Radio: White Sound, Black Sound

A tumultuous rock-‘n’-roll song was thumping along on Atlanta’s most popular Negro-oriented radio station, WAOK, when it was interrupted by the “white sound” of a high-pitched oscillator. Silence for a moment, and then without any introduction came the unidentified voice of a Negro father and his children speaking:

Father: If you are an American, you supposed to stand up for your country.

Son: I’m not gonna be any damn martyr in Viet Nam. I know that much.

Father: Stand up for your country. You a Communist or somethin’?

Son: Oh, you simple man, you.

Daughter: What the hell’s a Communist, Daddy? You don’t even know!

Father: I know. I read the papers.

Son: Yeah, you read all those lies.

Shouts of Protest. The voices are not those of an actual family, but they come closer to the real thing than any actors reading from scripts. For the past month, in collaboration with Behavioral Psychologist Jerry Berlin, WAOK has brought together random groups of Atlanta Negroes and invited them to cut loose in undirected and virtually uncensored sessions of psychodrama. The participants, playing the most transparent kind of “roles,” throw themselves into their own characters, fight, plead, argue, boast, complain and despair about everything from the V.C. to V.D. Put on tape and aired in varying spots throughout the day under the program name Family Line, the vignettes give a sharp, thoroughly unprettified glimpse into American Negro life.

Family Line started out as a ratings gimmick, but the series is nevertheless as true to life as the FCC’s rules will allow. The wilder obscenities are excised, but not the wilder shouts of protest. “Best way I can sum it up is this,” says one bitter Negro youth, in a psychodrama about his failure to get a job: “If you’re Protestant and white, you’re happy and free; if you’re black, you stay back just like me. I get so sick and tired of this damned line about equal opportunity. If you’ve got a college education and all A’s and you’ve traveled and you’ve had the home exposure Whitey has, then of course you have equal opportunity. But have I had that?” Replies the “father”: “Ever stop to think you just weren’t qualified for that job? That you weren’t qualified because you were out marchin’ with signs when you should have been in the classroom?”

Restraint & Rejection. One irony of the program is that it brings out not only the fight against Whitey but the fight between the different generations of Negroes. Again and again, middle-aged and older Negroes sound the Uncle Tom-toms of caution and restraint (mother to S.N.C.C.-worker son: “You’re endangering your daddy’s job”), while the kids reject the older generation in toto (“We got to do it on our own; we can’t take your word for it”).

“This is not a civil rights series,” insists WAOK’s white, Ohio-born programming manager, Zenas Sears. “The idea is to bring up problems of youth versus maturity or versus the Establishment. The immediate, practical effect is to make the listener think.”