The 1980s Black Culture Boom

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00][music] There were so many legendary black celebrities in the 1980s that it's kind of hard to pick someone to start with.

[00:00:11]In the sports world, stars like Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Magic Johnson, and Michael Jordan were scoring and earning more than athletes ever before. They were recognizable on and off the court.

[00:00:21]>> Over and out.

[00:00:23]>> Wait a minute. I know you. You're Kareem Abdul Jabbar.

[00:00:28]On September 15th, Nike created a revolutionary new basketball shoe.

[00:00:34]On October 18th, the NBA threw them out of the game.

[00:00:40]>> Brands were starting to see black celebrities as valuable. When Coke tried to sign Michael Jackson for $1 million, it thought that doing so would only help it strategically in the ethnic market.

[00:00:49][music] MJ rejected the deal and signed with Pepsi instead for $5 million, helping Pepsi revitalize its image as a young and fresh soda company in contrast to Old and Stuffy Coke. After Michael was severely burned on a Pepsi commercial set in 1984, he was compensated with an additional $1.5 million, which the King of Pop donated to the hospital where he was treated, [music] establishing a burn center.

[00:01:13]Though Jackson was the top musical star of the 1980s, other black artists were making a splash. And by that I mean becoming some of the bestselling and widely respected musicians in history.

[00:01:23]Prince Rogers Nelson aka Prince defied expectations of masculinity while starring in and scoring 1984's Purple Rain, earning him an Academy Award in several number one singles. The album, which for full transparency is one of Me and My Mama's favorite albums of all time, sold over 13 million copies and spent 24 weeks at number one. That album would be at the center of a controversy we'll come back to in episode 4. In 1984, rock star and icon Tina Turner made a stunning comeback to the world stage with her hit single, What's Love Got to Do With It? Earning her two Grammys. She starred in Mad Max Thunderdome, performed in high-profile events and tours that broke records, and released more best-selling songs for the rest of the decade. [music] Rolling. [music] >> There was Whitney Houston, whose debut album went number one for 14 weeks, giving the girl Saving All My Love for You, How Will I Know, and The Greatest Love of All. As a supporter of the anti-aparttheid movement, Whitney notably refused to work with agencies who did work with South Africa and performed at the Imprisoned Nelson Mandela's 70th [music] birthday celebration in 1988. Whitney's future husband, Bobby Brown, was also making a name for himself as the lead of New Edition before going solo along with Teddy Riley of Guy and Bernard Bell. He would pioneer New Jack Swing, which fused together R&B and hip hop.

[00:02:50]>> And they sell records, lots of records, even without advertising. Public Enemy, a New York rap group, sold 750,000 copies of their first single in just 6 weeks. that even though radio stations refuse to play their radical political message, >> a lot of the cultures are coming together around rap because it's just I mean there's so many things you can do with you can do with rap music.

[00:03:12]>> I think in the future to be more popular than rock.

[00:03:15]>> Hip hop was beginning to evolve into several distinct genres from the brash and playful raps of Run [music] DMC and LL CoolJ to the socially conscious lyrics of Public Enemy. [music] We'll be back to that group and another by the end of this episode. Outside the worlds of music and sports, black Americans also dominated small and big screens.

[00:03:33]Take Mr. T, who had his own cereal and starred on the A team. In addition to becoming a spokesman, motivational speaker for children, and Nancy Reagan's personal Santa Claus, I mean partner for the Just Say No to Drugs campaign.

[00:03:46]That's what I meant.

[00:03:47]>> LIVE FROM NEW YORK, IT'S THE EDDIE MURPHY SHOW. [applause] >> It's one hell of a day in my neighborhood. A hell of a day for a neighbor. Would you be mine? Could you be mine?

[00:04:02]I hope I get to move in your neighborhood someday. The problem is is when I move in, y'all move away.

[00:04:10]>> Eddie Murphy was on the top of the world with movies like Beverly Hills Cop and his standup specials Delirious and Eddie Murphy Raw, making him one of the highest earning box office stars in Hollywood. When it came to the small screen, there were a number of changes.

[00:04:24]In 1986, Oprah Winfrey, who pops up a lot throughout the series, was the first black woman with a nationally syndicated show. Black Entertainment Television, aka BET, was founded in 1980. Though the amount of original content it provided [music] wouldn't bulk up until the next decade. BET was also not a part of basic cable, so many black people still relied on the big three networks, CBS, [music] ABC, and NBC. These networks were throwing things at the wall and seeing what stuck. Some were short-lived gyms lost to public memory, like Frank's Place. [music] The 1987 dramdy starred Tim Reed as a professor turned restaurant owner in New Orleans. The CBS creation highlighted New Orleans culture, race, and class with a single camera, and no laugh track, [music] and appealed to a small but passionate audience.

[00:05:11]>> See this bag?

[00:05:13]>> Yeah.

[00:05:14]>> Which is darker, me or the bag?

[00:05:17]>> You.

[00:05:19]Which is darker, you or the bag?

[00:05:21]>> What are you talking about? [music] >> The Capital C Club. In the old days, Frank, if you were light-skinned black, you were creo. They spell creo with a capital C.

[00:05:33]If you were dark skinned, it was Creole with a little C, [music] and there was a big difference between the two.

[00:05:41]The show was a critic's darling and even received five Emmy nominations and won three. However, an episode titled The King of Wall Street pissed off the network's new owner, Lawrence Tish, who had made a killing in Junk Bonds. The show was cancelled after just one season. Other longerlived shows that carried bigger audiences were Benson, Different Strokes, 227, Amen, Webster, and Late Cummer's Family Matters, and the Arsenio Hall Show. All were dwarfed by the Cosby Show.

[00:06:08]>> Anything out for themselves? It's my barbecue sauce.

[00:06:14][laughter] >> Your barbecue sauce? My barbecue sauce.

[00:06:17]Haven't you ever noticed after people have some of my barbecue sauce, after a while when it kicks in, they get all huggy buggy?

[00:06:26]>> Stop. [laughter] >> I'm dead serious. Haven't you ever noticed that after one of my barbecues and they have the sauce, people want to get right home.

[00:06:35]>> The Cosby Show ran for eight seasons and was the most watched show of the 80s, appealing to all races and classes.

[00:06:41]However, the show's decision to steer clear of race, class, and other heavy issues led to criticism that the show was misleading its white viewers to believe that racism was over. The 1987 spin-off A Different World was wildly popular and inspired a generation of kids and teens to attend [music] H.B.CU.

[00:06:59]Thanks to producer Debbie Allen, it explored a plethora of social issues like racism, homelessness, and date rape. The Cosby parents and their children were professional and upper middle class, representing the 21.2% 2% of the black community who qualified for that status. Though their fictional experiences were by no means universal, the depiction of a regular black family enjoying life in comfort rather than simply surviving it, reflected the growth that more black Americans had made in the past decade. [music] Black expression, while always important in our history, reached new heights in this decade. Octavia E. Butler's Kindred, though released in 1979 was a popular choice during the 80s, disrupting the largely white science fiction genre. Mixing time travel with slave narratives, the book was written after Butler heard a young black nationalist express [music] his desire to murder his ancestors who had been subservient during slavery. Kindred explored how [music] the silent survival of the enslaved was an act of resistance in itself. Alice Walker's The Color Purple made a splash in 1982, tackling the [music] widespread and long-reaching existence of sexual and physical abuse of black women and girls, as well as black same-sex [music] desire. A movie directed by Steven Spielberg, would be released to controversy and acclaim in 1985. Two years later, Tony Morrison published her most popular [music] novel, Beloved, which handled themes of black women's bodily autonomy, enslavement, and womanhood in a white supremacist society.

[00:08:28]THINKING IT.

[00:08:29]>> GET UP, [ __ ] >> Get up.

[00:08:32]>> GET THE [ __ ] UP.

[00:08:33]>> LET'S GET HIM OUT OF HERE.

[00:08:35]>> GODAMN IT.

[00:08:38]>> In 1989, Spike Lee released his second and most popular [music] film, Do the Right Thing, just one month before the murder of Yousef Hawkins. Dealing with themes of modern-day race relations and police brutality, the film was critically acclaimed by some, like Roger Eert and labeled as potentially dangerous by others. [music] One reviewer claimed that the film might make black audiences prone to rioting, which would make Lee later say, "I don't remember people [music] saying people were going to come out of theaters killing people after they watched Arnold Schwarzenegger films." While the mainstream celebs mentioned at the top of this episode tended to shy away from aggressive [music] conversations and critiques of race, there was a growing group of vocal creatives who challenged the [music] status quo. Public Enemy became known as the Black Panthers of rap and notably caused wider interest in the [music] anti-aparttheid movement, the Nation of Islam, and facets of black history like the Black Panthers and Malcolm [music] X. And after Arizona abolished MLK Day in 1987, Public Enemy released When I Get to Arizona, which while sparking controversy, also reignited debates over the contentious federal holiday. [music] Everybody has the right in this country to express their particular point of view and that's what we're doing as a hardcore radical hip-hop group.

[00:09:51]>> The most infamous rap group was [ __ ] with Attitudes or NWA who became internationally known when it released [ __ ] the Police on its debut album Straight Out of Compton in 1988. The entire album involved themes of police brutality, violence on the streets of South Central LA, and misogyny, pioneering the emergence of gangster rap, which the group called reality rap.

[00:10:13]Cops found [ __ ] the police so offensive that across the country, police departments refused to provide security for NWA's concerts, damaging their plans to tour, but increasing the group's publicity. The group's popularity, especially among young white teens who weren't from the hood, would be a crucial component of the culture wars we'll discuss in the next episode. The same year that [ __ ] the Police debuted, two other important things happened.

[00:10:37]First, Yo MTV Raps premiered on MTV to a captivated, largely suburban white audience. Secondly, presidential candidate George HW Bush would make a black man named Willie Horton a key figure of his campaign. [music]