Angela Davis vs. Julia: Television's Dichotomous New Black Woman, 1968-1970

In the late 1960s, television representations of black women presented a cacophony of images. Broadcast news coverage of black revolutionaries such as Angela Davis, for example, aired during a time when positive portrayals of less threatening black women, such as  Diahann Carroll in the popular sitcom Julia, were gaining a national audience. Media fixation on Davis in particular made her the archetype of radical black feminism, whereas Diahann Carroll represented a “new” version of black motherhood that deviated from the mammy stereotype and broke down social and cultural barriers. This paper examines television’s role in establishing a gendered activist binary: that is, presenting respectable African American women associated with the civil rights movement and unruly black radical women who advocated for black power. Despite television’s efforts to portray Davis and Carroll as markedly different, hate mail written to both reflect similar anti-black and anti-feminist sentiments. Julia appeared to muddle the social mores that typically upheld racial hierarchies between black and white women, whereas Davis had the potential to destabilize the university and country as a whole by indoctrinating students during her tenure at UCLA. Considering that black women were perceived to occupy a certain marginal space, the inclusion of Davis and Carroll on television as smarter and prettier than their white counterparts made both women seem out of “place” to many viewers. Regardless of whether television networks intended to “inform” or “entertain,” the political climate of the time imbued these representations with certain assumptions about black feminism.