and their agencies feared offending white consumers who were resisting the movement toward integration. Their answer was to keep blacks off national television as much as possible. "At one major agency," Variety noted, "the word has gone out: 'No Negro performers allowed.'"
After ten years of popularly accepted television, it was legitimate to wonder where by the late 1950s black Americans had gone. In a nation where more than ten percent of the population was African American, TV was nowhere near ten percent black. Several citizens openly expressed their bewilderment at this situation. Natalie Fuller Shean, a woman from New York City who described herself as "nobody, just a housewife," wondered in 1956 if there existed in television "a conscious ban against the use of Negro actors.... I see very few on TV, and I often see none at all being intelligently used on shows in situations where they logically belong."
Several months later Thurgood Marshall, then the special counsel for the NAACP, protested conditions in a letter to Variety. He wrote about "the spotty use of Negro actors and actresses on the legitimate stage as well as in television and films save in 'token' jobs or in stereotyped roles." As late as 1959, a reader of TV Guide questioned in that journal: "Why can't some of the detective and comedy series work Negroes into their scripts, making them an ordinary part of television life as they are an ordinary part of everyday life?"
The prejudice-free enterprise that Ebony magazine foresaw for TV in 1950 was nonexistent by 1957. Fewer and fewer blacks were finding significant employment in the television industry. The collapse of The Nat King Cole Show served only to reaffirm what many felt to be true: television was no place for African-American talents to seek success.
Nevertheless, in the next stage of the history of blacks in TV substantial changes would be effected. Not because of any great liberal change of heart at the networks, but as an outgrowth of the dynamics of the civil rights movement the posture of blacks in television would be substantially realigned and improved. In the late 1950s and throughout the next decade all social life in the United States would be touched by TV and its depiction of the African American minority. In many ways, too, a growing fairness in that video image became a barometer of the nation's progress toward realizing its professed democratic ideals.