By: Vincent L. Hall
“I could’ve been singing ‘Nearer my God to thee’ and it wouldn’t have changed
anything.
-Nat King Cole
Edward Vincent Sullivan was major in the emergence of television as a medium of American entertainment. But to Black folks, The Ed Sullivan Show was just cause to be front and center every Sunday night for 24 years.
Not only was it an opportunity to see someone who looked like your “Black self,” but it was the most effective form of racial immersion this nation has ever witnessed.
It was almost surreal to watch the latest Netflix special, “Sunday’s Best: The Untold Story of Ed Sullivan.”
My memories of being a Black boy in the turbulent 1960s were revived.
As we belly up to the anniversary bar for the 60th time to celebrate the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1964, Ed’s show serves as a resolute reminder of how God works in mysterious ways to free us from America’s racism from slavery to Jim Crow.
There are appearances in this documentary that cover the best of music and entertainment. If you didn’t know better, and they changed the title, you could be persuaded to believe that it was the Motown Records story.
Ed Sullivan, who himself was a second-generation Jewish American, had a heart for marginalized people because he suffered the same.
According to a 1952 article in Colliers Magazine, “Sullivan was quoted as saying: ‘In the conduct of my show, I’ve never asked a performer his religion, his race, or his politics. Performers are engaged based on their abilities. I believe that this is another quality of our show that has helped win it a wide and loyal audience.”
If you pull at the threads of history, you will find that this sentiment rhymes with King’s mantra and public mainstay. “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin 21 but by the content of their character.”
All Ed wanted to do was present the best, and he didn’t care whether “the best” at any given moment was found in a longhaired group called The Beatles or the freshly conked coiffure of James Brown.
And in the words of Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” That one thing has made all the difference.” Ed Sullivan did as much for Black music, culture, and humanity weekly as any entertainer’s resistance to racism could ever do. He fed Southern segregationists enough blackness that some either came to like it or, at the very least, tolerated it.
Toward the documentary’s end, Nat King Cole testified to the hatred he and others faced. There was an organized plot to attack him mid-performance in Birmingham on April 10, 1956.
Initially, 100 Whites planned to assault Cole. There were only six who showed up, but they were locked and loaded with guns.
Right before the attack, a man who was allegedly drunk shouted “Negro go home” and soon after Nat Cole was assaulted in front of 4,000 concertgoers. A reporter asked him if it was because the men hated rock ‘n’ roll music.
Cole, transparently replied that the same thing would have happened were he singing “Nearer My God to Thee.”
Sunday’s Best is a fantastic piece of history that you need to see. After all, you may have never seen The Supremes, The Jackson Five, or so many other artists, if it were not for Ed Sullivan.
I love Kirk Franklin, but even he owes a debt to the original airing of Sunday’s Best!
A long-time Texas Metro News columnist, Dallas native Vincent L. Hall is an author, writer, award-winning writer, and a lifelong Drapetomaniac.
