QUESTION: Are there shows other than Amos 'N Andy, There's A New World A Coming, Destination Freedom, Brunswick Brevities, The Story of Ruby Valentine, The Johnson Family, or Tales From Harlem that reflect the actual or the perception of African American life?

ANSWER: I'd strongly recommend Freedom's People, a thirteen-week series done by NBC in 1941-42 in cooperation with the Federal Radio Education Committee. This was a documentary with each week's program tracing a different element of African-American life, and many prominent personalities in pre-war-era black America are featured, ranging from A. Phillip Randolph to Paul Robeson to Fats Waller.

Each week's program was built around the theme "Contributions To...." and subjects covered included Education, Military Service, Industry, the Arts, Science, and the Theatre. After this program's network run, transcriptions of the series were distributed by the FREC to schools for classroom use, and all of the episodes exist at the Library of Congress. Some of the episodes are in limited OTR circulation, although they're not easy to find -- I'm hoping to soon have access to several of them.

Another program worth looking for is an episode of the 1938-1939 CBS educational series: Americans All, Immigrants All. This was a 26-week series which spotlighted a different ethnic group each week and traced its accomplishments and history in the United States. The Dec 18, 1938 episode discussed "The Negro In The United States." This was another series distributed in transcription form for classroom use, under the auspices of the Department of the Interior.

There was also a 1933 CBS serial called John Henry -- Black River Giant. This was a program based on the works of white folklorist Roark Bradford (best known for "Green Pastures). It was adapted for radio by the Negro Puerto Rican actor Juano Hernandez, who also played the lead.

Stage actress Georgia Burke was his leading lady, supported by "an All Negro Cast" drawn from the Lafayette Players of Harlem.

The format of the program was very unusual -- it was broadcast weekly, in two discontinuous fifteen-minute segments. The first fifteen minutes would establish the plot action for the week -- and then the program would go off the air for half an hour, making way for an unrelated program. Then after that program, John Henry returned for a second fifteen minutes, which would be devoted to characterization and atmosphere -- with special note given to "authentic voodoo lore," according to reviews of the day.

Critics loved this program, but ordinary listeners seem to have been baffled by its "arty," non-linear structure, and it ran for eight months without attracting a sponsor. No scripts or recordings have surfaced.

Jack L. Cooper was a very important figure in Black radio -- he began The All Colored Hour (later The All Negro Hour ) over WSBC in 1929. WSBC was a small Chicago station that sold time in blocks to a wide variety of ethnic groups, and Cooper built up a thriving business buying blocks of time and then reselling them to individual South Side sponsors.

Cooper himself produced the programs for these sponsors, and they covered a wide range of topics -- in addition to The All Colored Hour, which was a variety show, he did a very close imitation of Amos 'n' Andy which was called Luke 'n' Timber (doing all the voices himself), and also worked as a news and feature reporter, a disk jockey, and a comedy ventriloquist.

By the end of the 1940s, Cooper was taking out full-page ads in Variety promoting himself as "The Highest Paid Negro in Radio," and he remained active into the early 1960s. A few recordings exist of his later work, but none have ever surfaced of his prime years in the 1930s.