ABSTRACT
This chapter illuminates the domestic dimensions of Americas Town Meeting of the Air (ATMA) by examining selected ATMA broadcasts in the US, the associated ATMA press releases, articles in American papers about the broadcasts, and letters from the American audience to ATMA about the program. It examines the purposes and achievements of the private organizers of the program, and their public counterparts within the State Department, in relation to race. ATMA was a talk show broadcast on the for-profit national broadcasting company (NBC) Blue network from 1935 until 1943, and then on American broadcasting company (ABC) radio, another private network, from 1943 to 1956. It sprang from the convergence between the needs of radio network NBC and the League for Political Education, an organization of the suffrage movement based in New York. The American press was understandably drawn to Sampsons assessment of the African-American condition in the US, the Ralph Bunche case, and Paul Robesons critiques of the US.
