American Black Journal

Detroit Public Television (DPTV) together with Michigan State University (MSU) have collaborated to catalog, preserve, and provide internet public access to the entire corpus of shows from the DPT television series, American Black Journal, that aired from 1968-2002.

Both DPTV and MSU shared in the two main goals of this project--digital preservation of the ABJ tapes and using the shows to create a significant, accessible multimedia archive of African-American history. The programs cover a broad spectrum of African American history:

1. Education and Families: Building Opportunity and Community
2. Leadership: Politics, Politicians, and Reform
3. Musical Roots: Jazz, Motown, Gospel, Hip Hop, & Techno
4. Literature and Language: The Richness and Diversity of Black Voices
5. Religion and Spiritual Life
6. Sports and Entertainment: Actors, Athletes and the Black Community
7. Africa and African-Americans
8. Urban Challenges: Development, Re-development, CommunityLife
9. Poverty, Progress, Rise of BlackBusinesses and Professionals
10. Motor City & Motown: Detroit in Regional and National Context

You can search the site by these themes as well as chronologically by decade; the programs themselves are a mere click or two away as you navigate this simple, handsomely designed site.