Boy, was I ever wrong about Ed Sullivan. Coming of age at the end of the 23-year run of CBS’ weekly The Ed Sullivan Show, which seemed hopelessly old-fashioned and stale, I totally missed the fact that, two decades earlier, Sullivan had been alone in presenting African-American artists to national television audiences. And that African-Americans thought it was a very big deal.
The Ed Sullivan Show began in 1948, before many Americans owned a TV, and Sullivan helped invent the earliest evolutionary stage of television content. Sullivan himself picked every performer on The Ed Sullivan Show – over 10,000 of them over the show’s 23 year run. He harvested Vaudeville and nightclub performers who had not prospered in the Radio Era, including Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, and the Ink Spots. Virtually every major African-American act got an early showcase on Sullivan’s show – Nat King Cole, Harry Belafonte, Mahalia Jackson, Diahann Carroll, James Brown, Ray Charles, the Supremes, Stevie Wonder, The Temptations, and the Jackson 5. By the time I was occasionally tuning in to the end of Sullivan’s run, there didn’t seem like anything was risky about Louis Armstrong and Pearl Bailey – but, then again, they had been appearing on TV for twenty years because of Ed Sullivan.
This was not the norm for programming by the three corporate television networks (yes, kids, there were only three TV channels for many years). Sunday Best: The Untold Story of the Ed Sullivan Show lets White Americans learn that, on Sunday nights, African-Americans rushed to their TVs – it was their only chance to see performing artists that looked like them. Sunday Best presents the testimony from Berry Gordy, Oprah Winfrey, Harry Belafonte and Smokey Robinson.
Sullivan did all this with intentionality. His own sense of justice required him to showcase the talents of the best artists regardless of race. And he despised Jim Crow and racial segregation. Director Sacha Jenkins has accessed Sullivan’s own personal writings, as well as contemporaneous recordings, so we hear Sullivan’s own words. Sullivan modeled his fearlessness and principles from his father, who knew about earlier anti-Irish discrimination.
Two career incarnations earlier, Sullivan had been a NYC sports columnist. When NYU chickened out and benched their one Black football player so they play the University of Georgia, Sullivan was so outraged that his column called for NYU to drop football altogether in shame.
Personally, he was such a close friend of Bill Robinson that Sullivan helped organize (and probably pay for) Robinson’s funeral.
Everyone today (hopefully) remembers the Jim Crow era for the separate restrooms and drinking fountains, the segregated schools and accommodations, the back-of-the-bus shit and the terror of the KKK. But there was also prevalent a lot of craziness about people of different races touching each other at all (based, I’m sure, on fear of Black sexuality). In the South, black people were supposed to give change for retail sales without touching white hands, and whites would consider a swimming pool defiled if a black person dipped their feet in it. If a white person, like Ed Sullivan, even shook a Black person’s hand on TV – let alone put his arm on their shoulders – it was a Big Deal.
Imagine if John Legend introduced Taylor Swift at the Grammys and gave her a chaste buss on the cheek – in 1955, that would have made heads explode in a third of the nation.
Network executives were legitimately concerned about Southern Whites boycotting their sponsors. White supremacy activist Asa Carter and Georgia Governor Herman Talmadge both organized actual boycotts. But Ed Sullivan, fearless, just didn’t care.
This is big news to those of us who remember Sullivan’s anti-telegenic stone face and the acts with spinning plates and hoop-jumping dogs. The CBS network censors were notorious for not letting the camera show Elvis’ gyrating hips and for trying to get the Stones to change the lyrics of Let’s Spend the Night Together to Let’s Spend Some Time Together. But Elvis was only censored from waist down in his THIRD appearance on the Sullivan Show.
There are lots of gems in Sunday Best, including Sammy Davis Jr and Flip Wilson trying to outdo each others’ Ed Sullivan impression while standing next to Ed Sullivan.
A 1958 Jackie Wilson performance on the Sullivan Show is gloriously entertaining by today’s standards. But, knowing what we learn in Sunday Best, it’s absolutely thrilling. In 1958, mainstream audiences would never have seen anything like Jackie’s rendition of Lonely Teardrops, effortlessly sliding into falsetto and nonchalantly dropping a jazz split. And all with a confident, cool swagger and without a hint of racial deference.
White Baby Boomers like me should watch Sunday Best to discover how invested Ed Sullivan was in civil rights before it became mainstream on national TV. Younger people, not just kids and Gen Xers, but also Millennials, should watch it to appreciate the ridiculous limits to which the American mainstream was cowed by Southern White racism. And all of should appreciate how The Ed Sullivan Show didn’t just reflect the cultural taste of America – it helped drive it.
Sunday Best: The Untold Story of Ed Sullivan is streaming on Netflix.
