thirty thirty years now is it thirty years don't ask me with the time with welcome welcome very much conversation where it's a pleasure to welcome to the program guild noble he probably will need no introduction to most of the people viewing conversations he's  pleasure is really mine and well i appreciate that and i wonder we have time we have a good deal of time and what we want to do is let this program be you've talked to a great number of people over the years and you're usually in the position of asking people what they think and at all of broadcasting because it was just a fantasy at the time it was a fledgling industry to begin with and certainly had no place for people of color and i did get involved however in radio i was fascinated with radio and i landed the job ultimately i'm taking big steps in time but i really landed a job in radio in the early sixty's and i loved it doing those things i started as a replacement actually and i was told that i could only stay there for three months and after three months i'd have to leave and i was hired by bill mccreary  as you know ended up at ten o five at any rate in at the end of three months bill decided to keep me on and let somebody else go who was in the newsroom and so i sort of you know caught by my fingernails  i stayed on and that was the beginning of it had you had you done any of that kind of thing like communications in college and then you know were you just not learning on the ground nothing really to study the best way perhaps oh i don't know about that but i think the most of the mechanics as you know of the industry are relatively easy to come by i think i don't think that they're that difficult the significant thing was what are you going to say how informed of myself my history of this country and another perspective of its story and history and the world by all of the dynamic people who were in harlem at the time adam clayton powell the nation of they were educational they told me about myself they tell me things about my history that i didn't get in school and so in addition to grappling with the skills that i had to really you know try to d i was really learning things and it really took me you you know you were involved in a personal sense in a very real committed kind of sense in that whole civil rights following that was going on right from the time you were just an infant or young or oh nothing was it your fault of the teachers full well it's hard to say it wasn't being offered the information i wasn't being run off right i went to church and i heard wonderful things about my reality and ethics but i didn't learn anything at all about race i certainly knew about that racism exists right i knew that black people that we had our place in society but that was about it was in and barrus that it was something that you didn't talk about slavery was when i started in radio i was more caught up in trying to develop a delivery and how to put words together in the mechanics of the industry and what i wasn't expecting was this education that i was going to get now you  going to you had gotten some you were committed or you were going to be getting educated after you got into the radio and began to start thinking i got the name and the political education that makes me who i am now yeah i got on the job all right good time it was the black radio at the time were it was about the only outlet that the black community had for expression so not only was there a lot of energy and home run going on but the leaders would come to the station to the interview r i met a all of them most of them and i also met a lot of musicians and that's an important part of my lab it's a living i know because i used to play piano for a living and so when i got a chance to meet you know erroll garner and dizzy gillespie i mean i was my feet didn't touch the ground i hear you and it was so it was just an exalting experience and i began to develop yeah i began to realize how ignorant i was pretty good beginning point for us all in a certain sense to realize how much there is to learn and yeah you know the a certain humility against how much there is to know and i'm much there is to learn as we set out on life or it's probably a good thing and then  i was very taken by martin luther king junior but there was another man in harlem his name was malcolm x and malcolm i was very put off by you were all i thought he was dreadful malcolm x he talked about white people and he talked about him like a dog he said that i was a bachelor at the time and i had an apartment at holloman i was having  extremist saw him in a distinct opposition to the ways of dr king yes interesting you think that was characteristic of many of the people around i think the doctor kaino was doing was malcolm sort of pretty isolated at the time that he was up and talk roll maybe an hour an hour and a half of his speech and a minute and a half would make the evening news yes and that i mean it all happens and that minute and a half you know you tell it yeah so that minute and a half was put on the air out of context and it was very very upsetting to whites and to a large number of black people got through to you got it turned me off completely and so it wasn't until after he was struck down that i ran into a muslim and he said i'm going to tell you why malcolm was killed and i was very interested so he brought me up to his apartment and he gave me this recording malcolm speech and for the first time i heard this man speak heard it i stayed up all night listening to this you know and it was a revelation yeah and it gave me a balanced meal martin can't be diminished at all no i mean he's a he's a marvelous person and he was my first awakening but i i got a lot out of malcolm x because he gave me a perspective that has really helped me he had a view of this world and of this country that was very useful to me and i'll i'll specify because he had come out of a an experience of crime yes as a youngster he got involved in crime he got involved with trafficking women trafficking drugs and in so doing he got a chance to see that which most of us don't see the underbelly of society the underbelly of the rulers  society because he was selling drugs to wealthy people he was selling women to wealthy people he would go down to broadway and pick up these wealthy businessmen and take them up town seemed clear he got it he singing calypso music look no no that wasn't malcolm malcolm you know farrakhan was a calypsonian oh ok no no malcolm x at any so he had it he had a chance to see graft and corruption and the reality of life and he expressed that and what he was saying yeah and that was very useful to me and it gave me a balanced perspective i didn't throw dr king out the window and i have not but malcolm x gave me another perspective we had a lot more militant is the right word or had i don't think anyone was gandhi and he was more of a militant presence now i think that he was one of the most i've come to know him but i've come to know him by way of his wife and many who worked with him he was a very gentle person very shy quiet you know rich retiring and he was quite except when he got up on the stage and this is brother said when he got up on that hour he was so he was a warrior yeah right but he did not believe in running around and going after white people and shooting them down in the streets but he said anybody strikes you you have a right to defend clear cut kind of things you can see there's all the innuendos and so forth that made that up and it was damn near very close to just being like an apartheid kind of thing that they had functioning in this country a said was then to me and it was absurd and it had to be fought and it was yes and you were cutting your teeth in terms of not cutting my young man wrote them and beginning also to cut your teeth of terms of radio and getting into got it right on the civil rights issue you got that right so i was just learning learning learning i started picking up books and reading doing my home or i'm trying to play catch up and then wouldn't you know it i found that television had become interested in hiring as we're called minorities  because of the pressure that came out of the current a commission report old remember when there was so many of peoples in the united states that a presidential committee a commission was appointed and headed up by  the governor of pennsylvania i believe and he they went on a long study with this commission to find out the causes of these disturbances and they published a book called the current mission report and one chapter was devoted to media and they said the reason why white america was so caught unawares and was so shocked by what was happening is they had never really heard the grievances of black people and the how we felt and so the prescription that came out in that chapter was that media ought to really start hiring black people and also begin to have some programming that was controlled and conceptualize by people of color mind you at the time there was nothing right down to the commercial breaks everything was controlled put together written consent conceptualized and all of that by people who only represent a small portion of the world's population and the whole dealing audience was suffering from that now given i grant you that at that time television was in its infancy and in mississippi and in atlanta and all of that you know all the civil rights dr king was getting beaten up here and so on so it was getting i was good programming i mean from a drummer for advertising space exactly and so when i started to look at the viewing number then john kennedy was struck down and that transfixed a nation and millions and millions of people watched television and and so television began to really recognize the commercial possibilities on the premise that they perform a public service to the audience to whom they broadcast and that has to be realized in public affairs programming and that included news so the stations put on the news to satisfied those requirements so that they go on about making their money with the entertainment and things yes exactly right and that still is a dynamic and it's right and and so that's why news as a matter of fact there were a lot of journalists who didn't want to do television news because they thought it was demeaning it was low grade low caliber stuff and john cameron swayze tells a story that he fought tooth and nail against being an anchor only to find out that after he found he had to do it he ended up making a fortune on television but he didn't really want to do it to begin with so already i want to know why he will because he thought it was never great journalism and he didn't see the future and i see  ok right yeah ok and harvest of shame and those programs came along in the mid to late sixty's were they really how come i want to put them back in the fifty's and i hope i hope i was not wrong well anyway anyway yeah but but there were people said to say that television news was not the big money or no yeah that it is today right ok and now it's the lion's share of revenues for us for a local station is the newscast and that's why they have so many of the local for the local news is that is that a yeah really big big money the five o'clock to six o'clock the twelve noon the eleven o'clock becomes a big consideration on his age of satellite and the show and they're  i found myself employable because of the political pressure that the era was imposing on america where a lot of things began to open up you began to find and from it of action programs you began to find head start programs the war on poverty america had to stop and say ok wait a minute now we're going to have to do something for quote unquote these people and these things were instituted all in all walks of life banking in the redlining practices came under scrutiny broadcasters came under scrutiny as i say and so i was caught up in the wave of that and i was the beneficiary and i landed a job at channel s know there's a there are an awful lot of these people in the drift of things in our country now and privateers and so for they would try to say the you know all those things failed the welfare you know that but an awful lot of those programs those had started a lot of those kind of things didn't awful lot of good if they could have been vouchsafed that war came along and really the war in vietnam came along and really cut into a lot of what was going on but there was a great deal it wasn't all just protest and there was a great deal of good things that were happening to help real people in a way that could be looking forward some of which is been cut off or you know it hasn't been able to have reaches the film and i just wonder what if you have a head start and you know the things that were annunciation with johnson is  poverty and the undercutting of so much of that effort and that idealism of that time that's the right word that was undercut by the a by the war in vietnam and the dissension to grow out of that well i think that the protest movement was very good i think that there was some progress made out of the head start in the form of action programs but here's where malcolm again is so so valuable because he used to say that if you stick a knife in the back six inches you moved towards the fullness of life the more you realized what other people were enjoying you began to understand how wealthy this country was what its wealth was predicated on and how unjust it was so i think that yes there was some progress and there was a lot of awakening i'm one of the beneficiaries of that awakening but america today still has as its root problem yes there has been some progress but i don't think that there is any white person that would want to swap with a black person as far as this social standing in this environment unless you're in a totally world that is only what they call politically correct and then i'll anglo saxon male you haven't got a chance heterosexual you know because there's these groups of people that are this politically correct camp were each of the groups that have been you know not treated rightly by the society and so forth can make their case you know but you can't very hardly come in there and say well you can't really hardly come in and say well i'm white anglo saxon protestant male and you know make a case against the injustices that have been done against you you know well i mean it's what it was i'm making a joke and what is beholden to others for that which they need can be considered free and that is a condition that exists for a good number of the people of this of this planet if you think it is the question you know we're making some progress do you think or they're getting to be more of us that are in a position where we can be in our own right independently able to chart a course or are we are we going backward do you think well i i can't deny that there are numbers of people especially in this society s mall that they may be who are doing extremely well people of color and in entertainment and sports and in government and business who multimillionaire yeah and they're doing extremely well  but there's no at the same time i think that these social condition broadly of people of color in this country not the planet has worsened you know and so it's sort of if you do you think you know you go through the community and you see that there's more disease there's less education in the hospital the health care is being cut back the hospital the access to hospitals really is all but drying up the educational system is disgraceful and at the same time you have this corporate downsizing you know the job market is drying up and becoming more demanding technologically and the schools are not preparing youngsters to really meet that technical technological demand and so with these young people going to make a living now they're going to support themselves and their women and their children now you know and so another industry is emerging as a it's a strange phenomena there's no question in my mind that and it's not in even in my mind it's statistically supportable that the lion's share of the wealth of this planet is still in the hands of a handful of people oh is only a few of the people who own the capital assets and most of us think do not own as probably two percent five percent on virtually all the capital assets and unfortunately in a certain sense the technology becoming ever more responsible for production inlay in a ratio where with labor so those who own the assets are getting just overwhelmingly wealthy plutocratic least so in this world and they own that and in the end also there's a technological dis i just read  our grandchildren as he wrote in one nine hundred thirty and he said this technological unemployment and he said that the technological unemployment is going to catch up with us as the technology is able to displace labor in production and so the technology becoming ever more responsible for production it's owned by relatively few and most all of us only have a labor relationship to a productive system we're in a pretty we could be seen into you know in a double vise kind of situation as far as the mass of the people of this planet are concerned you know well the labor market is shifting away from the shores of this country and now being exploited globally that's where the labor force is being sought out  corporate america in my analysis is really moving away from domestic labor laws of the union and all that in the demands becoming extremely troublesome the high expens paying pensions to work rooms and all of the medical care and and so what they're doing is closing down a lot of their factories and they are reinvesting opus dropping him opening up in the caribbean and africa and  asia they're looking to do that and i would say that in the future unless something really drastic happens it's going to continue so that is going to leave a large mass of people in this country who don't have technological skills and who are really not going to be able to get any work because the jobs are not there the garment district in which you know up until forty years ago or thirty years ago was where a lot of poor people were yeah sure pushing those will costs around with the racks of clothing and whatnot well now clothes and no longer manufactured down through an eighth avenue in the thirty's right now they're being put together that loaned woven died and stitched together overseas and  here yeah where those people work and that's what they do what's right and what their future exit out for those people yeah so it's just serious situation yeah it is a serious situation and did you go back you pick it was a serious situation when you got started with the radio and television is a what and you were cutting your teeth in learning then as it were and when when did you get from the into into the television what happened to it that you brought you to television and was it a big transition from radio to television  yeah because the civil rights movement was the story of the day the top story as i said a lot of things that were going on and hollow attracted the downtown big time news to come up lot and so one day one of the reporters said have you ever thought about working in television and i said you're doing radio and i'm still in radio i don't i said you know i've been thinking about it and said well you know i think that the news director or i work at channel seven might be interested in the meeting all right so he said if you could come down you know if i can set up would you come i said show him so he did and to make a long story short i got hired a and i was hired for a  week as sort of an audition is an on camera and you hammer went out camera crews and for a day or two i covered the usual stuff fires and explosions and water main breaks is that at the end of the second day the assignment at it as gil leave me a home number because there's some things that's going on in newark and i don't know what it's going to develop into but give me a number just in case we need somebody  it wouldn't you know it turned out to be what they call the newark riots i'll be done and they called me and i went down there and covered it and i found that i had a little i had a lot more navigate billeted than some of the white reporters who were covering that because the in a city of newark was cordoned off by tanks and police cars and whatnot and it was really it was really something and so when i got i found all these reporters who were on one side of this perimeter you know and they were doing this stand up reports and the campbell would be then they'd say behind me in these tanks is the black community and they're now in flood those flames when i wanted to come back i just put my caught on and they had to let me through so it became the top story right good for you and that is what really won me the job all right that's good you did a little audition in the break and then you did it and did you did you take right to the more concise because the picture that you paid doesn't require verbiage you have the picture itself and radio you have to really be ornate to describe to the listener but in television the picture does it so i had to learn how to work well i don't know about that but i just read it's ok to use or in a staff of writers who write the scripts and you know that it was a special report was a trying to be weekend news weekend news just the whole reporting of the do as you were there i was the anchor i anchored the six o'clock and eleven o'clock on saturdays and so i didn't have any particular racial perspective or anything like that at all you know i was a straight up reporter and of reporter right person and your consciousness was still on a black program ok and so two four five seven nine eleven thirteen all came up with a black program gentle seven's version was like it is and i was the co host the original host was robert and to host the program i still did not control the program right but i was very attracted to like it is because the program was dealing with me you my people you people write yes so now you had a program former yeah right right right and then in one nine hundred seventy five i became the producer ok and i had really been drifting away from the news i had become very unhappy i didn't think i was really well suited to be a reporter who have a number of levels and i just found more excitement in doing like it is like it is very very you know there's a great deal of thought goes into that people are talking about issues rather than just news people are writing what you then said and spoken to the camera are you beginning to get a hold of them know the control or the content of producer but i would ask yeah no i want to do a documentary i think the first documentary i did for like it is was on  was under my jurisdiction and that to me who was worth all the tension i mean is you talking now these documentaries first documentary did or when i became the producer of like it is so then you had control of the program yes look at that williams i determine what was and what wasn't going to be on the air ok that's a big just and that was when you began to start writing copy or well i was always interested in writing but i was never i never did the writing for like it is except for these documentaries that i did know she was really badly badly traumatized and she was very angry and rightly so but she was very warm right to me and she allowed me to come up to her home good because she gave me some insights into her husband that have really set a high standard for me and she told me some things about how he conditioned and disciplined and self how little he slept how much he read how much he prayed how much he fasted how how driven he was you know and it made me realize how vacuous in comparison i was and it began to as a young man was he he was on the lancing and up in massachusetts and boston you know that kind of thing that exactly he had had he wasn't exactly hitting the books at that time you know he wasn't it wasn't until present and his older brother wilfred began to tell him about this little known all going to zation called the nation of this land and what it did was it gave malcolm another power down another focus another way of looking at himself and he began to understand why he had gotten himself in the miserable condition that he was in as a thief and a felon right and even though it may have been a bit exaggerated in simplistic it was it was a focus of the him yeah because the nation of islam said the reason that you are in the mud is because of the white man right right was internalized anger and he said yes and of course the more he read and thought over what you know white racism had done in this country and around the world you know he just used that it made him read and whatnot so he became quite a person so all of that is to say that i began to learn something about malcolm and also about his personal his personal traits you know he was he read the classics he read philosophy i mean he was not just fire  brimstone i mean he was an extremely profound man and he told me about yeah and so it really was very useful to me you know we did a program is just sutton one time he said that what a powerful intellect that man had he was a really powerful yes he was into the piece that you did if i may one of the first a documentary on him was it were you by then in a certain sense i don't want to say mentor or having a mentor or having a role model kind of feeling f max in an age when there was a great deal of dissension against it was yours a controversy it was it a pro malcolm view was it an objective view or what was it your feeling and what were you able to present or was there any conflict void between what you might have wanted to as we speak up until as we speak in trying to catch up with this man because he was so well read his grasp of what as they say on the street what's up again he knew what was up he knew what his country and around the world he was a world figure he had a talk with heads of state in africa i mean he in the caribbean he was a pretty swift guy yeah and so i've been trying to catch up with that and also he me to other people he led me today rogers and he led me to a whole lot of people so i began to grow with the world ready to accept the view of malcolm x as you had it in one thousand nine hundred eighty eight when you did a documentary or what is the dynamic there i'm getting at a certain sense of can we say the truth like it is or do we sometimes have to rein in order to survive for another day or you know stand the dynamic of just i don't understand what i'm malcolm did and said was met with met by a lot of justifiable because he was much more of a threat than i'll ever be and he was right so no they were not ready for malcolm but i my view of gone they were trying to head off what we're faced with today right and you think that you see they way that lead they were trying to stop what we have come to today now what do you say we've come to today they were trying to stop the globalization of which hair and bring the fabric hair and have them loomed and put together here and now the factories set up over there over people and that is what was on the agenda and that's what he was saying you know the ropes and in many others was going be where he was going to these african countries and say don't believe the the courtship that you are being subjected to by american businesses and diplomacy they are really out to suck your blood they're really out to exploit you they won't be out to put not only them but then my view of exploit a whole lot of other people as well that's true yeah and so you saw while all and in the caribbean and cuba in vietnam all these things all these eruptions in kenya all these eruptions were taking place and one by one these things over the years have been ways and his thinking and whatnot so i it's very tough to to compare the two i think that the two completely different people i think that charismatic at least in the modern remembrances of them you know it was very necessary and malcolm was charismatic at the time when he spoke to those people on the street you noticed there was speaking to fewer people than farrakhan does in so forth i mean i was trying to get a sense of how much of an outreach malcolm had at the time that he was actually talking to well you didn't he didn't have the kind of reach drive our economy has i mean the whole dynamic of communication was and what it is now the television had was burgeoning and all of those things so i mean he didn't have the apparatus and also he was met with such brutal opposition the minute he began to pick up speed there was a counter movement in this country that the government was sponsoring that really set upon malcolm and tried to pollute many of the people who are around him spread divisions and so this man was hounded morning noon and night i mean it was just i don't know how he was productive with all the hell that he was catching so i think it's completely different looking at louis farrakhan it's a different day and a different happy i would like to see both black and white youngsters more conscious about their history i'd like to see my colleagues in the industry more conversation about history i think that  journalists are a war fully on informed this shipped around the world to compass stories and they really don't know too much about that why is that the educational system how much you think you learn about africa in the really intellectually bright gifted people go into journalism and i would bring with them friends and why that should be because it's such an important thing and in a you know in it such as you would know having led your life it's so incredibly going out of his drivel ization or tabloid is asian or something the nature of the industry you know nature of the business it is impossible for you to be profound to do sustained investigatory work as a television reporter you don't have time you got to catch the six o'clock flight to be out in beirut by tomorrow morning you're going to and you're going to be in front of the palace to do a report that afternoon to david twenty second stand up and so w chance for you to go over there and immerse yourself you know and understand and do some reading you didn't learn about beirut in college you know so you get flying by the city of pass and what happens is the assignment at it it gives you some something to read on the plane and then they tell you that you're going to check into this hotel and there's some of your colleagues will be there and then there's a u s i s agency office they've got all the information  it's easy but it doesn't agitate really intellectual growth and understanding just at a time when we need it so much exactly we don't have visionary exactly did you do you think we want  visionary leadership in terms of i say not only in journalism but in the in the leadership elements of our society politically and otherwise that there are challenges of the times that they are just not measuring up with marshall mcluhan had this wonderful expression to use that the leadership drives fiercely driving into the future with their i fixed firmly on the rearview mirror that they don't have a vision of the future that is adequate to the to the challenges of the time agenda to enhance their kitten can and their fortunes but it's not an agenda that is designed to uplift and as jesse jackson said brought the boats that are stuck on the bottom up to the surface that's not what their agenda is as a matter of fact anybody who rises up here or are around the world that objects and tries to intervene they're not around anymore these people are eliminated there is a specific agenda that is that the state department has carried out it's open this is not opinion it's matter of fact if you read and this agenda is carried out by the f b i domestically and the central intelligence agency over the around the world that is to engage in policies that will enhance the business and profit interests of the united states american interests not the interests of the american people in my view american interests a way reflected by time warner your very large multinational corporation does include the corporations which in various kinds of ways we are ten generally me more and i thought you knew us and that did and so are we working for the you and says that are creating this you and i against and what i'm saying sure i do you and i a kid thinkin because we were born out of the same cauldron the sort of alternate media is something that was mandated out of those of peoples of which i spoke in the sixties like it is and gil noble was born in the same way out of that so we are alternate media i've been out in or a log time only low like it is remains the only large component of people of color one hour a week and this is not unique because all the stations at the same problem if not less because some of those black programs that were born in the sixty's have been eliminated and we both have a certain state  i guess for some programming that is something other than just entertaining although the entertaining as this plays intertainment particularly as you say you're interested in music jazz music and i got a friend ornette coleman he's a really you know i mean there's a rare for that music is very important but but that it's got something that has to do with helping to understand the human condition in an intellectually cohesive kind of way there's a role for that rather than just pablum and internet and thoughtless entertainment which seems to be so much on scape is a more something i don't know there should be more thoughtful programming or comprehensively relevant programming to which people can repair to get a sense of what's going on in a sense of responsibility for that among the people who make up the interest you know if you think i would think so but you know life is short yeah and you know you look at your life and you have to do the best with what you've been given and try to make as much impact as you can not all of us can be as impactful as others but we try is that we're not going to change the world but i think that the way to look at our lives at least the way i choose to look at my life is  it make a difference you know i have this wonderful opportunity that was made open to me by people who i don't even know by the way cannot by my own industry and i had done that i wouldn't be working or working if some nameless faceless people didn't ford didn't fight and bleed and die that's how it happened and so you know i'm very fortunate to have this opportunity and i get very angry and frustrated because i see a decline sociologically on a global basis but at the same time i think that the measure of life is did you try did you give it a shot and that's what i say to young people you're not going to turn the whole thing around you know you never know what's going to happen is a mack truck is a sniper you don't know what is going to be but with the time that you have a job disposal and the tools in the skills and the ability what are you going to do with that you know now and that's really been my wrist and i all history a great deal because nobody could have been more modest than i and i'm very lucky that i came along at the time that i did and i've been able to maneuver and get to have the stewardship of this program and i try to do it as best i can and you know let's let history be the judge you have had a productive  career and whether it made a difference and not time will tell and it continues yours and mine too and there's land there's time ahead and maybe we can be looking forward to actually things might be able to be opening up into a new way but i want to thank you really very much for best program in television on that subject area we on conversations invite you to tune in when coming back again next week that's it for now gone over once again thank you very much for coming as i enjoy it until next time oh he just has so much  i think i might do something a comprehensive kind of way that it might be just opening up on him i'm going to get i'm going to get after a long twilight i mean james joyce had this saying and i'm sure if i mention in the history is a nightmare from which were attempting to awaken i begin to think i've heard a little alarm clock somewhere that something's going on it's been a fight but it's beginning to be that i think things are beginning to turn it's just a sensing that i have a beginning to put something to it i mean just in the last few months i think that you know things are beginning to open up but that's just from an old i think the internet is very exciting by my discomfort is you really don't