The World War II era represented the golden age of radio as a broadcast
medium in the United States; it also witnessed a rise in African
American activism against racial segregation and discrimination,
especially as they were practiced by the federal government itself. In
Broadcasting Freedom, Barbara Savage links these cultural and
political forces by showing how African American activists, public
officials, intellectuals, and artists sought to access and use radio to
influence a national debate about racial inequality.
Drawing on a rich and previously unexamined body of national public
affairs programming about African Americans and race relations, Savage
uses these radio shows to demonstrate the emergence of a new national
discourse about race and ethnicity, racial hatred and injustice, and the
contributions of racial and immigrant populations to the development of
the United States. These programs, she says, challenged the nation to
reconcile its professed egalitarian ideals with its unjust treatment of
black Americans and other minorities.
This examination of radio's treatment of race as a national political
issue also provides important evidence that the campaigns for racial
justice in the 1940s served as an essential, and still overlooked,
precursor to the civil rights campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s, Savage
argues. The next battleground would be in the South--and on television.