Justin Kaplan- Talk to Me
The film "Talk to Me" was made during a time when Africa Americans were trying to achieve equality. Petey is the main character in the film and he is very outspoken and is not afraid to voice his opinion when necessary. Petey gets the opportunity to be on the Tonight Show but is not happy by it because he wants to be taken seriously and he thinks that this show is just for entertainment. I think that Petey did the right thing in staying true to himself and not getting up there and just telling jokes and entertaining the crowd. He wanted to stand up for his beliefs and for the black community as a whole. Newman mentions that "black listeners had more confidence in disc jockeys they could tell were black" (124). Petey believed this and he got up there and told his audience exactly how he felt even if it was controversial. Petey's audience was mainly white and even though sometimes his opinion seemed very biased, it never was and he only told the facts. I definitely agree that the emergence of black radio had many positive effects for the black culture. As Kathy Newman writes in “The Forgotten Fifteen Million: Black Radio, the ‘Negro Market’, and the Civil Rights Movement�, “By 1957, ...there were more than six hundred radio stations targeting 30-100 percent of their programming to African Americans in cities all over the country and national advertisers were beginning to take black consumers more seriously- at least the ones they could reach via the airwaves.� (115-116). This just shows how important the emergence of blacks in the media was to their way of evolving out of this terribly segregated and racist time period. The evolution of Petey from convict to radio star effects all the people around him and had an extremely positive effect on the African American society. With the increasing involvement of the black community in the media, this helped to lay the foundation for the African American culture to become increasingly involved in the everyday aspects of life with the whites and other races.