Former BET News anchor Ed Gordon is making his return to the network after 15 years to host the new BET/CBS monthly show, America In Black.
Gordon told BLACK ENTERPRISE he’s excited to return to the network, saying that many of the people he comes across still link him to BET.
“People still say ‘Hey, I saw you on BET last week’ so I appreciate that people still see me as someone that they trusted there,” said Gordon.
Gordon has had a litany of roles at BET, including hosting BET Tonight, serving as an anchor for BET News, and his signature one-on-one series, Conversation with Ed Gordon
. He has also conducted some of the most notable interviews in Black history, including former South African President Nelson Mandela.When Gordon left BET in 2008, the U.S. was in the midst of a housing crisis that sent the country’s economy into a depression. At the same time, Barack Obama was about to make history. Gordon noted that many of the issues the country was dealing with at the time aren’t much different from today.
“What’s interesting to me is things are cyclical, what you see is things that were old are new again, as the saying goes, and unfortunately some of the things that have plagued African-Americans for so long have come back around,” Gordon told BE. “So it’s just an interesting thing to see the things that made headlines decades ago, to some degree have improved, but in other ways and areas they have not.”
According to Gordon, Black In America is a traditional news magazine show that will air on the first Sunday of every month. Each episode will feature three or four news features concerning African-Americans from Black correspondents, including CBS This Morning Co-Host, Gayle King; CBS correspondents James Brown
and Jericka Duncan; and seven-time Emmy-winner Nischelle Turner. Comedian Roy Wood Jr will also be on the show.In the next episode, Gordon will take a look at the California Reparations Task Force, which says the state owes its Black residents $800 billion to compensate for generations of over-policing, disproportionate incarceration, and housing discrimination.
“I applaud them for attempting to figure out some equation, I think we have to keep pushing,” said Gordon. “You can as the case was with Bruce’s Beach if you indeed laid claim to land that was unjustly taken and you can prove that, that land should be given back or at least paid for in today’s dollars. You’ll never get the generational money that was lost but I think eventually the country is going to have to look at it and come up with some equation or dollar amount. But I think that’s going to take a number of years quite frankly, I don’t think it’s going to happen overnight.”
America in Black will air its third episode on Sunday, April 2 at 10 PM on BET, BET HER, VH1, and will be available on BET+, the CBS News Streaming Network, and Paramount Plus.