rol Wall Street, the men who run Madison Avenue." And they, in his view, "are worried about economics." In a statement worthy of Robeson, he wrote that "racial prejudice is more finance than romance."
Bitter, disappointed, and frustrated by his experience, Nat King Cole refused to blame his cancellation on Southern prejudice, for as he noted, "After all, Madison Avenue is in the North." In absolving the South, he alleged that "I think sometimes the South is used as a football to take some of the stain off us in the North." In a conclusion with which Robeson would have concurred, he called upon all African Americans to organize and assert their financial strength to offset "the big men." According to him, "We need to show the strength of the Negro market." He continued:
Negroes above all, must become financially independent. All things, as intelligent Negroes know, boil down to money. We must, before it is too late, solidify our positions. We must sup¬port organizations like the Urban League and the NAACP.... They are all working for racial betterment. Negroes, too, must invest more, not only in entertainment enterprises, but in all businesses. We should put our money to work because money is what the people working against us respect.
Emerging through the frustration in Cole's argument was an insightful description of the reluctance of the advertising industry to sell his series. Madison Avenue did not think the show would survive. Even with a new format and improved summer ratings, agency interest in selling the program to an advertiser was not kindled. At the base of this lack of enthusiasm was the sensitivity of Madison Avenue to the so-called Southern Market.
Ironically, five months before the Nat King Cole Show premiered, Variety reported that pressure from advertisers with southern markets was "setting back by many years the advancement made in television toward providing equal job opportunities regardless of race, creed, or color." With the civil rights movement swelling in the South, national advertisers 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 pos