Why Confine Black History to a Crowded Programming Ghetto?

“Coloreds to the rear.” That’s what African American bus riders heard in Alabama until the late 1950s.

Those words apply to an even wider archive of social injustice, though, for blacks were confined to “the rear” not only on many buses throughout much of the 20th century, but in nearly all aspects of U.S. society.

As black civil rights leader W.E.B. DuBois asked, “Where do we come in?”

Every February, is television’s answer.

That’s because, in addition to a ratings sweeps period, in the U.S. this is Black History Month, a designation that seems to have sprung from the Negro History Week that Harvard scholar Carter G. Woodson began promoting in 1926 to celebrate positive contributions of African Americans. And why not? They sure weren’t being mentioned in history books of the time.

Where is TV in this scenario? As always, following along pliantly.

February is when the small screen ghettoizes black-tinted TV movies and documentaries the way white Americans once did an entire race, and the way public transportation in Alabama was split by skin color until the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the state’s segregated busing law in 1956.

This black blitz of February happens annually all across the channel-scape. You name it, from the recent “Lumumba” and “The Middle Passage” on HBO to “The Heroes of Black Comedy” on Comedy Central and Sunday’s “Homes of the Underground Railroad” on Home & Garden Television.

“There are homes in America that provided more than just shelter,” the latter begins on a cable channel whose deep digging usually comes in flower beds. “They offered sanctuary.”

Only black programs stamped Important gain entry to February’s sanctuary. Among them are a pair of worthy Sunday offerings about 20th century rights struggles: “The Rosa Parks Story” on CBS and “10,000 Black Men Named George” on Showtime.

Ably played here by Angela Bassett, Parks, now 89, is the quiet, prim-looking former Alabaman whose heroic refusal to surrender her seat to a white passenger sparked the pivotal 381-day boycott of Montgomery buses by blacks that led to that 1956 high court decision. As a bonus, it also revved up the civil rights movement and summoned to center stage a charismatic young minister named Martin Luther King Jr.

TV’s Parks shares the camera Sunday with her husband, Raymond (Peter Francis James), whose bitter resistance here to the civil rights crusade and his wife’s spiny activism is never quite clarified in Paris Qualles’ script, making his ultimate change of heart all the more awkward and abrupt. In recalling this odyssey of decisive black resistance, moreover, “The Rosa Parks Story” falls well short of “Boycott,” HBO’s superior documentary-style account (which premiered last February).

While centering mainly on Parks, though, it does flash back strikingly to some of the humiliations suffered by Southern blacks under white oppression in the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s. There she is being turned away repeatedly by a smug white dinosaur when trying to register to vote. There she is being thrown off a bus in a rainstorm when refusing to re-board through the back door, as required, after paying her fare in the front and taking a seat.

Director Julie Dash thickens the schmaltz a bit as Parks’ story winds down, and dramatic license clashes with history from time to time in this movie and also in Showtime’s, which was written by Cyrus Nowrasteh, who earlier directed and wrote “The Day Reagan Was Shot,” a Showtime work whose credibility was attacked in some circles.

Along with the Parks story, “10,000 Black Men Named George” validates that Frederick Douglass refrain: “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” Power, in this case, was the Pullman Co., and its demanding nemesis, captured persuasively by Andre Braugher, was A. Philip Randolph. Pullman responded with brutality to Randolph’s 12-year underdog campaign to unionize underpaid, abused black railway porters whom whites addressed monolithically as “George.”

“This company will never sit down ‘round a table with Randolph or any colored,” Pullman boss Barton Davis (Kenneth McGregor) snarls in this interesting “Matewan” on rails, directed by Robert Townsend. Despite being targeted by violence and other union-busting tactics, though, the urbane Randolph, his street-fighter partner, Milton Webster (Charles S. Dutton), and their Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters ultimately prevailed in 1937.

Randolph would go on to become a noted civil rights leader. His path later crossed, unpleasantly for him, with Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the Harlem congressman and subject of last week’s intriguing “Keep the Faith, Baby” on Showtime that featured strong work by Harry Lennix as this shrewd, swaggering demagogue.

No sound-minded person would argue against TV programs defining African Americans by their history, nor against stories relating the histories of any other ethnic group. These black accounts, in fact, are usually higher in quality than the norm of prime time, and better to be clustered here than not appear at all.

Yet why must the vast bulk be herded into a single month, as if blacks and whites had no shared history? If they’re valuable--and they are--they should be assimilated, not quarantined in a way that, in this case, forces many viewers to choose Sunday between “The Rosa Parks Story” and “10,000 Black Men Named George.”

Making February Black History Month on TV implies that March through January are exclusively white history months.

If TV wants to observe a black history month, moreover, why not do the same for Latinos and Asian Americans who also have not always been treated honestly by mainstream white historians?

It’s true the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People and its co-founder DuBois were born in February, by the way. Also in February, the 15th Amendment was passed, giving blacks the right to vote. The first black U.S. senator took his oath of office. The first known black sit-in occurred at a segregated lunch counter, and Malcolm X was assassinated.

Yet other months have also yielded a spate of seminal events in African American annals, including November, when Alabama’s Jim Crow busing statute took that lethal hit from the Supreme Court, giving Rosa Parks her lofty place in history.

What a shame that she and 10,000 other black stories are crammed into February.

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“10,000 Black Men Named George” premieres Sunday night at 8 on Showtime. The network has rated it TV-14 (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 14).

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“The Rosa Parks Story” airs Sunday night at 9 on CBS. The network has rated it TV-PG-L (may be unsuitable for young children, with a special advisory for coarse language).

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Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be contacted at howard.rosenberg@ latimes.com.