Integration in all entertainment industries proved to be a difficult task. As for radio and music, ownership and copyright laws were not commonplace throughout the 1930s-1960s, causing turmoil and obstacles for black artists. Squires delves into these issues of ownership in the entertainment industry while highlighting many white artists who stole, and shared work of black artists without awarding any credit. In the jazz and blues eras of the 1930s-1960s black artists created this new genre of music that took the country by storm. Many white artists fell in love with the sounds and started to emulate and created all white jazz bands. Race records, as they were called, began to highlight some of the issues blacks faced in the United States and were very prevalent in the black community. For example, Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit was about the numerous lynchings and subhuman treatment of black Americans in the 1930s and 40s. Black and white Americans both admired and recorded the same genres, but its implementation and ownership remained separate, like most things of this period. Moving into the 1950s, television began to take over radio broadcasts as the new household medium. The major networks, ABC, NBC, and CBS, formatted some of their most popular radio shows, and created new television series. One of these programs was Amos and Andy, a minstrel show that received much criticism and backlash from black Americans throughout the country. Black actors replaced white actors, and their status within the show was moved up to a middle class family with better jobs and better homes, but this didn’t take away from the fact that black Americans were continuing to be placed in stereotypical roles that had been recycled from the end of the civil war. The writers, directors, and producers were all white, which continued to be a problem for the few black actors that won television and movie roles. Many of the popular black sitcoms, such as Girlfriends and Homeboys in Outer Space had majority of white writers. In the 1980s and 1990s sitcoms featuring black actors were starting to gain popularity. With the creation of a new major network, FOX, an appeal to black Americans through television was clearly being made. Although these new sitcoms featuring black actors were popular with black audiences, “many critics felt FOX’s comic line-ups were ‘neo-minstrelsy’ with actors working in roles akin to those of Stepin’ Fetchit.” [1] The Cosby Show was a landmark television series that “portrayed a loving, successful, black married couple with well-educated children.” [2] Many white focus groups stated that the fictional Huxtable’s were similar to a middle class white family and shared some of their same everyday problems. Those was both displeasing and appealing to many black audiences, but the show, and its spinoff, A Different World, have both reached commercial success. In today’s media it is still very difficult to integrate entertainment and ownership within black media, but many television shows are trying to bridge those gaps.
