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Julia , 1968-1971

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The show featured Diahann Carroll as Julia Baker, a widowed African American mother and nurse, and her son Corey Baker (Marc Copage). Julia centered around Julia’s middle class life with her son. One of the first shows to feature an African American woman, who was not playing a “mamie” type. Scholar Herman Grey classifies this shows as Julia “assimilationist" because that race is not at issue in the plot or dialogue. The producers and Dihann Carroll were painfully aware of this avoidance, and understood the avoidance as a price to be paid for the privilege of havinga successful black single mom as the central character of a series.  Although the show aired in 1968, the same year of Dr. King’s assassination and urban uprisings, whites and blacks simply just co-existed on Julia.  Already in the first season of 1968-69, Diahann Carroll complained: “"At the moment we're presenting the white Negro. And he has very little Negroness."  In an interview for PBS decades later, Carroll recalls how unprepared and timid the network was at the time.   Activists and artists also voiced their displeasure of the show’s assimilationism. Famously, musician and poet, Gil Scott-Heron, on his poem song “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” said, “The revolution will not be brought to you by the/Schaefer Award Theatre and will not star Natalie Woods and Steve McQueen or Bullwinkle and Julia.”

This page has paths:

  1. Decolonizing American Television: 1965-1990s Leonard Butingan
  2. Blinding Race: Television in the Civil Rights Era, 1948-1965 Phil Ethington
  3. Television Timeline Leonard Butingan

This page has tags:

  1. 1970s Phil Ethington
  2. 1960s Phil Ethington

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