Outspoken Broadcast

Dear Fellow Americans. . . . We ask you to spend 30 minutes with us facing quietly and without passion or prejudice a danger which threatens all of us--a danger so great that if it is not met and conquered now, even though we win this war, we shall be defeated in victory. . . . This danger is race hatred.

With this introduction, CBS began one of the most eloquent and outspoken programs in radio history (An Open Letter to the American People). With no bombast and with a great deal of level, direct statement, CBS told the story of Detroit's recent race riot (TIME, June 28) and told it with the special impact possible in radio. The fact that a major U.S. network had the courage and took the time to emphasize a crisis in race relations was big radio news.

Sunday, June 20th, was hot. Detroit, sprawling across the flat Michigan prairie, baked in the nearly vertical sun. In the workers' camps on the fringe of the city, trailers and tents held the heat close and unbreathable. In the crowded flats and overflowing houses along Tireman and Epworth Boulevard in the Negro district, the heat pressed down like the sweaty hand of John Henry.

From there, with a full cast of white and Negro actors, CBS went on to describe the riot dramatically, honestly. It told of the initial fight on the Belle Isle Bridge ("Listen, you get out of that car and I'll show you, you black. . . ."), the angry rumors and how they grew ("That black boy's quite a baby with his fists. . . ." "A baby thrown off the Belle Isle Bridge"), the bloodshed ("1,800 arrested . . . 600 injured ... 35 dead . . . the majority Negroes. . . ."). Then the program moved on to the causes of the riot:

In three years Detroit has imported 500,000 Negroes and whites, mostly from the South. . . . As many people as live in New Orleans or the State of Arizona. . . . But Detroit doesn't have houses for a half-million extra people . . . enough streetcars and blisses to move the State of Arizona back and forth from work. . . .

There were other causes, and the script touched on some of them (Ku Kluxers and similar agitators) as well as on citizens who had the guts to stand against the mob. The script wound up with quotes from the Berlin and Tokyo radio propaganda playing up the riots (". . . the problem of labor and capital cannot be solved by the present rulers of the U.S.A. . . . hundreds of Negroes were sacrificed on the altar of the American white superiority complex. . . .").

The broadcast was carried by 96 CBS affiliated stations (some 25 in the South and Southwest). None of them was obliged to (the script was read to them over a closed wire before the broadcast). The program's author-producer-director, William N. Robson (TIME, March 8), thinks that the ether has been broken and that CBS can now go ahead to air other topical problems (inflation, black markets, etc.). To lend the race program authority, CBS had gotten Wendell Willkie to close it. The fact that his warm plea for tolerance was definitely an anticlimax was perhaps the best indication of the program's merit.

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