FROM MY 2001 DISSERTATION:

….William Greaves, who was the sole host of the show [Black Journal] by 1970, left that year to focus on his film company. Black Journal did a nationwide search for a new producer/host. It focused on a colleague of Greaves, a Detroit civil rights activist named Tony Brown. A native of Charleston, West Virginia, Brown earned a bachelor· s degree in sociology and psychology and a master’s degree in psychiatric social work at Wayne State University in Detroit. As a local civil rights activist, Brown had featured Martin Luther King in one of his marches. He began his journalistic career writing for The Detroit Courier, a Black weekly newspaper. He hosted a local public-affairs show for WTVS, a public television station. The show, sponsored by the Detroit Junior League, was called C.P.T. (C.P.T. stood for “Colored People’s Time,” a humorous, intra-racial term among many Blacks used to chide chronic Black lateness.) It was the first Black-oriented show on the station. Brown also remained involved in print journalism, publishing The Detroit Sun, a Black magazine.

In 1970, according to Brown, Greaves held a conference of Black public-affairs program producers in Wisconsin. Out of that meeting came the National Association of Black Media Producers, of which Brown, the founding dean of the Howard University School of Communications, was elected president. Brown says as president, he began challenging the licenses to broadcast stations that practiced racial exclusion in 1970, the year that he was appointed as Black Journal host. With major white commercial corporate sponsorship. Brown moved the show to commercial syndication in 1977. where it was renamed Tony Brown’s Journal. Brown’s own Tony Brown Productions produced it, and continues to do so today [in 2001]. Tony Brown’s Journal aired in commercial markets until 1981, when it returned to public television, where the show, hosted, produced and owned by Brown, airs in 2001.

The half-hour program has had several formats and identities in its long history. During the 1970s, dashikis turned into business suits. In the 1980s, the show had a studio audience. In the 1990s — the decade Brown. a longtime neo-conservative, publicly declared himself to be a member of the Republican Party—it adopted a one-on-one talk format. Favorite topics have included Black history and culture, Black economic empowerment in the 1980s and early 1990s and, in the late 1990s, Black empowerment through computers and non-racialized subjects such as the Y2K computer compliance crisis. and alternative medicine. Over the years. major white corporations. including Texaco and Pepsi Cola, have sponsored the program. There have been no studies yet conducted on Brown, his show or his audience. Tony Brown’s Journal has produced–and still updates in 2000–documentaries on subjects such as slavery as well as the life and death of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. During the mid- to the late-l990s. Brown hosted a talk show on New York radio station 1190 WLIB-AM. Brown remains a community activist with a public involvement in building economic opportunities for Blacks.

He is the only known Black public affairs show television host on commercial or public television to both produce and own his own program. In a 1990 article profiling Brown, Greaves said Tony Brown’s Journal has survived when other Black public affairs shows didn’t because the producers of those shows …would not fight for their survival… If you are a producer and you fight for your show, you are seen as a troublemaker in the mainstream media, thus endangering any future you might have had at the networks.”

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I learned a lot about Brown from Roberto Santiago’s “The Outspoken Tony Brown,” published in Emerge magazine, February 1990, pp. 38, and from WABC-TV’s Like It Is, Show No. 762, “The Long-Distance Runners,” March 11, 1990. Like It Is producer-host Gil Noble did a program on Black public-affairs shows. His guests were Brown, Greaves, Gustav Heningburg, the longtime host of WNBC-TV’ s Positively Black and Bill McCreary, executive producer and host of WNEW-TV’s (now WNYW’s) The McCreary Report. In 2026, a new (academic) book about Positively Black was published.