BIRD OF THE IRON FEATHER (1970) FORGOTTEN TELEVISION

BIRD OF THE IRON FEATHER (1970) – This African American drama was produced for Chicago’s educational station WTTW. The storied black radio and television pioneer Richard Durham created and wrote this soap opera/ soul drama that originally was to air every weekday like network soap operas did.

Durham was hoping to replicate the success of Los Angeles educational station KCET with their five day a week soap opera Cancion de la Raza, about a Mexican-American family. That program aired for 70 episodes from October 1968 to January 1969.

WTTW was approved for a $600,000 grant to produce one hundred 30-minute episodes of a series dramatizing the contemporary experiences of black Chicagoans. The title Bird of the Iron Feather was a reference to the 1847 Frederick Douglass speech in which he described African Americans as “birds of iron feathers unable to fly to freedom.”

Richard Durham decided to center the series around black Chicago police detective Jonah Rhodes (Bernard Ward), his wife Jean (Yolande Bryant) and his uncle “Funky” Frank Rhodes (Ira William Rogers), who owned Funky Frank’s Bar, an establishment where several characters would hang out.

Other family members of Detective Jonah Rhodes included his younger brother Maceo Rhodes, Jr. (Nol Tinner), younger sister Maybelle Rhodes (Suki Jones), his deaf-mute Uncle Robert (Robert Brown) and Robert’s deaf-mute wife Katie (Katie Brown). Katie and Robert were played by a real life deaf-mute married couple.

Though airing in early 1970, Bird of the Iron Feather was set in 1966. In the first episode, main character Jonah Rhodes is killed in the July ’66 Chicago West Side Riots and the series centered around flashbacks to Detective Rhodes’ life leading up to those riots. Black characters using the word nigger caused the program to be labeled For Adult Viewers Only.  

Many memories are triggered by Rhodes’ police diary, found by Sgt. Harry Vines (Milton Lamb), another black policeman, when he is cleaning out Jonah’s locker. Vines and Rhodes often clashed, but both were honest police officers. The diary is turned in to the police superintendent.

Writer Richard Durham depicted Jonah Rhodes’ struggles with some characters perceiving him as a sellout to the white power structure for being a cop and some perceiving him as too sympathetic to Chicago’s black militants. Jonah’s story arc was intended to show him gradually gravitating more to the militant point of view. 

An emphasis was placed on corruption, racism and covert retaliation within the Chicago police department, but other issues entered the narrative. Durham presented fictional versions of real events in some episodes, like school desegregation, the plight of black Vietnam War veterans, struggles of the handicapped and the police shooting of Black Panthers.

Before Bird of the Iron Feather even aired, budget issues caused the grantor, the Ford Foundation, to cut the number of episodes to 35 in support of Richard Durham’s concern that 100 high quality episodes could not be produced for just $600,000. The series was also cut back to airing on Monday, Wednesday and Friday rather than every weekday.

In the end, controversies surrounding the program caused its cancellation after just 21 episodes. Because it originally aired only in Chicago, many episodes are now lost forever since equipment for home taping of television programs was incredibly rare for the time period.

In September 1970 the Coalition for United Community Action blasted WTTW for not showing Bird of the Iron Feather nationwide via allied television stations. The Ford Foundation provided $17,000 more to prepare 13 of the original 21 episodes for broadcast by 155 other educational stations across the U.S. in 1971.

Only two episodes still exist in their entirety, with excerpts from a few more supplementing that material. Scripts for several episodes have survived and can be read at various sources. 

Every aspect of this program’s production was historic, especially the creative team, and there is a wealth of information available about it online and elsewhere. I spent several days diving into the lore surrounding Bird of the Iron Feather.

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