Produced by Joshua Herbert (Herb) Altschull. Atlschull won three Emmys for documentaries he helped produce at KING. Color Me Somebody was among his proudest achievements. About the documentary, Altschull wrote: “In my conversations around the area with people who didn’t realize the racial undercurrent in this city, I had always, from the beginning, wanted to use my position and KING’s to further the cause of racial equality. This was a cause worth fighting for, and I knew [Stimson Bullitt] wanted to lead the fight. I proposed that we do news shows and documentaries, and to my delight Stim was prepared to get in front of the campaign.”

Peter Blecha accounts his Dave Lewis Combo as “Seattle’s first significant African American 1950s rock and roll band” and Lewis himself as “the singularly most significant figure on the Pacific Northwest’s nascent rhythm & blues scene in the 1950s and 1960s.” The Texas-born Lewis came to the Pacific Northwest with his family during World War II. There was music in his background: his father, David Lewis, Sr., was an accomplished amateur guitarist, and his mother Bertha Lewis was similarly talented on piano. The family moved first to seek work in the navy town of Bremerton, Washington, across Puget Sound from Seattle, where they settled in the segregated Sinclair Heights housing projects. One of their neighbors was the young Quincy Jones, who took some music lessons from David Sr. The Lewis and Jones families both eventually moved to Seattle, where they lived about five blocks apart from one another in the Central District, the center of African-American life in Seattle at the time. His father worked as a fabricator at Boeing and also pulled shifts in a barber shop. Lewis tried both guitar and piano, but definitely gravitated toward the latter, especially after hearing Ray Charles, who was launching his performing career in Seattle in the late 1940s.