Remember – Call in and join this great conversation on Black Media History over two weeks! – 612-341-0980.

This week and next, TruthToTell’s ANDY DRISCOLL and LYNNELL MICKELSEN, joined by our colleague, DAVID CUMMINGS, of KFAI’s Monday music show, Rockin’ in Rhythm (2:00PM), will explore Black media as the messengers of information important to the Black communities they serve, Black personalities in media and their leadership roles, and the differences they represent to the dominant culture in Minnesota. Rockin' in Rhythm will continue the talk and play more early Black broadcast work later each of those days.

The history of African-Americans is, for so many of us, limited by what mainstream media and high school history books have fed us for over two centuries. Our perceptions have been twisted and shaped by what we’ve read, what we’ve heard, what we’ve watched – what we’ve read and heard and seen has either been a small percentage of the truth or completely distorted view.

For all our babble about how far we’ve come in 500 years of African enslavement, the Emancipation Proclamation and Brown vs. Board of Education 100 years later, the segregation of the United States is alive and thriving, thanks to unchecked discrimination and the maintenance of stereotypes in our popular culture.

Our schools, our housing patterns and financing practices, our health care system, our placement of polluting industries in close proximity to communities of color are evidence of the dichotomy between media images – like sports heroes or entertainment celebrities and the day-to-day treatment and belief systems of today’s American citizens. The birth of the tea party movement is little more than a reactionary cultural uprising by a massive racist element railing against our African-American President and their frustrations over an unfair and morbid economy.

In the middle of all this, staring almost 100 years ago, began a self-started industry to provide Black Americans with information and entertainment they needed to survive and thrive in a society that feared an uprising of these former slaves would displace us all. Black newspapers began to bloom, many based on the same political beliefs that had spawned the white press across the country. Papers were rarely neutral – and took on the hue of Democratic or Republican party ideology. My own great-grandfather bought an ran a Republican paper- the St. Paul Pioneer Press for the last half of the 19^th Century.

Black newspapering was similar in bent, even here in the Twin Cities. How much of that tainted the news they found fit to print is something we’ll try to learn as we explore the history of Black media in Minnesota and its roots in this community and other markets dating back to their founding in the early 1900s.

Then, of course, came radio, then television. Early radio portrayals of Blacks all contributed to our continuing perceptions of Black folks and a lot of it failed to encourage neighborliness even as they entertained us.

To this day, the 10-O’Clock News is little more than crime, weather and sports, with the crimes covered throwing the cities’ Black communities in the worst possible light while Black life here and in all across America, good and bad, is left untouched by mainstream media.

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