This article situates Nat King Cole’s NBC experience within those of Hazel Scott and Harry Belafonte, whose own programs bookended the first decade of television. While Scott was blacklisted and her Dumont show canceled, the brief primetime stints of Cole and Belafonte on national network television, reveal a shifting rhetoric surrounding the policing of blackness on TV that focused blame on the South. The South, then, became a convenient rhetorical device in the rejection of Black national television content. This article follows these two parallel yet interlocking threads, with the first section detailing the rise of national television in conversation with the South and the deflection of racism onto the region—an easy representational task amidst news coverage of the civil rights movement. The latter portion of the article follows a genealogy of Black hosted variety programs and Black televisual resistance from Scott to Cole and Belafonte.

本文将Nat King Cole的NBC经历置于Hazel Scott和Harry Belafonte的经历中，后者的节目预定了电视的第一个十年。斯科特（Scott）被列入黑名单，杜蒙（Dumont）演出被取消后，国家电视台上科尔（Cole）和贝拉方丹（Belafonte）在黄金时段的短暂停留，揭示了围绕电视上的黑度警惕性的不断变化的言论，而这主要是指责南方。当时，南方成为拒绝黑人国家电视内容的方便的修辞手段。本文遵循这两个平行但相互联系的线索，第一部分详细介绍了与南方国家对话时国家电视台的崛起以及种族主义向该地区的转移-这是民权运动新闻报道中的一项轻松代表任务。