INSIDE BED STUY
Documentarian Charles Hobson remembers a unique TV show that countered
negative stereotypes about black urban life in the late 1960s.
by CRAIG HUBERT
When Charles Hobson was growing up, the stretch of
Hancock Street between Nostrand and Marcy Avenue
he called home felt like a close-knit, homey place. Born
in 1936, the former television producer and documentarian
recalls a block that had, along with his parents,
immigrants from the West Indies and Jamaica, people
from Barbados, a few other Jamaicans, plus his two white
neighbors: On one side was a dentist and wife; on the
other an Irish guy named Corcoran who looked like “he
hadn’t had a haircut in 20 years.”
The area’s numerous churches were a point of connection.
Hobson would regularly walk with his mother to
the Concord Baptist Church on the corner of Marcy
Avenue and Madison Street, a few blocks away, and he
remembers Reverend Milton A. Galamison, a local pastor
at the nearby Siloam Presbyterian Church, who was
revered among his neighbors for his persistent activism.
There were jazz clubs, and the sports teams at the historic
Boys High School, where Hobson attended and ran track.
“It felt more residential back then,” Hobson says. “It was
an interesting community.”
It was this atmosphere that Hobson wanted to bring
to screen with “Inside Bedford-Stuyvesant,” which
premiered in April, 1968. The public affairs television
program, which aired for only two years on Channel 5
(then WNEW before it was purchased by Rupert Murdoch
in 1985), aimed to capture a realistic portrait of
the neighborhood that countered negative stereotypes
in the wake of local riots in 1964 after a 15-year-old
African-American boy was shot and killed by a white
police officer in Manhattan.
“We were trying to reach black folks,” Hobson says.
“There was nothing else.”
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‘Living with the El’ shows children in the 1940s in Bed Stuy. Photo by Joe Schwartz via Joe Schwartz Photo Archive at www.joeschwartzphoto.com.
/www.joeschwartzphoto.com