(Above) James McEachin starred as a private eye in Tenafly opposite David Huddleston (left), who played his chief police contact, Lieutenant Sam Church.As if the news lately hasn’t been bad enough, for various reasons, now comes word that two groundbreaking Black TV actors have died.
The first is James McEachin, “who,” The Hollywood Reporter recalls, “wrote and produced songs for Otis Redding before turning to acting to portray cops on his own NBC Mystery Movie series and in 18 of the popular Perry Mason telefilms.” The North Carolina-born performer and author passed away on January 11 of this year at age 94, but wasn’t buried until last month at Los Angeles National Cemetery.
McEachin served in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, went from there to become a firefighter and a policeman in New Jersey, and eventually moved way out to California, where he worked for a time as a record producer. His first acting role was in the 1966 film I Crossed the Color Line (aka The Black Klansman). He subsequently signed on as a contract player with the film and TV company Universal, appearing in movies such as True Grit (1969) and Hello, Dolly! (1969) and on shows ranging from Mannix, Hawaii Five-O, The Bold Ones, and It Takes a Thief to The Name of the Game, Dragnet 1967, and Ironside.
In 1973 McEachin earned top billing in Tenafly, one of four rotating segments of the NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie. He played Harry Tenafly, a middle-class, suburban family man and former cop now working for a large, bean-counting private investigations agency. The program, created by Richard Levinson and William Link of Columbo fame, was one of two debuting that fall to be built around Black gumshoes; the other was Shaft with Richard Roundtree. As McEachin told Francis Murphy, who in 1973 was the TV columnist for the Portland Oregonian, Levinson and Link had designed Harry Tenafly to be portrayed by Warren Oates (The Wild Bunch, Dillinger), but Universal said it would only pick it up if the private eye was Black. Tenafly joined George Peppard’s Banacek, Helen Hayes and Mildred Natwick’s The Snoop Sisters, and Dan Dailey’s Faraday and Company as second-season components of the Wednesday Mystery Movie (the sister to NBC’s Sunday Mystery Movie). Unfortunately, just a pilot film for Tenafly and four additional 90-minute episodes were shot before Universal pulled the plug on that whole “wheel series.” (At least for the time being, you can watch the pilot here.)
McEachin later guest starred on The Rockford Files, Harry O, Police Story, Quincy, M.E., Hill Street Blues, and a lengthy list of other American dramas. Aside from his multiple appearances in Perry Mason telefilms, his only other regular TV gig was on the 2002 CBS mid-season replacement series First Monday. He played a liberal U.S. Supreme Court justice opposite James Garner and Joe Mantegna.
The Hollywood Reporter notes that the actor “was appointed a U.S. Army Reserve Ambassador in 2005 to spend time speaking with soldiers and veterans.” He also starred in a one-man play, Above the Call; Beyond the Duty, which opened at Washington, D.C.’s Kennedy Center back in 2008, and penned several books, among them a 2021 memoir titled Swing Low My Sweet Chariot.
From what I can tell, no cause of death has been announced.
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We must also bid good-bye to Ena Hartman, who is remembered as one of the first Black female performers to win a regular role on an American TV series. She played sharp, levelheaded police dispatcher Katy Grant in the 1970-1971 ABC crime series Dan August, which starred Burt Reynolds as a police lieutenant working homicide 
investigations in the Southern California coastal town of Santa Luisa (a fictional place supposedly based on Santa Barbara).Hartman died in Van Nuys, California, on April 16, of what online sources say were “natural causes.” She was 93 years old.
The Hollywood Reporter explains that Hartman was born Gerthaline Henry on April 1, 1932, in Moscow, Arkansas, “the daughter of sharecroppers.” After dropping out of high school in order to open a restaurant and make some money, she hightailed it to New York City, where she took on a stage name, became a popular model, and studied drama. She made her acting debuts in 1964, appearing in both the big-screen film The New Interns and an episode of the TV series Bonanza. She went on to accept a small part in the 1966 movie Our Man Flint, and earned guest spots on such boob-tube favorites as Adam-12, The Name of the Game, It Takes a Thief, The Outsider, and Ironside. In addition, she played a nurse in Prescription: Murder, the unofficial first pilot for Columbo. It’s said that Hartman had been in the running to play Lieutenant Uhura on NBC’s original Star Trek series, but lost out to Nichelle Nichols. In 1973 she was cast in the violent prison-set picture Terminal Island starring Tom Selleck, but injured her ankle and had to reduce her participation in action scenes. The International Movie Database (IMDb) gives Hartman’s final on-screen credit as a 1975 episode of Police Story.
Dan August’s main title sequence is embedded below.
