Great American Negroes

In a surprising and significant departure from its normal fare, radio station WBZ has begun broadcasting a Sunday-evening series of half-hour biographical dramas concerning notable American Negroes. Entitled "The Great Ones," and produced in cooperation with the University of Chicago's Department of History, the series focuses on individuals who have had important influence on America and the world.

On the basis of the first two programs, the project is eminently worthwhile. Its originators decided to avoid a straight documentary approach in favor of presenting their material as dramas that emphasize a couple of critical moments or events in the subjects' lives. In this way they were perhaps following the lead of the fine television series based on John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage. The scripts will win no literary prizes, but they do incorporate a good deal of historically accurate information and also manage to convey an idea of their characters' personalities.

The opening program dealt with Dr. Charles R. Drew, holder of three degrees in medicine, who developed the blood-bank techniques. Following his success in heading the 1940 "Blood for Britain" project, Drew was picked for a similar job by the American Red Cross because it wanted "the best man, not the best white man," only to discover that, by a supreme irony, the blood would have to be racially segregated. The program also pointed up Drew's less public but equally important work as a superlative teacher of surgery at Howard University.

The second instalment portrayed Harriet Tubman, the tiny but herculean conductor of the Underground Railroad, who never lost a passenger. Included was her gunboat raid into Confederate territory, making her, according to an official dispatch, "the only woman in American military history ever to plan and conduct an armed expedition against enemy forces."

This Sunday's subject will be mathematician-astronomer-inventor Benjamin Banneker, who also worked on the layout of our nation's capital and proposed the establishment of a Department of Peace under a Secretary of Peace (we had a Secretary of War until 1947).

Some of the later episodes will center on scientist George Washington Carver, poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, musician W.C. Handy, and Frederick Douglass, greatest of all abolitionists.

Among the accomplished Negro players in the series are Booker T. Bradshaw '62 (already a highly gifted actor as a Harvard undergraduate), Roscoe Lee Browne, Gloria Foster, Ossie Davis, and Brock Peters. Bradshaw will have the main role in the November 19 drama about Charles Spaulding.

The programs are cheapened by the use of a throbbing electronic organ for background music, reminiscent of the old radio soap operas--for those of you who remember that vanished genre. Consultant--for the series, which will continue until Christmas, is Harvard Ph.D. John Hope Franklin--the leading historian of the Negro, the leading Negro historian, and currently chairman of Chicago's history department.