I’ve just been reading a bio of British singer Petula Clark who was world-famous in the 60s. In 1968 she taped a duet for her US TV show in which she featured with guest star Harry Belafonte. During said duet she touched Harry Belafonte’s arm. A representative of the show’s sponsor Chrysler saw it and ordered it to be retaped without the touch, stating that viewers in the South would be outraged and might even stop buying Chryslers.
The producers went ahead with the retake but when Clark realized just why it was being reshot she was furious, ordered the retakes destroyed and demanded that the network air the original version. It did and sure enough Southerners reacted as predictably as Pavlovian dogs, flooding the network with complaints and organizing a boycott against Chrysler.
It’s hard to believe insane shit like this went on as comparatively recently as the 60s. Was such idiocy common back then (as if a white woman was somehow violated by contact with a black guy) or was this just the reaction of an extremist minority in the South? When did things start improving, eg when could the networks show blacks and whites interacting normally, sexually or otherwise, and not bring down a shitstorm?
Interracial relationships on TV shows and movies STILL drew negative reactions well into the 80s/90s. When The Young & The Restless had Neil Winters (an African-American character) begin a relationship with Victoria Newman (a white character) in the early 90s, they got a not-insignificant amount of hate mail.
Yeah, things haven’t changed much. There are still a metric fuck-ton of racist assholes in the South who will go insane at the very thought of their precious lily-white flowers of femininity being contaminated by…those types.
There’s a fuck-ton of them up North, too, but they tended to be quieter. But not in the last 6 months.
The contracts TV stations signed with the networks gave them the right to ditch any programming they didn’t like. So most of the South had no idea about I Spy or Julia until years later.
The idea that things haven’t change much since the 1960s is laughable. That is not to say we don’t have a ways to go, but in the 1960s, we were just at the very beginning of the period where racial discrimination became illegal.
In 1969 I gave a ride to a black (girl) classmate. She sat in the passenger seat, there was no physical contact between us. People on the street yelled at us.
This was in St. Louis, not some small town in the Deep South.
Things are definitely improving. I took my son out to lunch today, and there was a really redneck looking guy, I mean, a real stereotype, with neck tattoos, and flannel shirt, and mullet, and he went and sat with what I presume were his wife and four kids: she was black, and the kids were mixed, and here’s the kicker-- she was nursing the baby. (In public :eek: !) He’d gone out to the double-cab pick-up to get her a pillow.
He looked like the kind of guy who, in 1967, would never have been somewhere where he would have had the opportunity to meet a black woman.
Young people who intermarry don’t think twice, and my 10-year-old doesn’t blink at mixed classmates. He has a good friend who is black/Hispanic, and has mild autism, and several others who are mixed in different ways.
He goes to a really well-mixed school, and I love it. He went to a Jewish preschool, and I’m glad he got his little haven from Christmas pageants disguised as “Winter Holiday shows,” and got to learn that Purim is more important than Hanukkah (and more fun), but not that he’s older, where is, is good.
Gallup has done several polls on interracial marriage over the decades. It was…not popular at the time (and remained below 50% approval until the mid-90s), so presumably even a hint of a relationship would have been pretty controversial too.
The Jeffersons had an interracial couple (Tom and Helen Willis). The show debuted in 1975, and while it was a bit controversial, I don’t remember any boycotts (threatened or actual). On the other hand, I think the reaction would have been different if an interracial couple had been regular characters in a drama, or if it had been a black man with a white woman.
Unfortunately, the Clark/Belafonte incident wasn’t unusual for the late sixties. The battles for racial understanding and civil rights, and against segregation and bigotry, were in full swing. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in 1968. Many racists felt comfortable expressing their views openly.
When Charles Schulz introduced Franklin as Peppermint Patty’s classmate in 1968, he got damning letters from the South about promoting school integration.
When Robert Guillaume took over the role of the Phantom from Michael Crawford in the LA production of the musical, playing opposite Elizabeth Stack’s (white) Christian, the theatre anticipated getting letters of objection. They got two.
Let’s keep in mind that 1968 was 1 year after we needed a SCOTUS decision to outlaw miscegenation laws in lots of states, VA in particular. Just one year. Perhaps if you lived through the rapid acceptance of SSM in the last decade, the slow gains in civil rights in the 60s and 70s seems, well, slow. But the anomaly is what we saw with SSM, not the other way around. Long ingrained social norms don’t usually change so quickly. In many parts of the US, maybe even most parts, the idea of inter-racial marriage was simply not acceptable. Especially between blacks and whites.
The Jeffersons was a ‘black’ show. This technique of allowing such relationships on ‘black’ shows still exists. I hope I don’t have to explain the horrifying ‘logic’ involved here.