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Von Eschen

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Penny M. Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Harvard University Press, 2006)

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I Spy, 1965-1968 25 TV series, created by David Friedkin and Morton Fine, NBC image_header 2018-11-19T05:23:55-08:00
Bill Cosby, as secret agent Alexander “Scotty” Scott, performed a breakthrough role as the first African American to co-star in a prime time television show in a non-inferior role. Scott is a spy for the U.S. intelligence agencies (presumably the CIA), with a white partner--Kelly Robinson (Robert Culp). For cover. Robinson (Culp) is a tennis star and Scott (Cosby) is his coach. Prominent African-American actors play guest roles throughout the series.

Although this is a breakthrough, it is only a "co-star" lead. In the title credits, Culp is the the Star. Culp headlines each episode of the show, so Cosby and his character are second fiddle. Cosby is a Rhodes Scholar action hero, a nearly equal partner to the white star. I Spy and NBC certainly deserve credit for boldly integrating its cast. But there are qualifications.

I Spy is remarkably indirect or silent in its handling of race. The show avoids confronting actual segregation in the U.S.A because it is set in foreign locations like Hong Kong or Italy. By placing them in non-U.SA. territories, Robinson/Culp and Scotty/Cosby are free to be inter-racial partners. The societies in which they are set do not resemble the U.S.A. For the most part, the show simply ignores race.

Cosby embraced a Civil Rights role for himself, but also explicitly rejected the direct treatment of racism in his TV and performing career: “Negroes like Martin Luther King and Dick Gregory; Negro groups like the Deacons and the Muslims- are all dedicated to the cause of Civil Rights…but they do their jobs in their own way. My way is to show white people that Negroes are human beings with the same aspirations and abilities that whites have.”Note

Evasions notwithstanding, I Spy is loaded with racial messages, within a framework Cold War cosmopolitanism. In the show's first episode, Chinese Communists attempt to gain a foothold in Africa by bribing an African American Olympian, Leroy Brown, played by Ivan Dixon (1931-2008) into defecting to Red China. The bribe included the hand in marriage of "Princess Amara,") played by Cicely Tyson (1924-) Robinson/Culp and Scotty/Cosby rescue Brown/Dixon, after he publicly renounces Communism and denounces his Chinese handlers, in a confessional speech to representatives of third world nations. As the Pilot, this episode makes Bill Cosby, Ivan Dixon, and Cicely Tyson the network's black cultural ambassadors to the newly-independent and non-aligned African states. like Louis Armstrong, who toured Africa for the Eisenhower State Department.Note

Throughout the Civil Rights movement, in a period of "Black Internationalism."Note Led by both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr, many actively promoted connections between African Americans and postcolonial African states like Ghana In Hollywood and TV, Harry Belafonte, and Sammy Davis Jr. hosted shows or adopted adopted roles that thematized racial and religious injustices. With the possible exception of King, South LA's incomparable homey (Jefferson High, UCLA PhD), Ralph Bunche (Nobelist (1950), UN mediator, UN Under-Secretary General (1968), and Civil Rights marcher (Washington 1963, Selma, 1965), was certainly the most influential of the Black Internationalists.

Given the strurm and drang of the Civil Rights movement's most tumultuous years of the show's lifespan (1965-1968) race was almost never an issue on I Spy. The virtual silencing of race on the show stands in stark contrast to the Watts Rebellion, through 1966, the year the Black Panthers invaded the California State Capitol, 1967, the year of the Detroit Rebellion, to 1968, the year of Dr. King's assassination.

Citations:

Gray, Herman. Watching Race Television and the Struggle for Blackness. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1995.

"I Spy." Ebony Magazine (Chicago, Illinois), September 1965.

Kackman, Michael. Citizen Spy Television, Espionage, and Cold War Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.

Von Eschen, Penny. Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.