You could win bar bets with this answer
Another surprise was Joe Pyne*. He was a pioneer in confrontational talk radio. He didn’t like hippies or gays or feminists or war protestors but he did speak out against racism. Which considering he was broadcasting from Delaware in the 1950s took some guts.
*For the sake of disclosure, I’ll state I started the linked article.
Not from the 1950s, but the most surprising advocate of racial tolerance I’ve come across was Nathan Bedford Forrest.
Forrest was a confederate general (the only one to rise in the ranks from private to general in the course of the war) and military genius. Most histories rank him as a virulent racist, primarily because of the massacre at Fort Pillow (where Black union soldiers were killed when they tried to surrender) and his involvement with the founding of the Ku Klux Klan.
Only he claimed that the soliders at Fort Pillow acted against his orders, and that he had no idea that the Klan was a racist organization, thinking it was just fighting back against Yankee carpetbaggers. It’s also pretty clear that he had nothing to do with the Klan other than it used his name as one of their supporters.
But he clearly had a commitment to racial equality after the war, arguing before the Memphis City Council that there was no reason to exclude Blacks from any profession, and that some ex-slaves were skilled artisans who could be put to good use teaching and training others.
And the most astonishing thing was his speech to the Independent Order of Pole Bearers (a precursor to the NAACP) where he gave one of the clearest statements of racial equality ever given by a white southerner of his time.
And, to top it off, he did something no white southerner of the time would ever consider, something so radical (for the time) that it was practically unthinkable: he kissed a black woman on the cheek.
astro: Why omit television?
Only so many letters allowed in the headline or I would have said TV also.
As the first host of the Tonight Show, from 1954 to 1957, and on the Steve Allen Show, opposite the Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday nights from 1956-1960, Steve Allen gave many black musicians their first national TV exposure. According to the Wikipedia entry:
This was at a time when TV was almost entirely lily white, with just about the only black characters being Amos ‘n’ Andy and the occasional stereotyped servant and porter. And Nat King Cole, who hosted his own variety show in 1956.
Ed Sullivan was no slacker, either, when it came to featuring black talent.
Wasn’t Hugh Hefner notable for inviting black musicians to perform on his television show during the 60’s, or for publishing radical writers in his magazine?
If you had left out the two superfluous apostrophes you would have room for TV. Not for the additional comma(s) and space, but plenty of room for TV. 