TELEVISION STARTED THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

"You'll wonder where the yellow went, when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent!"
"Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh what a relief it is."
"My bologna has a first new, it's O-s-c-a-r. My bologna has a second name, it's M-a-y-e-r. Oh, I love to eat it everyday and if you ask me why I'll say: "Because Oscar Mayer has a way with b-o-l-o-n-g-a."
"Back when the West was very young there lived a man named Master-son. He wore a cane and derby hat-they called him 'Bat', Bat Master-son."
"The Rifleman!" Pow! Pow!
"Have Gun Will Travel: reads the card of a man. A knight without armour in a savage land..."
"Look up in the sky! It's a bird, it's a plane!"

"Ya'll, get up now! It's time to wash up. We got Tang for breakfast!

Fuzzy heads pop up. Feet scrambling for furry slippers and kids smash into each other on their way to the bathroom. To be the first to drink the same drink, the astronauts drink.

All around the country, images flashed at the same time. White or black or any other color, we were driven by the jingles and the songs on that small screen. We didn't know it at the time, but television brought their version of the world to us. We believed everything it told us because we lived in shacks and the projects and in mansions and the suburbs. What we knew about the rest of the world was what that screen brought us.
The truth is, Madison Avenue was bringing us the image of the world that said we would be loved if we bought this car or that. Commercials told us what soap to buy and how halitois would ruin our social life. Those guys were sitting in their rooms, proposing ideas, helping to create shows to sell products, but it all came out dreams of something better.
It was gentle manipulation. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington was my favorite movie. It showed every national holiday. It made me believe that every man was my brother. Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. Frank Capra created indelible images.

In the beginning they told us to dream of world where all people were equal. They told us: this is was time to embrace new things. Television gave us all the same primer lessons and gave us all the same common holidays. It was through television, we were galvanized as a country when we saw dogs tearing the flesh of children, fire hoses stopping blacks from marching. Suddenly, it wasn't just black people. White people, Jews and anybody else who couldn't sit still from the side lines and watch joined in protest. Television kept a record of our involvement. We went from our living rooms into the world. Once outside, we saw other things that needed changing.
It was television that helped my parents elect the first young, Irish Catholic President, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. And it was on television that broadcast the feed of his assassination. We saw the blood on Jackie's dress as LBJ was sworn in. And all over this country, it was black. Day was night for a time. It was the end of Camelot. We would turn Jack into a god. Then King. Then Bobby.
Then television said it was time to move on...Death didn't sale many products...

We saw the Beatles land and toss their mushroom hair. Negroes began appearing on television without dogs and firehoses. This upped the ratings as The Temptations, James Brown and over half of Motown, dressed for style and flash guested on the Ed Sullivan Show.
Those good images made us dream we were finally a part of something bigger than our one room-our poverty-our pain.
Our dreams grew. And every other skinny girl with grapefruit eyes, tried to scrap up two friends and be Diana Ross and the Supremes.
There was Motown and Dick Clark and American Bandstand with that one Negro couple.

Every outrage we ever felt in those days-every fuzzy feeling of Christmas and brotherhood. Every moment of art and our dreams came from television.

If it wasn't for that little bitty screen and the images and songs that shaped us, we might not have an African-American President. It was television that helped us believe it was possible. It was television that showed us 40 some years later, our faces wet, a rainbow sea of faces, sobbing as we listened to his speech and believed in ourselves once again. We were one all over the world and television-that curse and that blessed thing that allowed me, miles away, to drop to my knees and thank God.