New Directions Volume 9 | Issue 1 Article 1 10-1-1981 WHMM-TV: Charting a New Course Harriet Jackson Scarupa Follow this and additional works at: http://dh.howard.edu/newdirections Recommended Citation Scarupa, Harriet Jackson (1981) "WHMM-TV: Charting a New Course," New Directions: Vol. 9: Iss. 1, Article 1. Available at: http://dh.howard.edu/newdirections/vol9/iss1/1 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Howard @ Howard University. It has been accepted for inclusion in New Directions by an authorized administrator of Digital Howard @ Howard University. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Charting A New Course 4 By Harriet Jackson Scarupa high school diploma ("General Education First Anniversary Development"). "Evening- Exchange" read the stylized let- Its exploration of the Black heritage "Evening Exchange" is the nightly public ters on the television screen. What follows comes through (or has come through) in affairs program of WHMM, the Howard are poignant images of Martin Luther King, such programs as "From Jumpstreet," University television station which will cel- Jr. peering through the bars of a Birming- "Afro-American Perspectives," "Africa File" ebrate its first anniversary this November ham jail, leading a civil rights march and "With Ossie and Ruby" as well as 17. WHMM, a member of the Public Broad- through Mississippi, receiving the Nobel through an array of specials, among them: casting Service (PBS), is the first non- Peace Prize, sharing a warm moment with "Divine Drumbeats: Katherine Dunham commercial public television station in the his family. These images are juxtaposed and Her People," a look at the pioneering continental United _States licensed to a with still others: a flickering candle placed dance r/ choreog raphe r/ anth ropolog ist; predominanrty Black college or university.