrictions it 
brought, increased.  Fear and discrimination by sponsors, abetted by 
commercial broadcasting's need for operating revenue from ad sales, 
could not be ignored.  Moreover, racist programming worked to 
unconsciously reinforce American bigotry and intolerance for the 
first two decades of television's life.
  Before advertising limited its possibilities, television, like 
radio before it, was envisioned as an electronic pathway to moral 
enlightenment.[7]  With the coming of television, proclaimed RCA's 
David Sarnoff may also come "a new world of cultural and educational 
opportunities . . . a new philosophy, a new sense of freedom, and 
greatest of all, perhaps, a finer and broader understanding between 
[sic] all the peoples of the world."[8]   It was advertised as a 
"magic box," a window to the world, a portal to unimaginable 
possibilities.[9]  But, television would not become a gateway to 
social utopia, and instead worked to fortify consumptive 
lifestyles.  In order to take quick advantage of a nation awash in 
pent-up savings after the war, big business needed a sweeping, cheap 
way to market products from bursting warehouses.[10]  TV led the way, 
with early television's business and programming models mirroring 
radio's template.  And, since racist attitudes permeated commercial 
radio entertainment for more then three decades by that time, it is 
not unseemly that stereotypes of African Americans would appear on 
television as well.  But, there were some in TV pushing to change 
that.  One was the nation's first network television censor, Stockton 
Helffrich.
NBC-TV's Continuity Acceptance Department and Issues of Race
 From the beginning of network TV programming, NBC had to contend 
with racist words and images in its telecasts.  Helffrich, head of 
the network's Continuity Acceptance (or "censorship") Department 
ordered cuts from all Hollywood films and cartoons replete with 
mocking stereotypes of African Americans.  He banned any production 
that, in his words, "represented [a] too unrelieved picture of the 
crap-shooting, drinking, dope-taking, easy-living, shiftless, and 
knife wielding Negro,"[11] and frequently reminded NBC program 
management of its 1948 "policy against epitaphs designating races or 
creeds in any way known to be offensive."[12]  As early as 1949, 
Helffrich wrote he was wary of intolerance in The Horn and Hardt's 
Children's Hour, seen on NBC-TV's New York station.[13]  "There has . 
. . been in the show," he explained, "some tendencies to go in for 
racial caricatures (particularly Negro.)"[14]  Helffrich pledged to 
scrutinize the kiddy's show scripts "quite carefully in an effort to 
anticipate possible sources of public disapproval."[15]
To have his actions make sense in a postwar context, it must be 
revealed that Helffrich was a member of the Communist Party before 
World War II and an active member of the Popular Front.[16]  He also 
marched in several of New York's always-controversial May Day Parades 
and organized Negro Youth Leagues at Harlem settlement 
houses.[17]  Later he renounced Communism, became an FDR liberal, and 
a union Shop Steward who organized white-collar and clerical 
employees against his own network.[18]  Despite his well-known 
progressive leanings, NBC's Top Brass plucked Helffrich from the rank 
and file, elevating him to Continuity Acceptance—a middle-management 
corporate public relations position.[19]  In addition, company 
documents indicate that on more than one occasion NBC protected 
Helffrich from U.S. government inquiry.[20]  Despite his checkered 
past, Helffrich was never blacklisted or summoned before a 
congressional committee.  (How and why this occurred lies beyond the 
narrow scope and discussion of this paper, but is the subject of an 
earlier work by the author.)[21]  Nonetheless, his clearly 
left-of-center (for the era) political beliefs, as we shall see, 
deeply informed Helffrich's decisions.
Of all his many censorial tasks, editing racist songs from TV 
programs proved quite daunting for Helffrich.  He insisted the lyrics 
of many 100-year-old Stephen Foster numbers be altered to meet what 
he saw as viewer prerequisites, concluding that if the words of those 
songs did not change, they would not be broadcast over NBC 
facilities.[22]  The Foster songs to which Helffrich specifically 
referred are ones like "My Old Kentucky Home" ("Oh, the sun shines 
bright [on my] old Kentucky home/'Tis summer, the darkies are gay . . 
."),[23] "Old Folks At Home" ("Way down upon the Swanee Ribber . . 
./Oh! darkies, how my heart grows weary/Far from de old folks at 
home"),[24] or "Massa's in de Cold Ground" ("Down in de 
cornfield/Hear dat mournful sound/All de darkeys am a weeping 
/Massa's in de cold, cold ground.")[25]  NBC-TV, through Helffrich, 
was plainly establishing a cautious but determined strategy to rid 
all network programming of racial stereotypes.  Still, live 
television was unpredictable and could undo the best-laid plans.
On The Old Gold Amateur Hour a rancher from upstate New York 
performed a tune whose lyric contained the word "darky."  The singing 
farmer was ordered to cut the reference in rehearsal and he did, but 
adlibbed it back into the live broadcast.[26]  Helffrich reacted by 
stationing more censors on the show "to police the amateurs" just as 
he and his minions patrolled "professional" programs like the Texaco 
Star Theater and Your Show of Shows.[27]  Another song entitled "The 
Whip" was presented on the Jack Carter Show but only after the 
"careful deletion of a redundant reference to 'black and white,'" 
wrote Helffrich.[28]  He even required that the tune not be sung in a 
Negro "dialect," concluding, "the intent of the song is certainly not 
anti-Negro but rather anti-tyranny."[29]  Nonetheless, complaint 
phone calls poured in from television cities around the 
nation.  Through these experiences and others Helffrich noted a sense 
of anxious change in viewer response of televised race 
portrayals.  He wrote, "On the whole problem of racial . . . 
minorities, we continue to have audience mail and like indications of 
a greater concern with these things . . . than used to prevail."[30]
After World War II, the cries of reform-minded activists in matters 
of race grew more intense.  African American veterans demanded an end 
to de jure racism at home, and full integration of American 
society.[31]  Sustaining such postwar dissension were liberal 
political polices, a major rise in membership of civil rights 
activist groups—like the National Association for the Advancement of 
Colored People (NAACP) and the National Urban League (NUL)—and a 
growing, vocal, and organized black middle-class.  Also, whites in 
significant numbers, especially in places like New York City and 
other urban centers, joined the cause and pushed for racial 
change.  This liberal ethos also meant television's portrayals of 
ethnicity and race would now come under greater scrutiny, and 
Helffrich knew it.
An NBC-TV/RCA Corporate Policy on Race
On October 6, 1950, Helffrich urged top network management to do 
something about its superannuated, racist programming arguing, "RCA 
[and] NBC's public relations [have been adversely affected] by 
alienation of the Negro audience through outdated editorial 
practice."[32]  While there is no specific documentation of the role 
Helffrich played in the corporate metamorphosis, in late November, 
apparently convinced of the importance African Americans held for the 
future of the network, RCA vice president John West, along with Syd 
Eiges, NBC VP for public information, hosted a seminar for black 
leaders.[33]  More than fifty representatives of important urban 
newspapers as well as key officers from the NAACP and NUL 
attended.  Among those making presentations for NBC-TV were Pat 
Weaver covering programming, Ernest de la Ossa explaining network 
hiring practices, and Helffrich outlining editorial and censorship 
diligence.  Helffrich later declared the seminar an unqualified 
success, openly stressing in his Continuity Acceptance 
Radio/Television reports that its only intent was "improvement of RCA 
and NBC public relations" and "the need for alertness whenever script 
material touches upon racial matters."[34]  By early the next year 
plans were in place for significant programming changes at the network.
RCA began an overt public relations initiative in January 1951, to 
tap the burgeoning $15-billion dollar "Negro market," one Variety 
called "the most important, financially potent, and 
sales-and-advertising serenaded 'minority' in the land."[35]  Sponsor 
further validated the potential African American marketplace by an 
article touting the so-called "forgotten 15,000,000" black 
consumers.[36]  Going even further, Ebony called commercial 
television "an amazing new weapon which can be all-powerful in 
blasting American's bigots."[37]  But racial hatred was an abiding 
feature of the American scene, and even promises of untapped economic 
gain could not quickly change things.
Unthinking racial slurs and stereotypes continued to crop up in 
programs even as NBC-TV focused on wooing black middle-class 
viewers.  For example, U.S. Senator Karl Mundt thought nothing of 
using the phrase "Nigger in the woodpile"[38] on the nationally 
televised NBC-TV public affairs show The American Forum of the 
Air.[39]  Helffrich wrote, Mundt's "ill advised adlib . . . brought 
in some fifty telephone calls" as well as objecting 
telegrams.[40]   Later that same month, comic Jack Carter used a 
puppet to portray a stereotyped "Stepin Fetchit" character singing 
"Lazy Bones," a tune containing derogatory lyrics about sloth and 
fecklessness.[41]  Later during the same show, in a sketch satirizing 
the 1937 film version of King Solomon's Mines, Carter's scripted line 
to an African American actor was to be: "Boy, I want you to call the 
other natives."  However, the last word was not enunciated clearly, 
or so Carter claimed, and was heard on national television as 
"niggers."  Embarrassed, Helffrich quickly distanced the network from 
Carter's gaffe pointing out that that particular "objectionable 
epitaph" was completely unacceptable in all NBC-TV scripts.[42]
To make amends for these continuing and costly errors the network 
retained and regularly consulted public relations specialist Joseph 
Baker, an African American whom Helffrich called an "authority . . . 
where the Negro people are concerned."[43]  Baker modified NBC's 
formal television statement of "standards and practices" to assume 
the tone of President Truman's 1947 special civil rights committee 
report and later published book, To Secure These Rights.[44]  The 
revised NBC-TV proclamation now noted that all programs would treat 
"aspects of race, creed, color, and national origin with dignity and 
respect."[45]  Near the end of 1951, the National Association of 
Radio and Television Broadcasters, taking its cue from NBC-TV, also 
revised its Code of Good Practices stating: "Racial or nationality 
types shall not be shown on television in such a manner as to 
ridicule the race or nationality."[46]
Blackface Minstrelsy on Television and Eddie Cantor
	When minstrelsy died at the end of the nineteenth-century, its 
blackface legacy was inherited by vaudeville, thus extending a 
powerful racist tradition a total of 120 years.[47]  The elite 
vaudevillians who performed in blackface on the Keith-Orpheum and RKO 
circuits in the 1910s and 1920s make up a virtual Who's Who of early 
twentieth-century show-biz celebrities: Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, 
George Jessel, George Burns, Sophie Tucker and Fanny Brice.[48]  The 
deeply entrenched minstrel tradition prompted even Hollywood's 
biggest stars to don blackface in some movies of the 1930s and early 
1940s: including Fred Astaire in Swingtime, Bing Crosby in Holiday 
Inn and Dixie, Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney in Babes in Arms and 
Babes on Broadway, and the Marx Brothers in A Day at the 
Races.[49]  The minstrel mask was more than a racial expression, it 
acted as an odd signifier, and a top performer's calling card recoded 
to mean grand, "traditional" entertainment was about to be 
presented.[50]  Both Jolson and Cantor said on numerous occasions 
that they were anything but racist.  Both openly refused to eat in 
restaurants that would not serve black performers, had long and 
abiding friendships with African Americans, and unreservedly 
advocated equal rights for blacks at a time when it was highly 
unpopular to do so.  Each also said that singing and dancing in 
blackface gave them the emotional freedom they needed to take risks 
as performers.[51]  Ultimately, the success of Jolson and Cantor was 
built on the premise that audiences of the era did not consider 
watching a blackface performance on stage a racial travesty.  Racism 
was so pervasive, so day-to-day unexceptional, that it was seen and 
accepted as an unremarkable part of the American social fabric—at 
least by most whites.[52]  Audiences perceived blackface 
entertainment with a similar indifference as vaudeville passed from 
the cultural scene by the mid-1930s.[53]  Comedian Bob Hope once 
remarked, "When vaudeville died, television was the box they put it 
in."  It is not surprising then that Eddie Cantor, the now aging, 
former vaudevillian and radio headliner-turned-television star, 
performed his most popular musical numbers in blackface on the 
nascent NBC-TV network.
When Cantor began his monthly hosting of The Colgate Comedy Hour he 
was almost sixty years old.[54]  At mid-twentieth century Cantor was 
one of the most popular and widely admired entertainers in the 
country, an "elder statesman" of show business with a career that 
spanned over forty-years in vaudeville, movies, recordings, and 
radio.  In addition to being a passionate spokesman for suffering 
Zionist refugees that survived Hitler, he was a tireless fundraiser 
for the United Jewish Appeal and other liberal humanist causes, and 
founder of March of Dimes.[55]  The showman certainly enjoyed his 
concurrent roles as performer, humanitarian, citizen of the world, 
and bona fide icon in the entertainment industry.
	On the debut Colgate show, Cantor rendered a medley of his favorite 
tunes wearing blackface, a straw hat, and oversized glasses.[56]  The 
New York-based telecast of September 10, 1950, beat Ed Sullivans' 
Toast of the Town show on CBS-TV with an audience share of nearly 
fifty-percent.[57]  Newspaper critics in major television cities were 
exuberant over Cantor's work.[58]  Nowhere, it appears, was there a 
note of disdain for the entertainer's blackface routine, even 
Helffrich's Continuity Acceptance Radio/Television (CART) reports 
were mute.  When the Colgate show premiered, Helffrich was still less 
than a month away from writing his October 6, 1950, CART entry 
claiming that overt racism hurt NBC-TV.  But Cantor's blackface 
routines did not abate.  On another show in the Colgate series, 
Cantor did an Al Jolson impression—complete with nappy wig, 
exaggerated lips and bugging eyes—which was labeled "'distasteful'" 
by a viewer whose comments Helffrich included in one of his 
reports.  The complainant added, "'Most sponsors and audiences 
recognize this type of act as insulting to the Negro people of the 
United States.'"[59]  In a later Colgate program, after Cantor 
preformed what was described only as a "Negro dance number," a 
puzzled Helffrich mused, "There does seem to be an inconsistency 
between Eddie Cantor's obvious effort on behalf of tolerance in 
America . . . and his inclusion of somewhat dated versions of Negro 
life."[60]  This riddle of Cantor's willingness to sing and dance in 
blackface while being a champion of human rights does at first glance 
seem inconsistent.  But, blackface at that time was perceived as 
theatrical convention and most artists (and audiences) were able to 
dissociate patently racist performances from any abiding personal 
sense of racism, even though such performances only served to 
reinforce an invisible racist ideology.[61]  One must also consider 
that sponsor Colgate-Palmolive was paying dearly for these expensive 
series of comedy spectaculars, one of NBC-TV's first successful 
counter-programming of the Sullivan show on Sunday 
evenings.[62]  Both network and sponsor desired to tap the attention 
of a vast audience that tuned in to enjoy Cantor's stage 
persona.  Since he grew to fame frequently performing in the minstrel 
idiom, if Cantor wished to sing a song in his signature blackface on 
national television, who could (or would want to) stop him?—certainly 
not the network, the sponsor, or Chief Censor Helffrich.  Not yet.
	Helffrich also let it be known that NBC-TV's best interests would be 
served if all minstrel or blackface presentations were deleted. "The 
damage done to good will of the public toward talent and clients by 
this kind of thing is increasingly apparent," he patiently 
wrote.[63]  Still, on the first anniversary of vaudeville entertainer 
Al Jolson's death, comedian Danny Thomas did a salute to the minstrel 
showman in blackface that brought NBC-TV ferocious viewer 
complaints.[64]  The next week, on the popular Kate Smith Show, 
another blackface act was used that again begot stinging 
protests.[65]  Now pushed beyond his limit, Helffrich declared he and 
his department would unceremoniously cut all racist portrayals on any 
NBC-TV show, admonishing writers and producers to steer clear of 
bigoted references to "avoid the possibility of a totally wasted effort."[66]
And Helffrich and his editors delivered on their promise.  Deleted 
from a Kraft Television Theatre drama was a reference to a "colored 
servant as 'that baboon,'" revealed Helffrich, continuing, "and the 
order of her mistress 'you will bathe . . . I cannot have you 
smelling like a sow . . .'"[67]  Also cut was a stereotyped line 
uttered by a policeman unjustifiably suspicious of an African 
American maid: "Maybe she's got a meat cleaver with her," the officer 
was scripted to say.[68]  At NBC-TV's Chicago operation, Continuity 
Acceptance manager Harry Ward deleted racial clichés in hundreds of 
old movies purchased for television broadcast.  One excised film 
scene depicted what Ward described as a "terrified Negro in frantic 
flight screaming, 'Help, help!  Seventy thousand ghosts jumped in mah 
ear!'"[69]  Ward's team also redacted dozens of comedies, cartoons 
and silent films showing sycophantic black cooks, maids, and 
chauffeurs.  In many Our Gang shorts, black skin was played for 
laughs.  In one episode an African American infant had his face 
painted with white shoe polish; in another scene Farina, a young 
African American character, wipes the sweat from his brow and black 
coloring comes off on his handkerchief.  In still another, little 
Farina upsets a flour can on his head to look "white."  In a Mutt and 
Jeff cartoon, Ward describes "'an unconscionable Negro stereotype 
with howling, gibbering cannibals . . .'"[70]  Guillotined from the 
popular Gangbusters crime show was a scene in which a black janitor 
was "scared and hopped up on gin."[71]  Cut from a Fireside Theatre 
script "a billboard which would have featured Al Jolson in blackface."[72]
All hackneyed notions that depicted African American's as tambourine 
shaking minstrels, derelict sociopaths wielding concealed weapons, 
simple-minded loafers, excessive drinkers, drugged-out zombies, 
addicted gamblers, infrequent bathers, and easily freighted 
stooges—i.e., "Feets don't fails me now!"—were cut.  Helffrich 
admonished his editors to "anticipate [these] kind[s] of [racial 
slurs] from writers and agencies . . ." suggesting that "[such] 
sloppy and lazy cliché's are out of date, are not fair, and are 
anything but a pretty face of America to the rest of the 
world."[73]  He pointedly wrote, "I can't very well poke my head in 
the sand to avoid reminding you not only of the century we are living 
in but of the nature of our audience."[74]
Such comments imply Helffrich was well aware of NBC-TV's multi-ethnic 
audience and the national and international political tensions 
surrounding race that engulfed the postwar era.  In 1955, for 
example, Helffrich attended a meeting of the New York State 
Commission Against Discrimination.[75]  Present at that gathering was 
Frederick O'Neal, a black pioneer in American theater, who likewise 
remarked, "that the absence of Negroes [on television shown as part 
of daily] . . . American life is something of which enemies of our . 
. . [nation] can take advantage."[76]  Helffrich, of course, agreed 
and throughout the CART reports, frequently pointed to NBC-TV's 
far-sighted integration policy.
	By mid-decade, NBC-TV demanded changes to any act that embraced 
racist stereotypes in any form.  For this the network endured angry 
protests from some of its biggest stars.  The Eddie Cantor Story was 
about to open in cinemas around the nation, and NBC-TV Chicago and 
New York received several one-minute television commercials to 
promote the biopic.  These ads, however, caused Helffrich and 
Continuity Acceptance significant problems.  The advertisements 
depicted Keefe Brasselle—the actor portraying Cantor in the flim—in 
blackface, an image now unfit for telecast over NBC 
facilities.  Therefore, the network chose to air only the 
non-blackface Cantor ad in its entirety, and "manufacture" a 
twenty-second commercial from the other unacceptable one-minute 
spot.[77]  On the heels of this action, NBC-TV next demanded major 
changes to Cantor's first Colgate Comedy Hour show of 1954, 
originating from Hollywood.[78]  Cantor again wished to sing his 
songs in blackface, a practice now deemed totally unacceptable by 
NBC-TV's West Coast management.[79]  Cantor left the show for good on 
May 16, 1954.[80]
NBC-TV's "Integration Without Identification" Policy
As Helffrich worked to eliminate racial stereotypes of any single 
minority, he and others concurrently pushed into place a "radical" 
corporate programming strategy—radical, at least, for 1950s 
television.  NBC-TV's plan, dubbed "Integration Without 
Identification," would now work consciously to integrate television 
programs.  The CART reports do not indicate how much of a hand 
Helffrich had in crafting the new policy, but it is clear that in 
1949 he first wrote of public relations problems the network 
encountered by broadcasting racist words or images.[81]  By late 
December 1950, a company-wide RCA racial initiative was being readied 
for the new year, which, as previously noted, included a 
comprehensive public outreach effort to secure a foothold in the 
robust and thriving $15-billion dollar African-American 
marketplace.  One of RCA's first undertakings was to recruit more 
"Negro employees" at NBC-TV.[82]  In testimony before a subcommittee 
of the Senate Labor Committee during late summer 1952, RCA president 
Frank Folsom announced that blacks now held diverse NBC job titles 
that included director of community affairs, senior staff writer, 
assistant film librarian, announcer, scenic artists, as well as 
on-air performers.[83]  Folsom also reported that RCA had recently 
hired nine African-American electrical engineers from Howard, 
Columbia, and Youngstown College among others.[84]  In late September 
1952, Helffrich noted that key NBC Managers "met with certain 
department heads to hypo the ["Integration Without Identification"] 
program," which in turn was followed by meetings "attended by top 
Producers, Directors and their assistants."[85]  An ebullient 
Helffrich wrote, "Clearly, activities of Continuity Acceptance in 
deleting stereotypes are now being complimented by positive 
[Management] actions creating an atmosphere in which further 
integration of talent regardless or color is the order of the 
day."[86]  That same month, RCA was awarded the first National 
Association of Colored Women citation in recognition of equitable 
employment in the broadcasting industry.[87]  By December, all 
pertinent members of the NBC production staff met with 
African-American community leaders in Chicago.[88]  Early the next 
year, Mildred McAfee Horton—first woman Director of RCA, NBC, New 
York Life, and seventh president of Wellesley College —declared NBC 
had "taken the lead in eliminating stereotypes which in the past has 
belittled certain races and minority groups."[89]  However, NBC-TV's 
program integration plan was not explained or promoted until a year later.
The first direct CART report mention of NBC-TV's "Integration Without 
Identification" policy was on January 12, 1953.[90]   Helffrich wrote 
that a conscious effort was now being made by Management to 
integrate, but never call attention to, Negro talent in all NBC 
programming.[91] On a Kraft Television Theatre presentation a few 
months later, a black actor was distinctly seen among a few other 
white actors in a sweeping pan on the set of a newspaper 
bureau.  "The camera very simply scanned the office," Helffrich 
explained, "catching quite incidentally . . . that one of the staff 
members was a Negro."[92]   This particular program is significant 
because the Kraft show was not an internally produced NBC-TV 
offering; Kraft's advertising agency had produced it.  Because of 
that, Helffrich enthused, "There was a good bit of gratification 
around the shop that an RCA/NBC [race] policy was spreading into 
agency production."[93]  But not all viewers took the liberal turn 
and saw television integration a positive thing.  Many were afraid of 
what was considered aberrant "race mixing."
Postwar segregation and racial fears were systemic, none more so than 
in the American South.  Variety reported most Southern politicians 
rejected television programs showing blacks and whites "on a purely 
equal social status."[94]  Southern historian Pete Daniel explained 
that whites feared integration because it "would allow black males 
and white females to share the same social space" thereby leading to 
"interracial orgies" and mongrelized children.[95]  Georgia Governor 
Herman Talmadge threatened a nationwide boycott of companies 
sponsoring "race mixing" programs so as "to clean up television 
before the situation becomes more offensive."[96]  The odd logic of 
race mixing was a cornerstone of Jim Crow, and "defending" women 
against almost certain sexual rape at the hands of a black man was 
frequently conflated with a white man's personal sense of masculine 
power, jingoistic patriotism, and the abiding horror of invisible 
communism.[97]  An improper glance, even the unintentional and 
harmless touching of a white woman by a black man could prompt 
outrage (or worse.)  An unidentified resident of East St. Louis, a 
hotbed of bigotry and unrest since race riots erupted there in 
1917,[98] wrote to Helffrich complaining that he and his friends were 
"thoroughly disgusted" by what they saw on NBC-TV objecting 
to
      mixed program[s] in which whites and Negroes take part . . . 
Whenever your
      sponsors . . . find it necessary to put whites and blacks on 
the same program, it
      is . . . time to stop [that] show entirely. . . .If you must 
have Negroes, then have an
      all Negro performance.  [Some] of my friends, as well as 
myself, shut off that part
      of the program, and even . . . recommend boycott[ing] the 
commercial lines
      represented by the sponsors.  We intend to . . . do this so 
long as such programs
      continue.[99]

Later a Chicago viewer was equally upset, proclaiming it was all a 
lie that "the Negro community resents stereotypes."[100]  The viewer 
wrote that "the only persons challenging his statements '[were] the 
Communists and perhaps a handful of self-appointed leaders who are 
simply seeking publicity.'"[101]  Helffrich did not directly address 
this letter, but Ben Park, Network TV Program Director for the NBC 
Central Division, did.  In his reply, Park explained the reasoning 
behind RCA/NBC's "Integration Without Identification" agendum:
      This emphasis on the preservation of human dignity is 
definitely not communist-
      inspired. . . .The so-called mass communications media are 
extremely potent in
      their ability to inculcate attitudes; we feel the least we can 
do is to avoid
      stereotyping and present human beings on the basis of their 
human attributes,
      good or bad. . . .[NBC-TV's "Integration Without 
Identification"] policy has
      tended to accomplish two things.  First, to state simply but 
effectively that
      Negroes bear the same general qualities of character and 
personality that exist
      among all the members of the human race, and whatever slight physical
      differences they have are not indicative of any 
inferiority.  This is so apparent that
      it makes us a little ashamed of the past, and ashamed that we 
have to make a
      point of it.  Second, generally speaking the policy to include 
Negroes in roles
      which they normally play in all walks of life has tended to 
increase the total
      number of opportunities available to them.  In other words, 
instead of insisting
      always on casting an Irishman as a policeman, many programs 
will include a Negro
      in the role.  The same goes for doctors, nurses, lawyers, cab 
drivers, laborers, and
      mechanics, as well as bootblacks, entertainers, and 
criminals.  In short, we are
      attempting to cast Negroes as people.[102]

Those sentiments may have been veridical for NBC-TV, but it appeared 
such concern for matters racial were less important to rival 
television networks during the same period—although it seemed NBC's 
competitors were coming around.  Later that same year for example, 
Helffrich noted that Frank Stanton, CBS president, was resigning from 
his old Ohio State fraternity because of the group's discriminatory 
practices.[103]  Stanton quit the Greek letter society when he 
learned his college brotherhood barred membership to all persons 
"'not of pure Aryan blood.'"[104]  Helffrich, in an obvious and 
self-serving comment, wrote, "For a couple of years now NBC has been 
pretty much alone in the leadership of a very conscious movement not 
only to eliminate stereotyping from our offerings but to integrate 
without identification member's of minority groups," continuing, "For 
a long time . . . our company's activity in the area has been 
pioneering in nature . . . [so] when we see our leading competitors 
beginning to take an interest it's obvious an excellent company 
policy is paying off . . ."[105]  Helffrich's commentary in this case 
may have been overstated for purposes of irony when one considers the 
unequivocally racist programs then being carried by the other two 
major networks.
NBC-TV, Beulah, and Amos 'n' Andy
Delta Sigma Theta, the celebrated African American service 
sorority,[106] awarded citations to NBC-TV and its Lights Out program 
for the "conscious efforts by both RCA and NBC to advance . . . good 
relations with the Negro community."[107]  Helffrich proudly pointed 
to one episode of the psychological drama wherein, "Negro actors 
assumed the roles of policemen."[108]  With evident satisfaction he 
noted that it was obvious to the home viewer the patrolmen were 
"essentially . . . members of the force and only incidentally  . . 
.  Negro[es]," (italics added) continuing, "Nowhere in the continuity 
was any racial identification involved."[109]  A similar strategy was 
employed on another Lights Out show in which an African-American was 
cast as a taxi driver.  Helffrich again asserting "the fact that he 
was a Negro wasn't accorded any significance (italics added) since he 
typified the hundreds of drivers who might be found cruising along 
any big city street."[110]  The images of black actors playing the 
quotidian roles of policemen or cab drivers, based upon Helffrich's 
notes, were apparently Promethean and well nigh incomprehensible to 
most television viewers of the era!  Helffrich's verbiage certainly 
reflects that a detailed clarification was thought required for the 
absolutely imponderable casting of African Americans in incidental 
roles usually reserved for whites.  The censor unquestionably 
understood that, for many, seeing a black face on television not 
acting the coon, Tom, or Mammy (or without tambourine and minstrel 
song) was simply inexplicable and required a sort of translation or 
justification.
Such concern for racial depiction did not appear to be the case at 
the two other major networks.  In October 1950, Beulah premiered on 
ABC-TV.  The sitcom holds the distinction of being the first 
nationally broadcast weekly television series starring an African 
American in the lead role.  Distinguished actress Ethel Waters first 
played the central character, Beulah.[111]  It was one of the very 
few images of African Americans on prime-time television during this 
period, which is perhaps why it so quickly came under fire—Beulah 
perpetuated the jolly, servile Mammy stereotype.  Beulah, a 
middle-aged black domestic, worked for the somewhat dysfunctional 
all-white Henderson family.  Episodes revolved around life in the 
kitchen of Beulah's inept employers—her sensible, folksy ways, and 
down-home cooking that could repair just about any problem—and her 
interaction with other neighborhood blacks who also performed menial, 
blue-collar jobs for area white people.  Television reviewer Jack 
Gould panned the show in the New York Times, as did some members of 
the black press, but its most severe critic was New York Herald 
Tribune columnist John Crosby.  Crosby was particularly captious of 
Waters arguing that she was, after all, a highly regarded actress and 
celebrated role model for the African American community.  Crosby saw 
her participation in Beulah as a creative cul de sac and betrayal to 
Water's singular theatrical accomplishments and personal 
triumphs.  Despite the rancor, Beulah never provoked the amount of 
bitter debate that Amos 'n' Andy generated, and it remained on the 
air until 1953.[112]
Amos 'n' Andy debuted on CBS-TV on June 28, 1951, a year after 
Beulah, but became a lightning rod for organized protest.[113]  The 
television show was modeled after the long-running and phenomenally 
popular radio program heard on NBC from 1928-43, and again on CBS 
from 1943 through the mid-Fifties.  Amos 'n' Andy, set in Harlem, 
portrayed an all-black world in which a slow-witted cabby (and show 
narrator), Andy, and his gullible, cigar champing friend, Amos, 
interact with the scheming carpetbagger, Kingfish, and his shrewish 
wife, Sapphire, alongside a spectrum of other stereotypical black 
characters.  Amos 'n' Andy found its comedic voice in overstated 
black rural dialects, garish costuming, and exaggerated story lines 
that continually featured frauds or scams perpetrated on Andy and 
others by Kingfish.
Amos 'n' Andy's pedigree—deeply rooted in the minstrel 
tradition—caused the National Association for the Advancement of 
Colored People (NAACP) to launch lawsuits and boycotts against the 
show.[114]  At its 1951 summer convention in Atlanta, the NAACP 
officially condemned Amos 'n' Andy and all other television programs 
that featured racist stereotypes.[115]  In formal legal action 
brought against CBS-TV and show sponsor Blatz Brewing Company, the 
NAACP presented over a half-dozen objections to the Amos 'n' Andy 
television show, including that the program tended "to strengthen the 
conclusion among uninformed and prejudiced people that Negroes are 
inferior, lazy, dumb, and dishonest."[116]  All that notwithstanding, 
bringing Amos 'n' Andy to postwar television cannot be considered a 
programming miscalculation on the part of CBS-TV.  The national mood 
on racism had yet to change when the show went on the air, and its 
ratings were actually quite good in the first year.  Amos 'n' Andy 
"will be with us for a long time," wrote Printers Ink, and 
Advertising Age pointed out the program was also well liked by black 
viewers, noting "most Negroes in this area do not go along with the 
NAACP."[117]  Historian Thomas Cripps contends that the NAACP's 
efforts throughout the 1953 television season only worked to 
"splinter" Black unity against the show, and "undercut" its campaign 
against sponsor Blatz Brewing.  By the next year, Blatz moved its 
sponsorship to the Four Star Playhouse claiming the anthology show 
brought "a higher-class image" to its product.  Ultimately it was the 
loss of sponsorship that triggered the network demise of Amos 'n' 
Andy.  Clearly, however, the NAACP played a central role in drumming 
up controversy against Blatz—anathema to any television sponsor.[118]
Moreover, for some African Americans, Amos 'n' Andy was not perceived 
as a polemic on race as much as it was seen as an intraclass 
problem.  Sociologist Darrell Y. Hamamoto argues "the real conflict 
revolved around the anxiety of the newly arrived black middle class 
and its ambiguous relationship to the upstart black 
underclass."[119]  Cripps concurred, observing, "Into this world of 
newly felt . . . black middle-class consciousness, activism, and 
wealth descended Amos 'n' Andy, complete with baggy pants, plug hats, 
foul cigars, pushy wives, misfired schemes and mangled grammar," 
continuing, "Organized blacks were shocked, not so much at what they 
saw but at the timing of its release in the year of liberal 
'rededication,' at a cresting of black political consciousness."[120]
The national racial climate was slowly changing during the Fifties, 
but CBS and ABC-TV's programming remained tied to past perceptions of 
race.  Only one network, NBC, tried something different.  NBC-TV's 
early strategic decsion to eliminate racial stereotypes was, indeed, 
a clear disruption of existing racial conventions, and a forward 
thinking act of important cultural significance.  In addition, 
Helffrich's CA department was responsible for a significant part of 
the network change.  Television historian Jeff Kisseloff observed, 
that "Helffrich lobbied forcefully, but unsuccessfully to keep Amos 
'n' Andy off television . . ." but Kisseloff provides no 
corroborating evidence, nor is there any mention of how Helffrich, an 
NBC-TV executive, could in any way directly influence CBS-TV from 
broadcasting the show.  In addition, no mention of any such effort 
appears in Helffrich's 225 NBC-TV Continuity Acceptance Radio 
Television (CART) reports.  However, evidence does show that 
Helffrich rejected the film series Beulah after its initial run on 
ABC-TV from 1950-53.  The distribution company handling the sitcom, 
Flamingo Films, was taking the series into syndication and WRCA, 
NBC-TV's owned and operated station in New York, was offered the 
program.[121]  "We turned [it] down," wrote Helffrich.[122]  He 
described the show as, "the usual so-called humor based upon racial 
peculiarities and is about dated these days as anything could get," 
continuing, there are "innumerable stereotypes [in the show,] 
garbling of English, etc.[,] plus 'subtle' condescensions toward 
Beulah . . ."[123]
Conclusions
At first blush Helffrich's progressive humanism on race might be seen 
as heroic given the extant bigotry of the era.  It is, after all, 
true that corporate documents show Helffrich recommended and helped 
facilitate a corporate policy change, insisting on program 
integration years ahead of the other networks, thus nudging NBC-TV 
toward multiculturalism before the concept had any social 
currency.[124]  But a more critical reading suggests Helffrich's 
actions addressed social power inequities in TV programs by only 
censoring the symbols or expression of power.  Merely expurgating 
bigoted speech did not and could not address the underlying problem: 
ubiquitous race discrimination in the United States promoted by a 
morally corrupt political, economic and legal system.  If Helffrich's 
palliative censorship worked at all, it worked to alleviate some 
symptoms manifest in racist broadcasts at the dawn of commercial 
television.  Recall Helffrich was but a mid-level manager with highly 
proscribed corporate authority, a small cog in a large company 
machine.  He changed what he could and no more.  Cynicism easily 
prompts that NBC-TV's "integration without identification" policy may 
well have been adopted by the network to take advantage of a possible 
advertising windfall—as mentioned earlier, the postwar African 
American market was a massive $15-billion opportunity.[125]  It was 
also good public relations and good business for NBC-TV to adopt a 
"pro Negro" policy before its broadcast competitors did.  Seen this 
way the network's early decision to eschew racial stereotypes was a 
strategic corporate move not an authentic disjunctive cultural 
act.  But whether based on commerce or the disruption of early TV 
programming tropes, methods of directly dealing with overt racism 
were at least put on the agenda and considered at NBC-TV thanks in 
part to Helffrich.
Still, there were more than business considerations alone that 
animated Helffrich; some higher level of social consciousness 
appeared to be at play, and ethical principles were regularly invoked 
in his CART reports.  For example, Helffrich repeatedly used the 
notion of human dignity to frame questions about race on 
television.  "An obvious way to spot racist programming," he wrote, 
was to have "an attentive ear cocked toward those who express 
hurt."[126]  Helffrich said he maintained an "automatic" wariness 
toward racial clichés like "Irish drunks, Italian gangsters, 
avaricious Jews, [and] Lazy Negroes."[127]  He said, "When you get 
right down to it, the simplest rule of thumb [for spotting racist 
programming] is summed up in the word 'dignity,'" concluding,
      You may not please everybody depending on preconceived 
prejudices behind the
      point of view, but in terms of your own conscience as a 
broadcaster you are in
      pretty good odor . . . Remember that in the broadcasting 
business the potential to
      do something harmful or beneficial to racial amity is 
conceivably greater than in
      any other medium at this time. . . .Broadcast of a racial 
fallacy is so immediate, so
      pervasive, so irretrievable, so shared coast-to-coast, 
border-to-border, as to be of
      enormous significance. [128]

And in that quote we see the crux of it: Helffrich identified and 
linked speech with action,[129] then expurgated symbolic discourse 
using some notion of "moral censorship" guided by his passionately 
Liberal ideology.  And Helffrich's program suggestions were 
humanistic improvements—albeit cosmetic ones—to early TV fare.  The 
chief censor plainly saw his job as not only preventing hurtful 
speech, but also as gatekeeper, philosopher, teacher, public 
relations agent, and catalyst encouraging progressive ideas on 
national television, despite regular viewer and sponsor protest.
William Clotworthy, a Standards and Practices editor who worked at 
NBC-TV in the 1970s, says Helffrich "left a legacy of thought on 
racial matters" that was talked about at the network more than 
20-years after Helffrich's departure.[130]  Clearly, Helffrich's 
influence and social conscience in areas of race and ethnicity were 
foundational, though obviously not fully realized during his 12-year 
tenure as chief censor at NBC-TV.












Endnotes:
[1]  	Variety, 3 May 1950, 30, 40.

[2]  	Ebony, June 1950, 22-23.

[3]  	"Can TV Crack America's Color Line?" Ebony, May 1951, 58-65.

[4]  	MacDonald, Blacks and White TV, 3-10, and Bogel, Primetime Blues, 13-19.

[5]  	Ibid.

[6]  	Bogle, Primetime Blues, 13.

[7]  	David Sarnoff, Looking Ahead: The Papers of David Sarnoff (New 
York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), 88-123.

[8]  	Ibid., 96.

[9]  	J. Ronald Oakley, God's Country: America in the Fifties (New 
York: Barricade Books, 1990), 95.

[10]  	Erik Barnouw, The Sponsor: Notes on a Modern Potentate (New 
York: Oxford, 1978), 47-58.

[11]  	NBC CART, 20 April 1950, box 1, folder 3.  NBC Files. 
Wisconsin State Historical Society, Madison, Wis.

[12]  	NBC CART, 6 October 1950, box 1, folder 3.  NBC Files.  The 
specific policy may be found in Responsibility: A Working Manual of 
NBC Program Policies (New York: National Broadcasting Company, 1948).

[13]  	NBC CART, 17 January 1949, box 1, folder 2.  NBC Files.  Horn 
and Hardt was a postwar automat cafeteria in New York City.

[14]  	Ibid.

[15]  	Ibid.

[16]  	Jackie Austin (Helffrich's daughter), interview by author, 
Madison, Wis., 11 January 1999.  See also FBI file number 100-336937 
– Stockton Helffrich, 1950.

[17]  	Ibid.

[18]  	 "Counting Noses: NBCers Agree With Helffrich," "Top NBCer 
Says: Biggest Network Whitecollarites Need Guild." From union 
newspaper, White Collar Mike, 1 August 1946, 1.  See also Bert 
Briller, "Conscience of the Industry," Television Quarterly, 26, 1, 
and (1997): 52-57; and Stockton Helffrich, interview with Jackie Austin.

[19]  	Stockton Helffrich interview by Jackie Austin, Helffrich 
residence, Jackson Heights, New York, 1 March 1987.

[20]  	L. B. Nichols to Tolson, FBI Memo, 16 February 1950.  FBI File 
100-336937.

[21]  	See Robert J. Pondillo, "The 'Secret Life' of Stockton 
Helffrich: America's First Network Television Censor."  Unpublished 
paper presented at the American Journalism Historians Association 
Convention, October 2002, Nashville, TN.

[22]  	NBC CART, 27 July 1950.

[23]  	Stephen C. Foster, My Old Kentucky Home, Good Night (New York: 
Firth, Pond and Company, 1853).

[24]  	Stephen C. Foster, Old Folks At Home (New York: Firth, Pond 
and Company, 1851).

[25]  	Stephen C. Foster, Massa's in de Cold Ground (New York: Firth, 
Pond and Company, 1852).

[26]  	NBC CART, 23 February 1950, box 1, folder 3.  NBC Files.  The 
lights, cameras and general commotion of live television make him 
nervous was the consensus.

[27]  	Ibid.

[28]  	NBC CART, 6 October 1950, box 1, folder 3.  NBC Files.

[29]  	Ibid.

[30]  	NBC CART, 20 April 1950.

[31]  	For a detailed discussion of how African-American's postwar 
social goals were yoked to the U.S. war effort see John B. Kirby, 
Black Americans in the Roosevelt Era: Liberalism and Race (Knoxville, 
Tenn.: University of Tennessee Press, 1980).

[32]  	NBC CART, 6 October 1950.

[33]  	This seminar may have been the brainchild of Joseph Baker, a 
black, African-American public relations consultant, whose company 
was retained by NBC-TV and RCA.  It is unclear when Baker was 
hired.  Helffrich first writes of Baker in his CART report of 
November 1951, whereas this seminar occurred in October 1950.

[34]  	NBC CART, 8 November 1950, box 1, folder 3.  NBC Files.

[35]  	Variety, 9 January 1952, 32; see also 27 January 1954, 1.

[36]  	"The Forgotten 15,000,000," Sponsor, October 1949, 24-25, 
54-55.  See also "Selling the Negro Market," Tide, 20 July 1951, 30.
[37]  	Ebony, May 1951, 58.

[38]  	NBC CART, 28 January 1951, box 1, folder 4.  The offensive 
epithet is defined as "a trick or drawback, especially if 
deliberately concealed; something inconsistent or out of place" 
and/or "an unacknowledged black forebear of a white person, with 
'woodpile' a slang for 'family tree.'" It is unclear how or in what 
context Senator Mundt used the phrase.  See J. E. Lighter, J. 
O'Connor J. Ball, (eds.), Random House Historical Dictionary of 
American Slang: A-G (Random House Historical Dictionary of American 
Slang, Vol. 1) (New York: Random House, 1994), 916.

[39]  	The American Forum of the Air, originating from Washington DC, 
was seen on NBC-TV from 1950-57.  The talk show began on radio in 
1937.  See Alex McNeil, Total Television, Fourth Edition (New York: 
Penguin Books, 1997), 40; and Tim Brooks and Earl Marsh, The Complete 
Directory of Primetime Network and Cable TV Shows: 1946-Present, 
Sixth Edition (New York: Ballentine Books, 1995), 41.

[40]  	NBC CART, 28 January 1951.

[41]  	Stepin Fetchit was the stage name of an actor (Lincoln Perry) 
who became known for his degrading portrayals of black men in early 
cinema.  His caricature usually portrayed blacks as lazy, easily 
frightened, chronically idle, and inarticulate.  See Donald Bogle, 
Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History 
of Blacks in American Film (New York: Continuum, 1989).

[42]  	NBC CART, 19 February 1951, box 1, folder 4.  NBC Files.

[43]  	NBC CART, 21 November 1951, box 1, folder 4.  NBC Files.

[44]  	See Robert J. Donovan, Conflict and Crisis: The Presidency of 
Harry S. Truman (New York: Norton, 1977), 333-4; and Alonzo L. Hamby, 
Man of the People: A Life of Harry S. Truman. New York: Oxford 
University Press, 1995), 364-6.

[45]  	NBC CART, 21 November 1951.

[46] 	"(TV Code) The Television Code of the NARTB," as reprinted in 
Radio/Television Daily: 1953 Television Year Book, Sixteenth Annual 
Edition (New York: Radio Daily Corp., 1953), 813.

[47]  	See Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans: A History 
(New York: W.W. Norton, 1983); Douglas Gilbert, American Vaudeville: 
Its Life and Times (New York: Dover, 1940), see also Robert C. Allen, 
"Vaudeville and Film 1895-1915: A Study in Media Interaction," (Ph.D. 
diss., The University of Iowa, 1977.)

[48]  	John E. DiMeglio, Vaudeville USA, (Bowling Green, Oh., Bowling 
Green University Popular Press, 1973), 25; and Joe Laurie, Jr., 
Vaudeville: From the Honky-Tonk to the Palace (New York: Henry Holt 
and Company, 1953), 63; see also Susan Kattwinkel, Tony Pastor 
Presents: Afterpieces From The Vaudeville Stage (Phoenix, Ariz.: 
Abbey Publishing, 1998).

[49]  	Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in 
the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley, Calf.: University of California 
Press, 1996).  Rogin argues blackface was the most popular American 
form of entertainment, so immigrant groups, especially the Irish and 
Jews, adopted it as a means of assimilation into the dominant American culture.

[50]  	See Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the 
American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

[51]  	Herbert Goldman, biographer to Jolson and Cantor, noted that a 
performer's use of "blackface, though lending accent to broader 
facial expressions, was often said to inhibit the rendering of 
subtler emotions."  See Herbert G. Goldman, Banjo Eyes: Eddie Cantor 
and the Birth of Modern Stardom (New York: Oxford, 1997), 68.

[52]  	Herbert Goldman, Jolson: The Legend Comes to Life (New York: 
Oxford University Press, 1988), 170-71; see also Goldman, Banjo Eyes, 57-77.

[53]  	By 1935 the legendary Palace Theatre, once flagship to a 
600-theatre vaudeville circuit, had become a movie house with no 
vaudeville acts at all.  Most historians agree vaudeville died as the 
result of changing entertainment economics brought about by the 
popularity of radio, talking movies, and the impact of the Great 
Depression.  See Robert W. Synder, The Voice of the City: Vaudeville 
and Popular Culture in New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

[54]  	In addition to Eddie Cantor, The Colgate Comedy Hour's 
revolving hosts included Abbott and Costello, Dean Martin and Jerry 
Lewis, Ed Wynn, Donald O'Conner, Ethel Merman, and Frank Sinatra. 
Other stars hosting only a few episodes included Bob Hope, Tony 
Martin, Jimmy Durante and Fred Allen.  See McNeil, Total Television, 
171; and Brooks and Marsh, The Complete Directory, 202.

[55]  	Cantor also christened the polio-fighting charity fund the 
"March of Dimes."  See Goldman, Banjo Eyes, 195-96.

[56]  	Ibid., 269.

[57]  	Ibid.  The early Colgate shows frequently beat Sullivan's program.

[58]  	Ibid.

[59]  	NBC CART, 27 September 1951, box 1, folder 4.  NBC Files.

[60]  	NBC CART, 5 October 1951, box 1, folder 4.  NBC Files.

[61]  	For a discussion of ideology and social reproduction see John 
B. Thompson, Ideology and Modern Culture: Critical Social Theory in 
the Era of Mass Communication (Stanford, CA: Stanford University 
Press, 1990), 85-97.

[62]  	Brooks and Marsh, The Complete Directory, 202.

[63]  	NBC CART, 6 November 1951, box 1, folder 4.  NBC Files.

[64]  	Ibid.

[65]  	Ibid.

[66]  	NBC CART, 31 October 1951, box 1, folder 4.  NBC Files.

[67]  	NBC CART, 10 September 1952, box 1, folder 5.  NBC Files.

[68]  	Ibid.

[69]  	NBC CART, 2 December 1952, box 1, folder 5.  NBC Files.

[70]  	NBC CART, 12 January 1953, box 1, folder 6.  NBC Files.  See 
also NBC CART, 23 July 1952, box 1, folder 5.  NBC Files; and NBC 
CART, 7 February 1953 and 13 February 1953.  NBC Files; and NBC CART, 
5 May 1954, box 1, folder 6.  NBC Files.

[71]  	Ibid.

[72]  	Ibid.

[73]  	Ibid.

[74]  	Ibid.

[75]  	NBC CART, 16 February 1955, box 153, folder 1.  NBC Files.

[76]  	Ibid.

[77]  	NBC CART, 5 February 1954, box 1, folder 7.  NBC Files.

[78]  	Goldman, Banjo Eyes, 378.

[79]  	NBC CART, 5 February 1954.

[80]  	Goldman, Banjo Eyes, 378.

[81]  	Cripps, "Amos 'n' Andy . . ." 38.  Cripps also mentions 
NBC-TV's "Integration Without Identification" policy, and the 
network's hiring of a black public relations firm, apparently 
learning of both from articles found in Variety (fn. 51).

[82]  	TV Digest, 23 August 1952, 10.

[83]  	Ibid.

[84]  	Ibid.

[85]  	NBC CART, 12 January 1953, box 1, folder 6.  NBC Files.

[86]  	Ibid.

[87]  	NBC CART, 26 September 1952, box 1, folder 5.  NBC Files.

[88]  	NBC CART, 12 January 1953.

[89]  	Ibid.

[90]  	Ibid.

[91]  	Ibid.  Although some form of it was in place and practiced since 1950.

[92]  	NBC CART, 5 March 1953, box 1, folder 6.  NBC Files.

[93]  	Ibid.

[94]  	Variety, 9 January 1952, 1, 20.

[95]  	Daniel, Lost  Revolutions, 191.

[96]  	Variety, 9 January 1952, 20.

[97]  	Daniel, Lost Revolutions, 196; also see Stephen J. Whitfield, 
A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till (New York: Free Press, 
1988), 2-6.

[98]  	The 1917 race riots in East St. Louis, Missouri was one of the 
bloodiest in 20th-century America. Unrest raged for nearly a week, 
leaving nine whites and hundreds of African- Americans dead.  See The 
East St. Louis Race Riot of 1917. [8 microfilm reels] Bethesda, Md.: 
University Publications of America, 1985. Davis Microforms Collection 
Microfilm 1-3402. See also James N. Upton, A Social History of 20th 
Century Urban Riots  (Bristol, Ind.: Wyndham Hall Press, 1984).

[99]  	NBC CART, 10 September 1951, box 1, folder 4.  NBC Files.

[100]  	NBC CART, 5 March 1953.

[101]  	Ibid.

[102]  	Ibid.

[103]  	NBC CART, 16 November 1953, box 1, folder 6.  NBC Files.

[104]  	Ibid.

[105]  	Ibid.

[106]  	Twenty-two African-American women at Howard University 
founded the sorority in 1913.

[107]  	NBC CART, 22 June 1951, box 1, folder 4.  NBC Files.

[108]  	Ibid.

[109]  	Ibid.	

[110]  	Ibid.

[111]  	There were three black actresses that played the role of 
Beulah over the course of its television run from October 
1950-September 1953.  Ethel Waters, Hattie McDanile (who appeared in 
only a few episodes before falling ill), and Louise Beavers.  See 
McNeil, Total Television, 90; and Brooks and Marsh, The Complete Directory, 96.

[112]  	Jannette L. Dates, and William Barlow, (eds.), Split Image: 
African Americans in the Mass Media (Washington, D.C.: Howard 
University Press, 1990); Elizabeth Kolbert,  "From Beulah to Oprah: 
The Evolution of Black Images on TV,"  New York Times, 15 January 
1993; MacDonald. Blacks and White TV, 23-24, 46, 118; Bogel, 
Primetime Blues, 19-26.

[113]  	McNeil, Total Television, 44; and Brooks and Marsh, The 
Complete Directory, 46.

[114]  	Melvin P. Ely, The Adventures of Amos 'n' Andy: A Social 
History of an American Phenomenon (New York: Free Press, 1991); Bart 
Andrews and Arghus Julliard, Holy Mackerel!: The Amos 'n' Andy Story 
(New York: E. P. Dutton Inc., 1986); see also W. T. Lhamon, Raising 
Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop (Cambridge: 
Harvard University Press, 1998).

[115]  	United States Commission on Civil Rights, Window Dressing on 
the Set: Women and Minorities in Television (Washington, D.C.: 
Government Printing Office, 1977), 4-5.

[116]  	Ibid.

[117]  	See Cripps, "Amos 'n' Andy . . ." 43-49.

[118]  	Ibid.

[119]  	Darrell Y. Hamamoto, Nervous Laughter: Television Situation 
Comedy and Liberal Democratic Ideology (New York: Praeger, 1989) 43.

[120]  	Cripps, "Amos 'n' Andy . . ." 39.

[121]  	NBC-TV's owned and operated New York station had several call 
letter iterations. It was WNBT, then WRCA, and as of May 1960, 
WNBC-TV.  See Joseph H. Udelson, The Great Television Race: A History 
of American Industry, 1925-1941 (Little Rock, Ala.: University of 
Alabama Press, 1982); see also <http://www.wnbc.com/wnbc/ 
1169359/detail.html>  Internet accessed: 20 May 2002.

[122]  	NBC CART, 5 November 1954, box 1, folder 7.  NBC Files.

[123]  	Ibid.

[124]  	NBC CART, 12 January 1953.

[125]  	Sponsor, October 1949, 24-25, 54-55.  See also Tide, 20 July 1951, 30.

[126]  	NBC CART, 10 September 1959, box 153, folder 5.  NBC Files.

[127]  	Ibid.

[128]  	Ibid.

[129]  	For a discussion see Patrick Garry, An American Paradox: 
Censorship in a Nation of Free Speech (Westport, Conn.: Praeger 
1993), 88, 128.  Garry discusses "persons who do not traditionally 
advocate censorship" will do so, not to restrict personal freedoms 
they say, but to "improve social conditions."  See also  Nat Hentoff, 
Free Speech for Me--But Not for Thee: How the American Left and Right 
Relentlessly Censor Each Other (New York: HarperCollins, 1992).

[130]  	William Clotworthy, telephone interview by the author, 
Murfreesboro, Tenn., 10 August 2004.



"Racial Discourse and Censorship on NBC-TV, 1948-1960."



by

Bob Pondillo, Ph.D.





College of Mass Communication
Middle Tennessee State University
Box 58
Murfreesboro, TN  37132





Phone: 615-904-8465
Fax: 615-898-5682
E-mail: <a href="/cgi-bin/wa?LOGON=A3%3Dind0602A%26L%3DAEJMC%26E%3D8bit%26P%3D4146037%26B%3D--%26T%3Dtext%252Fplain%3B%2520charset%3Diso-8859-1" >[log in to unmask]</a>





AEJMC HISTORY DIVISION













For presentation consideration at the AEJMC
Annual Convention, August 2005, San Antonio, Texas



(Copyright © 2005)


"Racial Discourse and Censorship on NBC-TV, 1948-1960."
(Required 75-word abstract)


This research explores postwar racial discourse in television 
programming at the National Broadcasting Company (NBC-TV).   It 
analyzes the era vis-à-vis actions taken by Stockton Helffrich, 
director of NBC-TV's Continuity Acceptance (i.e., censorship) 
Department from 1948-60. The work concludes Helffrich's politically 
progressive notions were significant in altering television's 
complicated race negotiations after the Second World War—a period of 
transition between an inequitable system of racial hierarchy and a 
more culturally liberal postwar order.



-1-

   "Racial Discourse and Censorship on NBC-TV . . ."
	


"Racial Discourse and Censorship on NBC-TV, 1948-1960."


At the dawn of the U.S. civil rights era, black stereotypes—the 
shiftless coon, termagant Mammy, servile Uncle Tom—remained the order 
of the day in popular American mass entertainment.  These stereotypes 
were toned-down considerably after the Second World War but, with the 
exception of a few celebrated black entertainers and sports figures, 
such was still the case on radio and in motion pictures.  Still, some 
believed commercial network television might be different.
Could TV break the stranglehold of American apartheid?  In May 1950, 
Variety offered perhaps the overstatement of the decade on that 
question, with the headline, "Negro Talent Coming into Own on TV 
Without Using Stereotypes: A Sure Sign That Television is Free of 
Racial Barriers."[1]  A month later Ebony echoed the theme despite 
lingering postwar dilemmas of racist stereotyping.[2]  In a later 
Ebony interview, Ed Sullivan remarked television helped "the Negro in 
his fight . . . to win the guarantees [of] his birthright [by taking 
the civil rights battle] into the living rooms of America's homes 
where public opinion is formed."[3]  To Sullivan's credit (and the 
occasional consternation of anxious advertisers), he regularly 
featured African American musicians, singers, dancers, and comedians 
on his popular variety program.  Also, during television's 
experimental years—prior to the Second World War and into the early 
postwar years—black performers seemed to make significant inroads 
toward eliminating the color barrier.[4]  The medium's insatiate need 
for programs and talent meant that African American entertainers were 
seen regularly on local and network shows and had not yet been cast 
as caricatures as they were on radio and in movies.[5]  Television's 
breezy attitude toward race before and immediately after the war, 
Donald Bogle argues, was due in large part to its early absence of 
significant audience—not enough people were watching to incite 
controversy, and especially not yet in Southern markets.  Bogle 
claims at this juncture television was still relatively free of "any 
particular social or political pressures . . . [and it was] not yet 
driven by the concerns of big advertisers."[6]  But as millions of TV 
sets invaded American homes and more network programming was 
consumed, commercial sponsorship along with the many restrictions it 
brought, increased.  Fear and discrimination by sponsors, abetted by 
commercial broadcasting's need for operating revenue from ad sales, 
could not be ignored.  Moreover, racist programming worked to 
unconsciously reinforce American bigotry and intolerance for the 
first two decades of television's life.
  Before advertising limited its possibilities, television, like 
radio before it, was envisioned as an electronic pathway to moral 
enlightenment.[7]  With the coming of television, proclaimed RCA's 
David Sarnoff may also come "a new world of cultural and educational 
opportunities . . . a new philosophy, a new sense of freedom, and 
greatest of all, perhaps, a finer and broader understanding between 
[sic] all the peoples of the world."[8]   It was advertised as a 
"magic box," a window to the world, a portal to unimaginable 
possibilities.[9]  But, television would not become a gateway to 
social utopia, and instead worked to fortify consumptive 
lifestyles.  In order to take quick advantage of a nation awash in 
pent-up savings after the war, big business needed a sweeping, cheap 
way to market products from bursting warehouses.[10]  TV led the way, 
with early television's business and programming models mirroring 
radio's template.  And, since racist attitudes permeated commercial 
radio entertainment for more then three decades by that time, it is 
not unseemly that stereotypes of African Americans would appear on 
television as well.  But, there were some in TV pushing to change 
that.  One was the nation's first network television censor, Stockton 
Helffrich.
NBC-TV's Continuity Acceptance Department and Issues of Race
 From the beginning of network TV programming, NBC had to contend 
with racist words and images in its telecasts.  Helffrich, head of 
the network's Continuity Acceptance (or "censorship") Department 
ordered cuts from all Hollywood films and cartoons replete with 
mocking stereotypes of African Americans.  He banned any production 
that, in his words, "represented [a] too unrelieved picture of the 
crap-shooting, drinking, dope-taking, easy-living, shiftless, and 
knife wielding Negro,"[11] and frequently reminded NBC program 
management of its 1948 "policy against epitaphs designating races or 
creeds in any way known to be offensive."[12]  As early as 1949, 
Helffrich wrote he was wary of intolerance in The Horn and Hardt's 
Children's Hour, seen on NBC-TV's New York station.[13]  "There has . 
. . been in the show," he explained, "some tendencies to go in for 
racial caricatures (particularly Negro.)"[14]  Helffrich pledged to 
scrutinize the kiddy's show scripts "quite carefully in an effort to 
anticipate possible sources of public disapproval."[15]
To have his actions make sense in a postwar context, it must be 
revealed that Helffrich was a member of the Communist Party before 
World War II and an active member of the Popular Front.[16]  He also 
marched in several of New York's always-controversial May Day Parades 
and organized Negro Youth Leagues at Harlem settlement 
houses.[17]  Later he renounced Communism, became an FDR liberal, and 
a union Shop Steward who organized white-collar and clerical 
employees against his own network.[18]  Despite his well-known 
progressive leanings, NBC's Top Brass plucked Helffrich from the rank 
and file, elevating him to Continuity Acceptance—a middle-management 
corporate public relations position.[19]  In addition, company 
documents indicate that on more than one occasion NBC protected 
Helffrich from U.S. government inquiry.[20]  Despite his checkered 
past, Helffrich was never blacklisted or summoned before a 
congressional committee.  (How and why this occurred lies beyond the 
narrow scope and discussion of this paper, but is the subject of an 
earlier work by the author.)[21]  Nonetheless, his clearly 
left-of-center (for the era) political beliefs, as we shall see, 
deeply informed Helffrich's decisions.
Of all his many censorial tasks, editing racist songs from TV 
programs proved quite daunting for Helffrich.  He insisted the lyrics 
of many 100-year-old Stephen Foster numbers be altered to meet what 
he saw as viewer prerequisites, concluding that if the words of those 
songs did not change, they would not be broadcast over NBC 
facilities.[22]  The Foster songs to which Helffrich specifically 
referred are ones like "My Old Kentucky Home" ("Oh, the sun shines 
bright [on my] old Kentucky home/'Tis summer, the darkies are gay . . 
."),[23] "Old Folks At Home" ("Way down upon the Swanee Ribber . . 
./Oh! darkies, how my heart grows weary/Far from de old folks at 
home"),[24] or "Massa's in de Cold Ground" ("Down in de 
cornfield/Hear dat mournful sound/All de darkeys am a weeping 
/Massa's in de cold, cold ground.")[25]  NBC-TV, through Helffrich, 
was plainly establishing a cautious but determined strategy to rid 
all network programming of racial stereotypes.  Still, live 
television was unpredictable and could undo the best-laid plans.
On The Old Gold Amateur Hour a rancher from upstate New York 
performed a tune whose lyric contained the word "darky."  The singing 
farmer was ordered to cut the reference in rehearsal and he did, but 
adlibbed it back into the live broadcast.[26]  Helffrich reacted by 
stationing more censors on the show "to police the amateurs" just as 
he and his minions patrolled "professional" programs like the Texaco 
Star Theater and Your Show of Shows.[27]  Another song entitled "The 
Whip" was presented on the Jack Carter Show but only after the 
"careful deletion of a redundant reference to 'black and white,'" 
wrote Helffrich.[28]  He even required that the tune not be sung in a 
Negro "dialect," concluding, "the intent of the song is certainly not 
anti-Negro but rather anti-tyranny."[29]  Nonetheless, complaint 
phone calls poured in from television cities around the 
nation.  Through these experiences and others Helffrich noted a sense 
of anxious change in viewer response of televised race 
portrayals.  He wrote, "On the whole problem of racial . . . 
minorities, we continue to have audience mail and like indications of 
a greater concern with these things . . . than used to prevail."[30]
After World War II, the cries of reform-minded activists in matters 
of race grew more intense.  African American veterans demanded an end 
to de jure racism at home, and full integration of American 
society.[31]  Sustaining such postwar dissension were liberal 
political polices, a major rise in membership of civil rights 
activist groups—like the National Association for the Advancement of 
Colored People (NAACP) and the National Urban League (NUL)—and a 
growing, vocal, and organized black middle-class.  Also, whites in 
significant numbers, especially in places like New York City and 
other urban centers, joined the cause and pushed for racial 
change.  This liberal ethos also meant television's portrayals of 
ethnicity and race would now come under greater scrutiny, and 
Helffrich knew it.
An NBC-TV/RCA Corporate Policy on Race
On October 6, 1950, Helffrich urged top network management to do 
something about its superannuated, racist programming arguing, "RCA 
[and] NBC's public relations [have been adversely affected] by 
alienation of the Negro audience through outdated editorial 
practice."[32]  While there is no specific documentation of the role 
Helffrich played in the corporate metamorphosis, in late November, 
apparently convinced of the importance African Americans held for the 
future of the network, RCA vice president John West, along with Syd 
Eiges, NBC VP for public information, hosted a seminar for black 
leaders.[33]  More than fifty representatives of important urban 
newspapers as well as key officers from the NAACP and NUL 
attended.  Among those making presentations for NBC-TV were Pat 
Weaver covering programming, Ernest de la Ossa explaining network 
hiring practices, and Helffrich outlining editorial and censorship 
diligence.  Helffrich later declared the seminar an unqualified 
success, openly stressing in his Continuity Acceptance 
Radio/Television reports that its only intent was "improvement of RCA 
and NBC public relations" and "the need for alertness whenever script 
material touches upon racial matters."[34]  By early the next year 
plans were in place for significant programming changes at the network.
RCA began an overt public relations initiative in January 1951, to 
tap the burgeoning $15-billion dollar "Negro market," one Variety 
called "the most important, financially potent, and 
sales-and-advertising serenaded 'minority' in the land."[35]  Sponsor 
further validated the potential African American marketplace by an 
article touting the so-called "forgotten 15,000,000" black 
consumers.[36]  Going even further, Ebony called commercial 
television "an amazing new weapon which can be all-powerful in 
blasting American's bigots."[37]  But racial hatred was an abiding 
feature of the American scene, and even promises of untapped economic 
gain could not quickly change things.
Unthinking racial slurs and stereotypes continued to crop up in 
programs even as NBC-TV focused on wooing black middle-class 
viewers.  For example, U.S. Senator Karl Mundt thought nothing of 
using the phrase "Nigger in the woodpile"[38] on the nationally 
televised NBC-TV public affairs show The American Forum of the 
Air.[39]  Helffrich wrote, Mundt's "ill advised adlib . . . brought 
in some fifty telephone calls" as well as objecting 
telegrams.[40]   Later that same month, comic Jack Carter used a 
puppet to portray a stereotyped "Stepin Fetchit" character singing 
"Lazy Bones," a tune containing derogatory lyrics about sloth and 
fecklessness.[41]  Later during the same show, in a sketch satirizing 
the 1937 film version of King Solomon's Mines, Carter's scripted line 
to an African American actor was to be: "Boy, I want you to call the 
other natives."  However, the last word was not enunciated clearly, 
or so Carter claimed, and was heard on national television as 
"niggers."  Embarrassed, Helffrich quickly distanced the network from 
Carter's gaffe pointing out that that particular "objectionable 
epitaph" was completely unacceptable in all NBC-TV scripts.[42]
To make amends for these continuing and costly errors the network 
retained and regularly consulted public relations specialist Joseph 
Baker, an African American whom Helffrich called an "authority . . . 
where the Negro people are concerned."[43]  Baker modified NBC's 
formal television statement of "standards and practices" to assume 
the tone of President Truman's 1947 special civil rights committee 
report and later published book, To Secure These Rights.[44]  The 
revised NBC-TV proclamation now noted that all programs would treat 
"aspects of race, creed, color, and national origin with dignity and 
respect."[45]  Near the end of 1951, the National Association of 
Radio and Television Broadcasters, taking its cue from NBC-TV, also 
revised its Code of Good Practices stating: "Racial or nationality 
types shall not be shown on television in such a manner as to 
ridicule the race or nationality."[46]
Blackface Minstrelsy on Television and Eddie Cantor
	When minstrelsy died at the end of the nineteenth-century, its 
blackface legacy was inherited by vaudeville, thus extending a 
powerful racist tradition a total of 120 years.[47]  The elite 
vaudevillians who performed in blackface on the Keith-Orpheum and RKO 
circuits in the 1910s and 1920s make up a virtual Who's Who of early 
twentieth-century show-biz celebrities: Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, 
George Jessel, George Burns, Sophie Tucker and Fanny Brice.[48]  The 
deeply entrenched minstrel tradition prompted even Hollywood's 
biggest stars to don blackface in some movies of the 1930s and early 
1940s: including Fred Astaire in Swingtime, Bing Crosby in Holiday 
Inn and Dixie, Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney in Babes in Arms and 
Babes on Broadway, and the Marx Brothers in A Day at the 
Races.[49]  The minstrel mask was more than a racial expression, it 
acted as an odd signifier, and a top performer's calling card recoded 
to mean grand, "traditional" entertainment was about to be 
presented.[50]  Both Jolson and Cantor said on numerous occasions 
that they were anything but racist.  Both openly refused to eat in 
restaurants that would not serve black performers, had long and 
abiding friendships with African Americans, and unreservedly 
advocated equal rights for blacks at a time when it was highly 
unpopular to do so.  Each also said that singing and dancing in 
blackface gave them the emotional freedom they needed to take risks 
as performers.[51]  Ultimately, the success of Jolson and Cantor was 
built on the premise that audiences of the era did not consider 
watching a blackface performance on stage a racial travesty.  Racism 
was so pervasive, so day-to-day unexceptional, that it was seen and 
accepted as an unremarkable part of the American social fabric—at 
least by most whites.[52]  Audiences perceived blackface 
entertainment with a similar indifference as vaudeville passed from 
the cultural scene by the mid-1930s.[53]  Comedian Bob Hope once 
remarked, "When vaudeville died, television was the box they put it 
in."  It is not surprising then that Eddie Cantor, the now aging, 
former vaudevillian and radio headliner-turned-television star, 
performed his most popular musical numbers in blackface on the 
nascent NBC-TV network.
When Cantor began his monthly hosting of The Colgate Comedy Hour he 
was almost sixty years old.[54]  At mid-twentieth century Cantor was 
one of the most popular and widely admired entertainers in the 
country, an "elder statesman" of show business with a career that 
spanned over forty-years in vaudeville, movies, recordings, and 
radio.  In addition to being a passionate spokesman for suffering 
Zionist refugees that survived Hitler, he was a tireless fundraiser 
for the United Jewish Appeal and other liberal humanist causes, and 
founder of March of Dimes.[55]  The showman certainly enjoyed his 
concurrent roles as performer, humanitarian, citizen of the world, 
and bona fide icon in the entertainment industry.
	On the debut Colgate show, Cantor rendered a medley of his favorite 
tunes wearing blackface, a straw hat, and oversized glasses.[56]  The 
New York-based telecast of September 10, 1950, beat Ed Sullivans' 
Toast of the Town show on CBS-TV with an audience share of nearly 
fifty-percent.[57]  Newspaper critics in major television cities were 
exuberant over Cantor's work.[58]  Nowhere, it appears, was there a 
note of disdain for the entertainer's blackface routine, even 
Helffrich's Continuity Acceptance Radio/Television (CART) reports 
were mute.  When the Colgate show premiered, Helffrich was still less 
than a month away from writing his October 6, 1950, CART entry 
claiming that overt racism hurt NBC-TV.  But Cantor's blackface 
routines did not abate.  On another show in the Colgate series, 
Cantor did an Al Jolson impression—complete with nappy wig, 
exaggerated lips and bugging eyes—which was labeled "'distasteful'" 
by a viewer whose comments Helffrich included in one of his 
reports.  The complainant added, "'Most sponsors and audiences 
recognize this type of act as insulting to the Negro people of the 
United States.'"[59]  In a later Colgate program, after Cantor 
preformed what was described only as a "Negro dance number," a 
puzzled Helffrich mused, "There does seem to be an inconsistency 
between Eddie Cantor's obvious effort on behalf of tolerance in 
America . . . and his inclusion of somewhat dated versions of Negro 
life."[60]  This riddle of Cantor's willingness to sing and dance in 
blackface while being a champion of human rights does at first glance 
seem inconsistent.  But, blackface at that time was perceived as 
theatrical convention and most artists (and audiences) were able to 
dissociate patently racist performances from any abiding personal 
sense of racism, even though such performances only served to 
reinforce an invisible racist ideology.[61]  One must also consider 
that sponsor Colgate-Palmolive was paying dearly for these expensive 
series of comedy spectaculars, one of NBC-TV's first successful 
counter-programming of the Sullivan show on Sunday 
evenings.[62]  Both network and sponsor desired to tap the attention 
of a vast audience that tuned in to enjoy Cantor's stage 
persona.  Since he grew to fame frequently performing in the minstrel 
idiom, if Cantor wished to sing a song in his signature blackface on 
national television, who could (or would want to) stop him?—certainly 
not the network, the sponsor, or Chief Censor Helffrich.  Not yet.
	Helffrich also let it be known that NBC-TV's best interests would be 
served if all minstrel or blackface presentations were deleted. "The 
damage done to good will of the public toward talent and clients by 
this kind of thing is increasingly apparent," he patiently 
wrote.[63]  Still, on the first anniversary of vaudeville entertainer 
Al Jolson's death, comedian Danny Thomas did a salute to the minstrel 
showman in blackface that brought NBC-TV ferocious viewer 
complaints.[64]  The next week, on the popular Kate Smith Show, 
another blackface act was used that again begot stinging 
protests.[65]  Now pushed beyond his limit, Helffrich declared he and 
his department would unceremoniously cut all racist portrayals on any 
NBC-TV show, admonishing writers and producers to steer clear of 
bigoted references to "avoid the possibility of a totally wasted effort."[66]
And Helffrich and his editors delivered on their promise.  Deleted 
from a Kraft Television Theatre drama was a reference to a "colored 
servant as 'that baboon,'" revealed Helffrich, continuing, "and the 
order of her mistress 'you will bathe . . . I cannot have you 
smelling like a sow . . .'"[67]  Also cut was a stereotyped line 
uttered by a policeman unjustifiably suspicious of an African 
American maid: "Maybe she's got a meat cleaver with her," the officer 
was scripted to say.[68]  At NBC-TV's Chicago operation, Continuity 
Acceptance manager Harry Ward deleted racial clichés in hundreds of 
old movies purchased for television broadcast.  One excised film 
scene depicted what Ward described as a "terrified Negro in frantic 
flight screaming, 'Help, help!  Seventy thousand ghosts jumped in mah 
ear!'"[69]  Ward's team also redacted dozens of comedies, cartoons 
and silent films showing sycophantic black cooks, maids, and 
chauffeurs.  In many Our Gang shorts, black skin was played for 
laughs.  In one episode an African American infant had his face 
painted with white shoe polish; in another scene Farina, a young 
African American character, wipes the sweat from his brow and black 
coloring comes off on his handkerchief.  In still another, little 
Farina upsets a flour can on his head to look "white."  In a Mutt and 
Jeff cartoon, Ward describes "'an unconscionable Negro stereotype 
with howling, gibbering cannibals . . .'"[70]  Guillotined from the 
popular Gangbusters crime show was a scene in which a black janitor 
was "scared and hopped up on gin."[71]  Cut from a Fireside Theatre 
script "a billboard which would have featured Al Jolson in blackface."[72]
All hackneyed notions that depicted African American's as tambourine 
shaking minstrels, derelict sociopaths wielding concealed weapons, 
simple-minded loafers, excessive drinkers, drugged-out zombies, 
addicted gamblers, infrequent bathers, and easily freighted 
stooges—i.e., "Feets don't fails me now!"—were cut.  Helffrich 
admonished his editors to "anticipate [these] kind[s] of [racial 
slurs] from writers and agencies . . ." suggesting that "[such] 
sloppy and lazy cliché's are out of date, are not fair, and are 
anything but a pretty face of America to the rest of the 
world."[73]  He pointedly wrote, "I can't very well poke my head in 
the sand to avoid reminding you not only of the century we are living 
in but of the nature of our audience."[74]
Such comments imply Helffrich was well aware of NBC-TV's multi-ethnic 
audience and the national and international political tensions 
surrounding race that engulfed the postwar era.  In 1955, for 
example, Helffrich attended a meeting of the New York State 
Commission Against Discrimination.[75]  Present at that gathering was 
Frederick O'Neal, a black pioneer in American theater, who likewise 
remarked, "that the absence of Negroes [on television shown as part 
of daily] . . . American life is something of which enemies of our . 
. . [nation] can take advantage."[76]  Helffrich, of course, agreed 
and throughout the CART reports, frequently pointed to NBC-TV's 
far-sighted integration policy.
	By mid-decade, NBC-TV demanded changes to any act that embraced 
racist stereotypes in any form.  For this the network endured angry 
protests from some of its biggest stars.  The Eddie Cantor Story was 
about to open in cinemas around the nation, and NBC-TV Chicago and 
New York received several one-minute television commercials to 
promote the biopic.  These ads, however, caused Helffrich and 
Continuity Acceptance significant problems.  The advertisements 
depicted Keefe Brasselle—the actor portraying Cantor in the flim—in 
blackface, an image now unfit for telecast over NBC 
facilities.  Therefore, the network chose to air only the 
non-blackface Cantor ad in its entirety, and "manufacture" a 
twenty-second commercial from the other unacceptable one-minute 
spot.[77]  On the heels of this action, NBC-TV next demanded major 
changes to Cantor's first Colgate Comedy Hour show of 1954, 
originating from Hollywood.[78]  Cantor again wished to sing his 
songs in blackface, a practice now deemed totally unacceptable by 
NBC-TV's West Coast management.[79]  Cantor left the show for good on 
May 16, 1954.[80]
NBC-TV's "Integration Without Identification" Policy
As Helffrich worked to eliminate racial stereotypes of any single 
minority, he and others concurrently pushed into place a "radical" 
corporate programming strategy—radical, at least, for 1950s 
television.  NBC-TV's plan, dubbed "Integration Without 
Identification," would now work consciously to integrate television 
programs.  The CART reports do not indicate how much of a hand 
Helffrich had in crafting the new policy, but it is clear that in 
1949 he first wrote of public relations problems the network 
encountered by broadcasting racist words or images.[81]  By late 
December 1950, a company-wide RCA racial initiative was being readied 
for the new year, which, as previously noted, included a 
comprehensive public outreach effort to secure a foothold in the 
robust and thriving $15-billion dollar African-American 
marketplace.  One of RCA's first undertakings was to recruit more 
"Negro employees" at NBC-TV.[82]  In testimony before a subcommittee 
of the Senate Labor Committee during late summer 1952, RCA president 
Frank Folsom announced that blacks now held diverse NBC job titles 
that included director of community affairs, senior staff writer, 
assistant film librarian, announcer, scenic artists, as well as 
on-air performers.[83]  Folsom also reported that RCA had recently 
hired nine African-American electrical engineers from Howard, 
Columbia, and Youngstown College among others.[84]  In late September 
1952, Helffrich noted that key NBC Managers "met with certain 
department heads to hypo the ["Integration Without Identification"] 
program," which in turn was followed by meetings "attended by top 
Producers, Directors and their assistants."[85]  An ebullient 
Helffrich wrote, "Clearly, activities of Continuity Acceptance in 
deleting stereotypes are now being complimented by positive 
[Management] actions creating an atmosphere in which further 
integration of talent regardless or color is the order of the 
day."[86]  That same month, RCA was awarded the first National 
Association of Colored Women citation in recognition of equitable 
employment in the broadcasting industry.[87]  By December, all 
pertinent members of the NBC production staff met with 
African-American community leaders in Chicago.[88]  Early the next 
year, Mildred McAfee Horton—first woman Director of RCA, NBC, New 
York Life, and seventh president of Wellesley College —declared NBC 
had "taken the lead in eliminating stereotypes which in the past has 
belittled certain races and minority groups."[89]  However, NBC-TV's 
program integration plan was not explained or promoted until a year later.
The first direct CART report mention of NBC-TV's "Integration Without 
Identification" policy was on January 12, 1953.[90]   Helffrich wrote 
that a conscious effort was now being made by Management to 
integrate, but never call attention to, Negro talent in all NBC 
programming.[91] On a Kraft Television Theatre presentation a few 
months later, a black actor was distinctly seen among a few other 
white actors in a sweeping pan on the set of a newspaper 
bureau.  "The camera very simply scanned the office," Helffrich 
explained, "catching quite incidentally . . . that one of the staff 
members was a Negro."[92]   This particular program is significant 
because the Kraft show was not an internally produced NBC-TV 
offering; Kraft's advertising agency had produced it.  Because of 
that, Helffrich enthused, "There was a good bit of gratification 
around the shop that an RCA/NBC [race] policy was spreading into 
agency production."[93]  But not all viewers took the liberal turn 
and saw television integration a positive thing.  Many were afraid of 
what was considered aberrant "race mixing."
Postwar segregation and racial fears were systemic, none more so than 
in the American South.  Variety reported most Southern politicians 
rejected television programs showing blacks and whites "on a purely 
equal social status."[94]  Southern historian Pete Daniel explained 
that whites feared integration because it "would allow black males 
and white females to share the same social space" thereby leading to 
"interracial orgies" and mongrelized children.[95]  Georgia Governor 
Herman Talmadge threatened a nationwide boycott of companies 
sponsoring "race mixing" programs so as "to clean up television 
before the situation becomes more offensive."[96]  The odd logic of 
race mixing was a cornerstone of Jim Crow, and "defending" women 
against almost certain sexual rape at the hands of a black man was 
frequently conflated with a white man's personal sense of masculine 
power, jingoistic patriotism, and the abiding horror of invisible 
communism.[97]  An improper glance, even the unintentional and 
harmless touching of a white woman by a black man could prompt 
outrage (or worse.)  An unidentified resident of East St. Louis, a 
hotbed of bigotry and unrest since race riots erupted there in 
1917,[98] wrote to Helffrich complaining that he and his friends were 
"thoroughly disgusted" by what they saw on NBC-TV objecting 
to
      mixed program[s] in which whites and Negroes take part . . . 
Whenever your
      sponsors . . . find it necessary to put whites and blacks on 
the same program, it
      is . . . time to stop [that] show entirely. . . .If you must 
have Negroes, then have an
      all Negro performance.  [Some] of my friends, as well as 
myself, shut off that part
      of the program, and even . . . recommend boycott[ing] the 
commercial lines
      represented by the sponsors.  We intend to . . . do this so 
long as such programs
      continue.[99]

Later a Chicago viewer was equally upset, proclaiming it was all a 
lie that "the Negro community resents stereotypes."[100]  The viewer 
wrote that "the only persons challenging his statements '[were] the 
Communists and perhaps a handful of self-appointed leaders who are 
simply seeking publicity.'"[101]  Helffrich did not directly address 
this letter, but Ben Park, Network TV Program Director for the NBC 
Central Division, did.  In his reply, Park explained the reasoning 
behind RCA/NBC's "Integration Without Identification" agendum:
      This emphasis on the preservation of human dignity is 
definitely not communist-
      inspired. . . .The so-called mass communications media are 
extremely potent in
      their ability to inculcate attitudes; we feel the least we can 
do is to avoid
      stereotyping and present human beings on the basis of their 
human attributes,
      good or bad. . . .[NBC-TV's "Integration Without 
Identification"] policy has
      tended to accomplish two things.  First, to state simply but 
effectively that
      Negroes bear the same general qualities of character and 
personality that exist
      among all the members of the human race, and whatever slight physical
      differences they have are not indicative of any 
inferiority.  This is so apparent that
      it makes us a little ashamed of the past, and ashamed that we 
have to make a
      point of it.  Second, generally speaking the policy to include 
Negroes in roles
      which they normally play in all walks of life has tended to 
increase the total
      number of opportunities available to them.  In other words, 
instead of insisting
      always on casting an Irishman as a policeman, many programs 
will include a Negro
      in the role.  The same goes for doctors, nurses, lawyers, cab 
drivers, laborers, and
      mechanics, as well as bootblacks, entertainers, and 
criminals.  In short, we are
      attempting to cast Negroes as people.[102]

Those sentiments may have been veridical for NBC-TV, but it appeared 
such concern for matters racial were less important to rival 
television networks during the same period—although it seemed NBC's 
competitors were coming around.  Later that same year for example, 
Helffrich noted that Frank Stanton, CBS president, was resigning from 
his old Ohio State fraternity because of the group's discriminatory 
practices.[103]  Stanton quit the Greek letter society when he 
learned his college brotherhood barred membership to all persons 
"'not of pure Aryan blood.'"[104]  Helffrich, in an obvious and 
self-serving comment, wrote, "For a couple of years now NBC has been 
pretty much alone in the leadership of a very conscious movement not 
only to eliminate stereotyping from our offerings but to integrate 
without identification member's of minority groups," continuing, "For 
a long time . . . our company's activity in the area has been 
pioneering in nature . . . [so] when we see our leading competitors 
beginning to take an interest it's obvious an excellent company 
policy is paying off . . ."[105]  Helffrich's commentary in this case 
may have been overstated for purposes of irony when one considers the 
unequivocally racist programs then being carried by the other two 
major networks.
NBC-TV, Beulah, and Amos 'n' Andy
Delta Sigma Theta, the celebrated African American service 
sorority,[106] awarded citations to NBC-TV and its Lights Out program 
for the "conscious efforts by both RCA and NBC to advance . . . good 
relations with the Negro community."[107]  Helffrich proudly pointed 
to one episode of the psychological drama wherein, "Negro actors 
assumed the roles of policemen."[108]  With evident satisfaction he 
noted that it was obvious to the home viewer the patrolmen were 
"essentially . . . members of the force and only incidentally  . . 
.  Negro[es]," (italics added) continuing, "Nowhere in the continuity 
was any racial identification involved."[109]  A similar strategy was 
employed on another Lights Out show in which an African-American was 
cast as a taxi driver.  Helffrich again asserting "the fact that he 
was a Negro wasn't accorded any significance (italics added) since he 
typified the hundreds of drivers who might be found cruising along 
any big city street."[110]  The images of black actors playing the 
quotidian roles of policemen or cab drivers, based upon Helffrich's 
notes, were apparently Promethean and well nigh incomprehensible to 
most television viewers of the era!  Helffrich's verbiage certainly 
reflects that a detailed clarification was thought required for the 
absolutely imponderable casting of African Americans in incidental 
roles usually reserved for whites.  The censor unquestionably 
understood that, for many, seeing a black face on television not 
acting the coon, Tom, or Mammy (or without tambourine and minstrel 
song) was simply inexplicable and required a sort of translation or 
justification.
Such concern for racial depiction did not appear to be the case at 
the two other major networks.  In October 1950, Beulah premiered on 
ABC-TV.  The sitcom holds the distinction of being the first 
nationally broadcast weekly television series starring an African 
American in the lead role.  Distinguished actress Ethel Waters first 
played the central character, Beulah.[111]  It was one of the very 
few images of African Americans on prime-time television during this 
period, which is perhaps why it so quickly came under fire—Beulah 
perpetuated the jolly, servile Mammy stereotype.  Beulah, a 
middle-aged black domestic, worked for the somewhat dysfunctional 
all-white Henderson family.  Episodes revolved around life in the 
kitchen of Beulah's inept employers—her sensible, folksy ways, and 
down-home cooking that could repair just about any problem—and her 
interaction with other neighborhood blacks who also performed menial, 
blue-collar jobs for area white people.  Television reviewer Jack 
Gould panned the show in the New York Times, as did some members of 
the black press, but its most severe critic was New York Herald 
Tribune columnist John Crosby.  Crosby was particularly captious of 
Waters arguing that she was, after all, a highly regarded actress and 
celebrated role model for the African American community.  Crosby saw 
her participation in Beulah as a creative cul de sac and betrayal to 
Water's singular theatrical accomplishments and personal 
triumphs.  Despite the rancor, Beulah never provoked the amount of 
bitter debate that Amos 'n' Andy generated, and it remained on the 
air until 1953.[112]
Amos 'n' Andy debuted on CBS-TV on June 28, 1951, a year after 
Beulah, but became a lightning rod for organized protest.[113]  The 
television show was modeled after the long-running and phenomenally 
popular radio program heard on NBC from 1928-43, and again on CBS 
from 1943 through the mid-Fifties.  Amos 'n' Andy, set in Harlem, 
portrayed an all-black world in which a slow-witted cabby (and show 
narrator), Andy, and his gullible, cigar champing friend, Amos, 
interact with the scheming carpetbagger, Kingfish, and his shrewish 
wife, Sapphire, alongside a spectrum of other stereotypical black 
characters.  Amos 'n' Andy found its comedic voice in overstated 
black rural dialects, garish costuming, and exaggerated story lines 
that continually featured frauds or scams perpetrated on Andy and 
others by Kingfish.
Amos 'n' Andy's pedigree—deeply rooted in the minstrel 
tradition—caused the National Association for the Advancement of 
Colored People (NAACP) to launch lawsuits and boycotts against the 
show.[114]  At its 1951 summer convention in Atlanta, the NAACP 
officially condemned Amos 'n' Andy and all other television programs 
that featured racist stereotypes.[115]  In formal legal action 
brought against CBS-TV and show sponsor Blatz Brewing Company, the 
NAACP presented over a half-dozen objections to the Amos 'n' Andy 
television show, including that the program tended "to strengthen the 
conclusion among uninformed and prejudiced people that Negroes are 
inferior, lazy, dumb, and dishonest."[116]  All that notwithstanding, 
bringing Amos 'n' Andy to postwar television cannot be considered a 
programming miscalculation on the part of CBS-TV.  The national mood 
on racism had yet to change when the show went on the air, and its 
ratings were actually quite good in the first year.  Amos 'n' Andy 
"will be with us for a long time," wrote Printers Ink, and 
Advertising Age pointed out the program was also well liked by black 
viewers, noting "most Negroes in this area do not go along with the 
NAACP."[117]  Historian Thomas Cripps contends that the NAACP's 
efforts throughout the 1953 television season only worked to 
"splinter" Black unity against the show, and "undercut" its campaign 
against sponsor Blatz Brewing.  By the next year, Blatz moved its 
sponsorship to the Four Star Playhouse claiming the anthology show 
brought "a higher-class image" to its product.  Ultimately it was the 
loss of sponsorship that triggered the network demise of Amos 'n' 
Andy.  Clearly, however, the NAACP played a central role in drumming 
up controversy against Blatz—anathema to any television sponsor.[118]
Moreover, for some African Americans, Amos 'n' Andy was not perceived 
as a polemic on race as much as it was seen as an intraclass 
problem.  Sociologist Darrell Y. Hamamoto argues "the real conflict 
revolved around the anxiety of the newly arrived black middle class 
and its ambiguous relationship to the upstart black 
underclass."[119]  Cripps concurred, observing, "Into this world of 
newly felt . . . black middle-class consciousness, activism, and 
wealth descended Amos 'n' Andy, complete with baggy pants, plug hats, 
foul cigars, pushy wives, misfired schemes and mangled grammar," 
continuing, "Organized blacks were shocked, not so much at what they 
saw but at the timing of its release in the year of liberal 
'rededication,' at a cresting of black political consciousness."[120]
The national racial climate was slowly changing during the Fifties, 
but CBS and ABC-TV's programming remained tied to past perceptions of 
race.  Only one network, NBC, tried something different.  NBC-TV's 
early strategic decsion to eliminate racial stereotypes was, indeed, 
a clear disruption of existing racial conventions, and a forward 
thinking act of important cultural significance.  In addition, 
Helffrich's CA department was responsible for a significant part of 
the network change.  Television historian Jeff Kisseloff observed, 
that "Helffrich lobbied forcefully, but unsuccessfully to keep Amos 
'n' Andy off television . . ." but Kisseloff provides no 
corroborating evidence, nor is there any mention of how Helffrich, an 
NBC-TV executive, could in any way directly influence CBS-TV from 
broadcasting the show.  In addition, no mention of any such effort 
appears in Helffrich's 225 NBC-TV Continuity Acceptance Radio 
Television (CART) reports.  However, evidence does show that 
Helffrich rejected the film series Beulah after its initial run on 
ABC-TV from 1950-53.  The distribution company handling the sitcom, 
Flamingo Films, was taking the series into syndication and WRCA, 
NBC-TV's owned and operated station in New York, was offered the 
program.[121]  "We turned [it] down," wrote Helffrich.[122]  He 
described the show as, "the usual so-called humor based upon racial 
peculiarities and is about dated these days as anything could get," 
continuing, there are "innumerable stereotypes [in the show,] 
garbling of English, etc.[,] plus 'subtle' condescensions toward 
Beulah . . ."[123]
Conclusions
At first blush Helffrich's progressive humanism on race might be seen 
as heroic given the extant bigotry of the era.  It is, after all, 
true that corporate documents show Helffrich recommended and helped 
facilitate a corporate policy change, insisting on program 
integration years ahead of the other networks, thus nudging NBC-TV 
toward multiculturalism before the concept had any social 
currency.[124]  But a more critical reading suggests Helffrich's 
actions addressed social power inequities in TV programs by only 
censoring the symbols or expression of power.  Merely expurgating 
bigoted speech did not and could not address the underlying problem: 
ubiquitous race discrimination in the United States promoted by a 
morally corrupt political, economic and legal system.  If Helffrich's 
palliative censorship worked at all, it worked to alleviate some 
symptoms manifest in racist broadcasts at the dawn of commercial 
television.  Recall Helffrich was but a mid-level manager with highly 
proscribed corporate authority, a small cog in a large company 
machine.  He changed what he could and no more.  Cynicism easily 
prompts that NBC-TV's "integration without identification" policy may 
well have been adopted by the network to take advantage of a possible 
advertising windfall—as mentioned earlier, the postwar African 
American market was a massive $15-billion opportunity.[125]  It was 
also good public relations and good business for NBC-TV to adopt a 
"pro Negro" policy before its broadcast competitors did.  Seen this 
way the network's early decision to eschew racial stereotypes was a 
strategic corporate move not an authentic disjunctive cultural 
act.  But whether based on commerce or the disruption of early TV 
programming tropes, methods of directly dealing with overt racism 
were at least put on the agenda and considered at NBC-TV thanks in 
part to Helffrich.
Still, there were more than business considerations alone that 
animated Helffrich; some higher level of social consciousness 
appeared to be at play, and ethical principles were regularly invoked 
in his CART reports.  For example, Helffrich repeatedly used the 
notion of human dignity to frame questions about race on 
television.  "An obvious way to spot racist programming," he wrote, 
was to have "an attentive ear cocked toward those who express 
hurt."[126]  Helffrich said he maintained an "automatic" wariness 
toward racial clichés like "Irish drunks, Italian gangsters, 
avaricious Jews, [and] Lazy Negroes."[127]  He said, "When you get 
right down to it, the simplest rule of thumb [for spotting racist 
programming] is summed up in the word 'dignity,'" concluding,
      You may not please everybody depending on preconceived 
prejudices behind the
      point of view, but in terms of your own conscience as a 
broadcaster you are in
      pretty good odor . . . Remember that in the broadcasting 
business the potential to
      do something harmful or beneficial to racial amity is 
conceivably greater than in
      any other medium at this time. . . .Broadcast of a racial 
fallacy is so immediate, so
      pervasive, so irretrievable, so shared coast-to-coast, 
border-to-border, as to be of
      enormous significance. [128]

And in that quote we see the crux of it: Helffrich identified and 
linked speech with action,[129] then expurgated symbolic discourse 
using some notion of "moral censorship" guided by his passionately 
Liberal ideology.  And Helffrich's program suggestions were 
humanistic improvements—albeit cosmetic ones—to early TV fare.  The 
chief censor plainly saw his job as not only preventing hurtful 
speech, but also as gatekeeper, philosopher, teacher, public 
relations agent, and catalyst encouraging progressive ideas on 
national television, despite regular viewer and sponsor protest.
William Clotworthy, a Standards and Practices editor who worked at 
NBC-TV in the 1970s, says Helffrich "left a legacy of thought on 
racial matters" that was talked about at the network more than 
20-years after Helffrich's departure.[130]  Clearly, Helffrich's 
influence and social conscience in areas of race and ethnicity were 
foundational, though obviously not fully realized during his 12-year 
tenure as chief censor at NBC-TV.












Endnotes:
[1]  	Variety, 3 May 1950, 30, 40.

[2]  	Ebony, June 1950, 22-23.

[3]  	"Can TV Crack America's Color Line?" Ebony, May 1951, 58-65.

[4]  	MacDonald, Blacks and White TV, 3-10, and Bogel, Primetime Blues, 13-19.

[5]  	Ibid.

[6]  	Bogle, Primetime Blues, 13.

[7]  	David Sarnoff, Looking Ahead: The Papers of David Sarnoff (New 
York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), 88-123.

[8]  	Ibid., 96.

[9]  	J. Ronald Oakley, God's Country: America in the Fifties (New 
York: Barricade Books, 1990), 95.

[10]  	Erik Barnouw, The Sponsor: Notes on a Modern Potentate (New 
York: Oxford, 1978), 47-58.

[11]  	NBC CART, 20 April 1950, box 1, folder 3.  NBC Files. 
Wisconsin State Historical Society, Madison, Wis.

[12]  	NBC CART, 6 October 1950, box 1, folder 3.  NBC Files.  The 
specific policy may be found in Responsibility: A Working Manual of 
NBC Program Policies (New York: National Broadcasting Company, 1948).

[13]  	NBC CART, 17 January 1949, box 1, folder 2.  NBC Files.  Horn 
and Hardt was a postwar automat cafeteria in New York City.

[14]  	Ibid.

[15]  	Ibid.

[16]  	Jackie Austin (Helffrich's daughter), interview by author, 
Madison, Wis., 11 January 1999.  See also FBI file number 100-336937 
– Stockton Helffrich, 1950.

[17]  	Ibid.

[18]  	 "Counting Noses: NBCers Agree With Helffrich," "Top NBCer 
Says: Biggest Network Whitecollarites Need Guild." From union 
newspaper, White Collar Mike, 1 August 1946, 1.  See also Bert 
Briller, "Conscience of the Industry," Television Quarterly, 26, 1, 
and (1997): 52-57; and Stockton Helffrich, interview with Jackie Austin.

[19]  	Stockton Helffrich interview by Jackie Austin, Helffrich 
residence, Jackson Heights, New York, 1 March 1987.

[20]  	L. B. Nichols to Tolson, FBI Memo, 16 February 1950.  FBI File 
100-336937.

[21]  	See Robert J. Pondillo, "The 'Secret Life' of Stockton 
Helffrich: America's First Network Television Censor."  Unpublished 
paper presented at the American Journalism Historians Association 
Convention, October 2002, Nashville, TN.

[22]  	NBC CART, 27 July 1950.

[23]  	Stephen C. Foster, My Old Kentucky Home, Good Night (New York: 
Firth, Pond and Company, 1853).

[24]  	Stephen C. Foster, Old Folks At Home (New York: Firth, Pond 
and Company, 1851).

[25]  	Stephen C. Foster, Massa's in de Cold Ground (New York: Firth, 
Pond and Company, 1852).

[26]  	NBC CART, 23 February 1950, box 1, folder 3.  NBC Files.  The 
lights, cameras and general commotion of live television make him 
nervous was the consensus.

[27]  	Ibid.

[28]  	NBC CART, 6 October 1950, box 1, folder 3.  NBC Files.

[29]  	Ibid.

[30]  	NBC CART, 20 April 1950.

[31]  	For a detailed discussion of how African-American's postwar 
social goals were yoked to the U.S. war effort see John B. Kirby, 
Black Americans in the Roosevelt Era: Liberalism and Race (Knoxville, 
Tenn.: University of Tennessee Press, 1980).

[32]  	NBC CART, 6 October 1950.

[33]  	This seminar may have been the brainchild of Joseph Baker, a 
black, African-American public relations consultant, whose company 
was retained by NBC-TV and RCA.  It is unclear when Baker was 
hired.  Helffrich first writes of Baker in his CART report of 
November 1951, whereas this seminar occurred in October 1950.

[34]  	NBC CART, 8 November 1950, box 1, folder 3.  NBC Files.

[35]  	Variety, 9 January 1952, 32; see also 27 January 1954, 1.

[36]  	"The Forgotten 15,000,000," Sponsor, October 1949, 24-25, 
54-55.  See also "Selling the Negro Market," Tide, 20 July 1951, 30.
[37]  	Ebony, May 1951, 58.

[38]  	NBC CART, 28 January 1951, box 1, folder 4.  The offensive 
epithet is defined as "a trick or drawback, especially if 
deliberately concealed; something inconsistent or out of place" 
and/or "an unacknowledged black forebear of a white person, with 
'woodpile' a slang for 'family tree.'" It is unclear how or in what 
context Senator Mundt used the phrase.  See J. E. Lighter, J. 
O'Connor J. Ball, (eds.), Random House Historical Dictionary of 
American Slang: A-G (Random House Historical Dictionary of American 
Slang, Vol. 1) (New York: Random House, 1994), 916.

[39]  	The American Forum of the Air, originating from Washington DC, 
was seen on NBC-TV from 1950-57.  The talk show began on radio in 
1937.  See Alex McNeil, Total Television, Fourth Edition (New York: 
Penguin Books, 1997), 40; and Tim Brooks and Earl Marsh, The Complete 
Directory of Primetime Network and Cable TV Shows: 1946-Present, 
Sixth Edition (New York: Ballentine Books, 1995), 41.

[40]  	NBC CART, 28 January 1951.

[41]  	Stepin Fetchit was the stage name of an actor (Lincoln Perry) 
who became known for his degrading portrayals of black men in early 
cinema.  His caricature usually portrayed blacks as lazy, easily 
frightened, chronically idle, and inarticulate.  See Donald Bogle, 
Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History 
of Blacks in American Film (New York: Continuum, 1989).

[42]  	NBC CART, 19 February 1951, box 1, folder 4.  NBC Files.

[43]  	NBC CART, 21 November 1951, box 1, folder 4.  NBC Files.

[44]  	See Robert J. Donovan, Conflict and Crisis: The Presidency of 
Harry S. Truman (New York: Norton, 1977), 333-4; and Alonzo L. Hamby, 
Man of the People: A Life of Harry S. Truman. New York: Oxford 
University Press, 1995), 364-6.

[45]  	NBC CART, 21 November 1951.

[46] 	"(TV Code) The Television Code of the NARTB," as reprinted in 
Radio/Television Daily: 1953 Television Year Book, Sixteenth Annual 
Edition (New York: Radio Daily Corp., 1953), 813.

[47]  	See Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans: A History 
(New York: W.W. Norton, 1983); Douglas Gilbert, American Vaudeville: 
Its Life and Times (New York: Dover, 1940), see also Robert C. Allen, 
"Vaudeville and Film 1895-1915: A Study in Media Interaction," (Ph.D. 
diss., The University of Iowa, 1977.)

[48]  	John E. DiMeglio, Vaudeville USA, (Bowling Green, Oh., Bowling 
Green University Popular Press, 1973), 25; and Joe Laurie, Jr., 
Vaudeville: From the Honky-Tonk to the Palace (New York: Henry Holt 
and Company, 1953), 63; see also Susan Kattwinkel, Tony Pastor 
Presents: Afterpieces From The Vaudeville Stage (Phoenix, Ariz.: 
Abbey Publishing, 1998).

[49]  	Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in 
the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley, Calf.: University of California 
Press, 1996).  Rogin argues blackface was the most popular American 
form of entertainment, so immigrant groups, especially the Irish and 
Jews, adopted it as a means of assimilation into the dominant American culture.

[50]  	See Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the 
American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

[51]  	Herbert Goldman, biographer to Jolson and Cantor, noted that a 
performer's use of "blackface, though lending accent to broader 
facial expressions, was often said to inhibit the rendering of 
subtler emotions."  See Herbert G. Goldman, Banjo Eyes: Eddie Cantor 
and the Birth of Modern Stardom (New York: Oxford, 1997), 68.

[52]  	Herbert Goldman, Jolson: The Legend Comes to Life (New York: 
Oxford University Press, 1988), 170-71; see also Goldman, Banjo Eyes, 57-77.

[53]  	By 1935 the legendary Palace Theatre, once flagship to a 
600-theatre vaudeville circuit, had become a movie house with no 
vaudeville acts at all.  Most historians agree vaudeville died as the 
result of changing entertainment economics brought about by the 
popularity of radio, talking movies, and the impact of the Great 
Depression.  See Robert W. Synder, The Voice of the City: Vaudeville 
and Popular Culture in New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

[54]  	In addition to Eddie Cantor, The Colgate Comedy Hour's 
revolving hosts included Abbott and Costello, Dean Martin and Jerry 
Lewis, Ed Wynn, Donald O'Conner, Ethel Merman, and Frank Sinatra. 
Other stars hosting only a few episodes included Bob Hope, Tony 
Martin, Jimmy Durante and Fred Allen.  See McNeil, Total Television, 
171; and Brooks and Marsh, The Complete Directory, 202.

[55]  	Cantor also christened the polio-fighting charity fund the 
"March of Dimes."  See Goldman, Banjo Eyes, 195-96.

[56]  	Ibid., 269.

[57]  	Ibid.  The early Colgate shows frequently beat Sullivan's program.

[58]  	Ibid.

[59]  	NBC CART, 27 September 1951, box 1, folder 4.  NBC Files.

[60]  	NBC CART, 5 October 1951, box 1, folder 4.  NBC Files.

[61]  	For a discussion of ideology and social reproduction see John 
B. Thompson, Ideology and Modern Culture: Critical Social Theory in 
the Era of Mass Communication (Stanford, CA: Stanford University 
Press, 1990), 85-97.

[62]  	Brooks and Marsh, The Complete Directory, 202.

[63]  	NBC CART, 6 November 1951, box 1, folder 4.  NBC Files.

[64]  	Ibid.

[65]  	Ibid.

[66]  	NBC CART, 31 October 1951, box 1, folder 4.  NBC Files.

[67]  	NBC CART, 10 September 1952, box 1, folder 5.  NBC Files.

[68]  	Ibid.

[69]  	NBC CART, 2 December 1952, box 1, folder 5.  NBC Files.

[70]  	NBC CART, 12 January 1953, box 1, folder 6.  NBC Files.  See 
also NBC CART, 23 July 1952, box 1, folder 5.  NBC Files; and NBC 
CART, 7 February 1953 and 13 February 1953.  NBC Files; and NBC CART, 
5 May 1954, box 1, folder 6.  NBC Files.

[71]  	Ibid.

[72]  	Ibid.

[73]  	Ibid.

[74]  	Ibid.

[75]  	NBC CART, 16 February 1955, box 153, folder 1.  NBC Files.

[76]  	Ibid.

[77]  	NBC CART, 5 February 1954, box 1, folder 7.  NBC Files.

[78]  	Goldman, Banjo Eyes, 378.

[79]  	NBC CART, 5 February 1954.

[80]  	Goldman, Banjo Eyes, 378.

[81]  	Cripps, "Amos 'n' Andy . . ." 38.  Cripps also mentions 
NBC-TV's "Integration Without Identification" policy, and the 
network's hiring of a black public relations firm, apparently 
learning of both from articles found in Variety (fn. 51).

[82]  	TV Digest, 23 August 1952, 10.

[83]  	Ibid.

[84]  	Ibid.

[85]  	NBC CART, 12 January 1953, box 1, folder 6.  NBC Files.

[86]  	Ibid.

[87]  	NBC CART, 26 September 1952, box 1, folder 5.  NBC Files.

[88]  	NBC CART, 12 January 1953.

[89]  	Ibid.

[90]  	Ibid.

[91]  	Ibid.  Although some form of it was in place and practiced since 1950.

[92]  	NBC CART, 5 March 1953, box 1, folder 6.  NBC Files.

[93]  	Ibid.

[94]  	Variety, 9 January 1952, 1, 20.

[95]  	Daniel, Lost  Revolutions, 191.

[96]  	Variety, 9 January 1952, 20.

[97]  	Daniel, Lost Revolutions, 196; also see Stephen J. Whitfield, 
A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till (New York: Free Press, 
1988), 2-6.

[98]  	The 1917 race riots in East St. Louis, Missouri was one of the 
bloodiest in 20th-century America. Unrest raged for nearly a week, 
leaving nine whites and hundreds of African- Americans dead.  See The 
East St. Louis Race Riot of 1917. [8 microfilm reels] Bethesda, Md.: 
University Publications of America, 1985. Davis Microforms Collection 
Microfilm 1-3402. See also James N. Upton, A Social History of 20th 
Century Urban Riots  (Bristol, Ind.: Wyndham Hall Press, 1984).

[99]  	NBC CART, 10 September 1951, box 1, folder 4.  NBC Files.

[100]  	NBC CART, 5 March 1953.

[101]  	Ibid.

[102]  	Ibid.

[103]  	NBC CART, 16 November 1953, box 1, folder 6.  NBC Files.

[104]  	Ibid.

[105]  	Ibid.

[106]  	Twenty-two African-American women at Howard University 
founded the sorority in 1913.

[107]  	NBC CART, 22 June 1951, box 1, folder 4.  NBC Files.

[108]  	Ibid.

[109]  	Ibid.	

[110]  	Ibid.

[111]  	There were three black actresses that played the role of 
Beulah over the course of its television run from October 
1950-September 1953.  Ethel Waters, Hattie McDanile (who appeared in 
only a few episodes before falling ill), and Louise Beavers.  See 
McNeil, Total Television, 90; and Brooks and Marsh, The Complete Directory, 96.

[112]  	Jannette L. Dates, and William Barlow, (eds.), Split Image: 
African Americans in the Mass Media (Washington, D.C.: Howard 
University Press, 1990); Elizabeth Kolbert,  "From Beulah to Oprah: 
The Evolution of Black Images on TV,"  New York Times, 15 January 
1993; MacDonald. Blacks and White TV, 23-24, 46, 118; Bogel, 
Primetime Blues, 19-26.

[113]  	McNeil, Total Television, 44; and Brooks and Marsh, The 
Complete Directory, 46.

[114]  	Melvin P. Ely, The Adventures of Amos 'n' Andy: A Social 
History of an American Phenomenon (New York: Free Press, 1991); Bart 
Andrews and Arghus Julliard, Holy Mackerel!: The Amos 'n' Andy Story 
(New York: E. P. Dutton Inc., 1986); see also W. T. Lhamon, Raising 
Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop (Cambridge: 
Harvard University Press, 1998).

[115]  	United States Commission on Civil Rights, Window Dressing on 
the Set: Women and Minorities in Television (Washington, D.C.: 
Government Printing Office, 1977), 4-5.

[116]  	Ibid.

[117]  	See Cripps, "Amos 'n' Andy . . ." 43-49.

[118]  	Ibid.

[119]  	Darrell Y. Hamamoto, Nervous Laughter: Television Situation 
Comedy and Liberal Democratic Ideology (New York: Praeger, 1989) 43.

[120]  	Cripps, "Amos 'n' Andy . . ." 39.

[121]  	NBC-TV's owned and operated New York station had several call 
letter iterations. It was WNBT, then WRCA, and as of May 1960, 
WNBC-TV.  See Joseph H. Udelson, The Great Television Race: A History 
of American Industry, 1925-1941 (Little Rock, Ala.: University of 
Alabama Press, 1982); see also <http://www.wnbc.com/wnbc/ 
1169359/detail.html>  Internet accessed: 20 May 2002.

[122]  	NBC CART, 5 November 1954, box 1, folder 7.  NBC Files.

[123]  	Ibid.

[124]  	NBC CART, 12 January 1953.

[125]  	Sponsor, October 1949, 24-25, 54-55.  See also Tide, 20 July 1951, 30.

[126]  	NBC CART, 10 September 1959, box 153, folder 5.  NBC Files.

[127]  	Ibid.

[128]  	Ibid.

[129]  	For a discussion see Patrick Garry, An American Paradox: 
Censorship in a Nation of Free Speech (Westport, Conn.: Praeger 
1993), 88, 128.  Garry discusses "persons who do not traditionally 
advocate censorship" will do so, not to restrict personal freedoms 
they say, but to "improve social conditions."  See also  Nat Hentoff, 
Free Speech for Me--But Not for Thee: How the American Left and Right 
Relentlessly Censor Each Other (New York: HarperCollins, 1992).

[130]  	William Clotworthy, telephone interview by the author, 
Murfreesboro, Tenn., 10 August 2004.