On “Tony Brown’s Journal,” he interviewed guests like Jesse Jackson and Lena Horne, and made programming decisions by asking himself, “Will it help Black people?”
(Source: The New York Times)
Tony Brown, the pioneering host and producer of “Tony Brown’s Journal,” a long-running public affairs television show aimed at Black audiences that was notable for its candid and often contentious discussions about race and other politically charged issues, died on June 17 at his home in Newport News, Va. He was 93.
Mr. Brown’s death, from coronary heart disease, was announced on Friday on his Facebook page.
By the time his PBS show went off the air in 2008, Mr. Brown estimated that, over the course of nearly four decades, he had interviewed more than 1,000 guests, including Lena Horne, Jesse Jackson, Angela Davis, Bill Cosby and Sammy Davis Jr.
While he had no favorites, he said, he singled out an exchange with Ms. Horne that not only captured the frankness that his program encouraged, but also hinted at his broadcasting mission. He recalled asking the well-known singer why she had married a white man — the composer and conductor Lennie Hayton — and her reply: “I was not woman enough at that time to marry a Black man. As a woman, I should have been looking at myself first.”
An intense and impeccably dressed former social worker with hardscrabble West Virginia roots who was blessed with a silken baritone, Mr. Brown acknowledged that he made programming decisions “on the basis of one thing — will it help Black people?”
He told the Congressional Black Caucus at a hearing in 1972 that the exclusion of Black people from executive jobs in the media had led to a “totally brainwashed” Black population “drilled to think like whites,” resulting in a “general disrespect and misunderstanding by whites about Blacks, and Blacks about themselves.”
