Atlanta-based Bounce TV this month celebrated the life of Atlanta civil rights leader Xernona Clayton with a thorough documentary called “Xernona Clayton: A Life In Black & White.
The documentary, which aired on June 19 on the broadcast network, is now available on demand on the Brown Sugar streaming service. (There is a seven-day free trial for first-time subscribers on the app and it’s $3.99 a month after that.)
Clayton, at age 92, is one of the last surviving members of the coterie of Atlanta civil rights leaders from the 1960s. She was a close friend of Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife Coretta Scott King.
Her memory remains airtight. She provides clearheaded anecdotes during the documentary of that era as if it were yesterday. And her spirit shines through.
Among the admirers who participated in the documentary are Ambassador Andrew Young, Martin Luther King III, Sen. Raphael Warnock, comedian Chris Tucker and former CNN president Tom Johnson, who worked at the White House in the late 1960s and informed Lyndon B. Johnson of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.
“She is a human dynamo,” Johnson said in the doc. “She is a star.” He added later: “Xernona Clayton has made this world a better place.”
In 1967, she launched “The Xernona Clayton Show” on the then-Atlanta CBS affiliate, WAGA-TV as the first Black woman in the South to host their own daily TV show. “I tried to make it provocative,” she said in the doc. And she used her connections to get the likes of Harry Belafonte, Duke Ellington, Eartha Kitt and Sidney Poitier on her show.
“Having a talk show strengthened my resolve,” she said. “I can make a lot of things happen.”
Clayton later joined Ted Turner’s Turner Broadcasting, where she first served as a producer of documentary specials and later was a director of public relations and corporate vice president for urban affairs. Turner “was my friend, the person who cared about me and my welfare,” Clayton said. “I became his unofficial advisor. That was the best job i ever had!”
In 1993, to honor the work and performances of Black people in a range of industries, she created the annual Trumpet Awards, which continues to this day. Luminaries such as Aretha Franklin, Rosa Parks, Quincy Jones, Tiger Woods, Nelson Mandela and Muhammad Ali showed up over the years.
“Just a special night,” Clayton said. “You’re going to learn something. And you’ll leave feeling good.”
She also created the Civil Rights Walk of Fame in Atlanta in 2004 which includes everyone from John Lewis and Hosea Williams to Maya Angelou and Magic Johnson. “What I see in that is a person walked in these shoes,” Clayton said. “Some walked to a better place to create a better place for his family or community.”
The documentary also covered the unveiling of her statue in downtown Atlanta from this past March. Clayton was only the second woman to have a street and a plaza named for them in the city and the first Black woman to have a statue in downtown Atlanta. There, several men, from Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens to WSB-TV anchor Fred Blankenship, jokingly said they were her boyfriend, though she told them all that she makes that choice, not them. (She is happily married to federal judge Paul Brady.)
Before the statue was unveiled, she said, only partly seriously, that she wanted it to resemble a combination of Lena Horne, Halle Berry and Coretta Scott King.
“She makes jokes of anything and anybody,” Young said. “If you take yourself too seriously, she will put you in your place and you don’t even realize you’re being put.”
Clayton, during a recent Zoom call to promote the documentary, said she cried when she finished watching it. “They were tears of gratitude I shed, not of sadness,” she said.
She said she thought she had lived a normal life of a good Christian woman, “not exemplary enough that I should be given such special notice. ... I don’t have an exalted opinion of myself. When they put it in black and white and captured my life, it means someone had an impact from some things I’ve done and that makes me feel good.”
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(“Xernona Clayton: A Life in Black & White” is available on Brown Sugar streaming service.)
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