1973, Oklahoma City, OK - Listen to Logan Jackson's story: "Dan Porter was an old Civil War veteran. I was a little boy. At the time we met, they were enforcing the Jim Crow law, which said black men could not vote. ‘Man told Dan Porter, says, ‘Don’t you go in there and try to vote.’ Says, ‘You can’t read.’ “Porter says, ‘That don’t make no difference. I’m one of the men who made General Lee surrender!’” Logan stared into the faces around him, ‘You don’t know who General Lee was, do you? He was a general in the Civil War. Yeah, an old soldier.’ Well, Dan, he voted.”
How a diverse group of Americans succeeded in living together is a fascinating tale that has made an extraordinary difference for the millions who came after them. Of course they had racial problems, and still do, but the way they worked them out holds lessons for our own time.
The struggle for racial equality began in one of the most diverse places in America. No, not New York or California, but Oklahoma. The state once had twenty-eight all-black towns scattered throughout thirty-seven Indian nations. For nearly a century Oklahoma was primarily a land of the red and the black, a checkerboard of Indians and ex-slaves who very nearly got their own state, until thousands of immigrants from around the world joined them seeking free land—land they got in a single day. Watch "Through the the Looking Glass Darkly," my first documentary to win a National EMMY for a story seldom told.
Bob Dotson's first EMMY award winning documentary, WKY-TV, 1973. America survives and thrives because of all those names we don’t know, seemingly ordinary people who do extraordinary things. They don’t run for president or go on talk shows, but without them, the best of America would not exist.
Bob Dotson was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the son of Dottie Bailey, a singer who performed on NBC radio and Bill Dotson, a janitor who dropped out of school in fifth grade, but attended night classes for 23 years and later earned an honorary masters degree in Opthalmics for his study of the eye.
Their youngest son Bob began a remarkable Odyssey of his own, after graduating from Kansas University in 1968. Bob Dotson crisscrossed this country, more than four million miles, searching for people who are practically invisible, the ones who change our lives, but don’t take time to tweet and tell us about it.
His quest got noticed. Dotson won Oklahoma’s first National Emmy for a 90-minute documentary on African American history called “Through the Looking Glass Darkly.” He was nominated for 11 national Emmys — and won seven more — after he became an NBC News correspondent in 1975. His long-running series, “The American Story with Bob Dotson,” was a regular feature on the TODAY Show for 40 years. He is now a New York Times Best Selling author and writes a daily blog which The Society of Professional Journalists cited as the “best in new media.”
Dotson continues producing documentaries. An NBC production, “El Capitan’s Courageous Climbers,” won seven International Film Festivals and documentary's highest honor, the CINE Grand Prize. He is one of the most honored storytellers of our time. His reporting and storytelling have earned 120 awards around the world. They include top honors from the Kennedy Center, DuPont Columbia and a record six Edward R. Murrow Awards for Best Network News Writing. In 2014, Dotson received the William Allen White Foundation National Citation for journalistic excellence. In 2019 he joined Will Rogers in the Oklahoma Journalism Hall of Fame.
Dotson now teaches the next generation of visual storytellers, conducting workshops in Korea, Australia, England, Holland, Switzerland, and Austria. He is also a professor of Master Storytelling at Syracuse University.
Bob is the author of four books, including the New York Times best-selling “American Story: A Lifetime Search for Ordinary People Doing Extraordinary Things.” (Penguin/Random House)
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The latest edition of his classic, “Make It Memorable: Writing and Packaging Visual News with Style” became Amazon’s best-selling journalism book. It is being studied on 26 campuses and in newsrooms around the world. (Roman & Littlefield.)
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