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Hosted by Jim Lowry and Bed Stuy resident and actress
Roxie Roker (mother of the singer Lenny Kravitz and
most famous for her later role as Helen Willis on the
1970s television sitcom “The Jeffersons”), each episode,
clips of which you can find on YouTube, combined onthe
street reporting with interviews, performances and
community forums that were directly pitched to local
issues, all presented with a casual intimacy.
“Inside Bedford-Stuyvesant” aired in both the 1 a.m. and
7 a.m. time slots, which made the show difficult to see.
“But we still had an audience,” Hobson says. “We got a
lot of letters. People knew about us.” And its reputation
has only grown in the years since its arrival. The program
was among a number of shows produced explicitly for
an African-American audience around that same time.
Hobson would go on to contribute to the first two seasons
of the more well-known “Black Journal,” which premiered
on WNET in June 1968 and had a higher budget (a reported
$500,000 per season as opposed to the $45,000 given to
“Bed-Stuy”) and a national focus. He was also the original
creative force behind the long-running “Like It Is,” a
morning current affairs program hosted by Gil Noble.
Premiering the same year were the variety series “Soul!”
and the Boston-based “Say Brother.”
Hobson didn’t originally have anything to do with “Inside
Bedford-Stuyvesant.” The origins of the show reside with
the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation. Launched
in 1967 by Robert F. Kennedy in collaboration with local
activists, the BSRC was the country’s first community
development corporation, and one of its first projects
was a television program to promote the neighborhood
(co-host Jim Lowry was a BSRC staffer). But the group’s
initial choice to produce the show, a local children’s
book author and friend of Hobson’s named Leslie Lacey,
quickly tried to back out. “I can’t work with these white
people!” Lacey told Hobson over the phone, referring to
the Kennedy staffers who were involved in the production.
“I went to a meeting with the group, and it was pretty
Hobson’s many other projects
include “Jumpstreet,” a 1980
series about the evolution of
black American music for PBS.
Photo by Susan de Vries.
clear that I was the only person there who knew anything
about Brooklyn,” Hobson says.
Following his graduation from Brooklyn College in
1960, and after spending time in the United States
Army, Hobson began working at the radio station
WBAI, first as a host and later as a producer. But when
he moved to television production, he had to learn on
the job. “There was very little money,” he remembers.
“And because of that, things could happen naturally.”
This led to an improvisational, haphazard mode of
working, Hobson says. If a guest didn’t show up for a
shoot, they would take the cameras to the nearest park
and talk to whoever was around; when it rained, there
was no time for delays and the hosts would have to use
umbrellas while filming their segments. The crew were
able to get interviews with well-known figures such as
Harry Belafonte and New York Mets left fielder Cleon
Jones, but just as important were episodes that focused
on welfare mothers who needed extra support, young
draft dodgers, Pratt professors and black police officers.
One of Hobson’s favorite pieces was an interview with
an old retiree known around the neighborhood for his
love of music who, unbeknownst to the crew, turned out
to be the composer Eubie Blake, who cowrote “Shuffle
Along,” one of the first Broadway musicals to be written
and directed by African-Americans.
Hobson would later leave Brooklyn, and “Inside Bedford-
Stuyvesant” is merely a blip in his career—he later won
Emmy Awards, produced projects for both PBS and BBC,
lectured at universities across the world and was a Fulbright
Scholar. When he moved back to Boerum Hill around
1995, he found much of what he remembered had changed.
Which makes him thankful that the show existed at all, and
that in the years since its original run it has developed an
audience that recognize its importance.
“There was no other black community in the country
that had this kind of documentation,” he says. “It was a
remarkable thing.”