Part Three: 3.25.09 – 3.31.09
Teaching was my primary source of income so I continued to do that at the university and pursue my masters at the same time. Teaching students historical and contemporary black political thought and challenging them to learn it was something I loved doing. I worked as a consultant on a number of federally funded programs as well. And Livin’ Black was now aired weekly.

Needless to say, I didn't have much time for anything else, so of course I got married in June of 1972 at the ripe old age of 24. My wife, Natalie Jane Bruce of Indianapolis graduated from St. Mary's of the Woods in Terre Haute, Indiana and was teaching music in grade school. At 22 she was even younger than me.

Natalie and I met as undergraduates when her choir traveled to Cincinnati one college weekend. We dated a little but had not seen or talked with one another for a few years. Natalie’s father, Dr. Reginald Bruce, was one of the most successful doctors in Indianapolis. He and Natalie’s stepfather, Charles DeBow, were Tuskegee airmen. On my way home from covering the First National Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana, for Livin’ Black I stopped in Indianapolis and called Dr. Bruce and asked for Natalie’s number. Four months later, June 1972, Natalie and I were married and living in Dayton.


As Livin’ Black continued to grow I was even more attracted to television and wanted to leave the university and pursue a full-time career in television. In 1972 the FCC began to require that television stations hire more minorities. That created a number of opportunities for me as an on-air news personality at television stations in Dayton, Cincinnati, Columbus and Indianapolis; but that t wasn't what I wanted to do, much to the surprise of those who wanted to hire me to fill their minority quotas. “You should do this,” a news director said, “and in a couple of years the network will move you into a major market where you'll start making a lot of money.”

I was much more interested in writing, producing and creating content for television instead. “Oh,” the general manager of the station would say, “we don’t have any of those jobs.” So I continued teaching, consulting and working on Livin’ Black.
A year later, however, Dayton was selected as one of the five pilot cities in the federally funded Model Cities Program. And the city was one of the first in the country to have an Ombudsman’s Office, a joint center for citizens’ complaints modeled after the Ombudsman Office in Sweden founded in 1809. The first commercial I ever created was in fact a public service announcement for them.

Dayton was also home to the very first rape crisis center in the country and the first federally funded drug rehab program where addicts weaned themselves off heroin using methadone as a substitute. And the Dayton Police Academy was the first in the country to be called a Criminal Justice Center instead, shifting the mindset from teaching recruits basic police work to having them better understand their role in relation to the community. Remember, there were many riots in our urban centers during the late ‘60s and a lot of unrest generally, so a great deal of federal money was spent to educate, inform and sensitize police personnel. I was involved in some way with all those programs.

But racism is institutionalized and very powerful and trying to change something that was so ingrained in society was at best difficult. Whenever policemen had sniper practice at the Criminal Justice Center their favorite target was a silhouette of an African American male with Afro. In fact, it was the favorite target nationwide, so much so that the manufacturer couldn't keep up with the demand.

It was during this time that a colleague of mine and I submitted a proposal to the federal government to produce documentary films. The day they notified us that our application had been approved was an exciting one. I was finally going to be able to leave teaching and concentrate full-time on film making. However, except for the news film that we would occasionally shoot for some of the interview segments of Livin’ Black I didn't know anything about film or film editing. But I was determined to learn. NEXT: Trying to find a documentary cameraman…