BOOB TUBE POWER

Television Shapes America's Image of Blacks - And How They See Themselves

PART I: 1950-1989

By Earl A. Birkett

For the most part, the display of African Americans on television in its infancy in the late 1940s aped their status in the movies and in American society as a whole: seen in the background but seldom heard. When they were, it was usually as comic relief.

By 1950, blacks had achieved a very low status in the societal pecking order. Most were employed in positions of service to whites - porters, maids, janitors and the like. President Harry S. Truman's order desegregating the armed forces in 1948 went a long way toward raising opportunity and the resulting profile of black people in American life. The new medium of national television took advantage of blacks' status ever so slowly and tentatively. There were four TV networks in the 1950s - ABC, CBS, NBC and DuMont - and only two programs that featured blacks of any note.

The first black person on TV may have been Broadway star Ethel Waters, who hosted a one-off variety show on NBC on June 14, 1939, when television was still being developed. She would make history in 1950 as the first African American to star in a show, Beulah, a situation comedy about a maid serving a bungling white family, who got her employers out of scrapes in every episode. But the show, like its contemporary, The Amos 'n' Andy Show, relied heavily on caricatures of black characters for laughs. Waters soon left the show, marking the beginning of a struggle to have black lives and experiences portrayed in significant and accurate ways.

More typical of the decade was Amos 'n' Andy, a sitcom featuring black leading actors. The offshoot of a popular radio program that had run on NBC and CBS from 1928 to 1960, notorious for featuring white actors Freeman Gosden (Amos) and Charles Correll (Andy) portraying black men, it was a sitcom that starred two black men. The radio show that inspired it was not flattering to African Americans, who had mixed reactions, one side calling it "crude, repetitious and moronic," while the other side "lauded the show's wholesome themes and goodnatured humor." The program received decent ratings but was cancelled after pressure from the NAACP, which called it "a gross libel of the Negro and distortion of the truth." The group explained that the show "tends to strengthen the conclusion among uninformed and prejudiced people that Negroes are inferior, lazy, dumb and dishonest." Every character, they claimed, is "either a clown or a crook"; "Negro doctors are shown as quacks and thieves"; "Negro lawyers are shown as slippery cowards"; "Negro women are shown as cackling, screaming shrews"; "All Negroes are shown as dodging work of any kind"; and "Millions of white Americans see this Amos 'n' Andy picture of Negroes and think the entire race is the same." These criticisms would take on added salience over the next 70 years.

Eddie Anderson would gain fame as the only other major black person on television until 1957. He costarred with comedian Jack Benny as his valet "Rochester" on The Jack Benny Program from 1950 to 1965. (Anderson originated the role with Benny on radio in 1937.)

AMOS'N'ANDY(1951-1953)

The Misfortune of Nat King Cole

The chief obstacle to the success of black leading performers on television in the 1950s and early 1960s centered around the unwillingness of a white audience and white sponsors to support them Racism was the order of the day, and the nascent Civil Rights Movement was still alien to most Americans as they watched the nightly news broadcasts from Montgomery and Little Rock.

The most prominent and unfortunate example was singer Nat King Cole, who had been given his own variety show, The Nat King Cole Show, on NBC in 1956. One year later, NBC was forced to cancel his show - the first network variety series hosted by a major black star - because of the inability to get enough national sponsors, frightened away by a feared boycott in the South In the North, as well, several NBC stations rejected the show. Cole's response was legendary: “Madison Avenue is afraid of the dark.”

A major black star would remain off of series television for the next eight years.

The 1960s Brings New Opportunities

Fortunately, Cole's misfortune did not extend to the new decade of the 1960s. The nation had just elected its youngest president, John F. Kennedy, a Democrat and Roman Catholic, who promised America a New Frontier of equal opportunity for everyone, especially blacks. Among the first to heed the call were the three major networks, ABC, CBS and NBC, which gradually began to feature African American actors, first in supporting roles, then as leading men and women. Young performers such as Cicely Tyson, Ivan Dixon, and Dick Gregory would gradually make their way onto TV dramas, comedies and late-night talk shows, and ever so slowly, white audiences would become used to their presence. Many sympathized with the African American struggle for civil rights, and they were more receptive to seeing blacks in roles where they weren't relegated to portraying servants and clowns. servant; they wanted to play the lead offered solely to whites: white-collar hero.

The biggest heroes that year were spies. James Bond mania at the movies also invaded television screens, and a bumper crop of secret agents sprung up all over the tube: The Avengers, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Get Smart, among many others. NBC, which already had a hit with U.N.C.L.E., greenlit another spy series, this one a jazzy, tongue-in-

Bill Cosby Changes Everything

The year was 1965. Congress passed and President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Voting Rights Act, guaranteeing the right of blacks to vote without impediment in the segregated South, achieved at a bloody price in lives. African Americans for the first time were allowed to enjoy the benefits of a burgeoning post-World War II middle class. With their rise in political clout and prosperity came a growing demand for respect, both on television and in real life. No longer would they be satisfied with playing the would co-star as glamorous government operatives, Kelly Robinson (Robert Culp) and Alexander Scott (Bill Cosby), who would travel the world performing top-secret espionage work in their guise as a tennis bum and his trainer, respectively. The producers and network gambled on Cosby, in his debut series, playing a Rhodes scholar who could excel in the intricate world of spies, the first black actor to colead a drama series. It paid off. Audiences black and white accepted the first black-white buddy coupling where they had equal status, and Cosby won an Emmy and launched one of the most successful careers in TV history.

Cosby's breakthrough immediately opened doors for other black actors. ABC had its own copycat series, N.Y.P.D., featuring its own black-white pairing, Kevin Hooks and Frank Converse as New

York City police detectives. It only lasted for two seasons, 1967-1969. Far more successful was The Mod Squad, a series designed to appeal to both a multiracial audience and the Baby Boom youth culture. Starring Clarence Williams III, Michael Cole and a negative light - dangerous street criminals. That dichotomy would persist on TV and in real life for the next half-century.

Another First: Julia and Peggy Lipton as counter-culture "hippies" who sign on as undercover Los Angeles cops, the series ran for five years, 1968-1973, and helped make white audiences more comfortable seeing white cops and black cops work together on a co-equal status, one of them being a young white woman.

While progress was made with placing black actors in ensemble casts, no network, still remembering the bad experience with Nat King Cole a decade earlier, was ready to build a series completely around a black performer until 1968. That year, NBC made the bold leap forward with Julia, starring the Broadway and film actress Diahann Carroll. Rather than play a secret agent or a space traveler, Carroll would be more down-to-earth and relatable, portraying a nurse who was also a single mother, something unheard of at the time. American audiences took to Julia Baker and her young son, Corey, played by actor Marc Copage. The series ran for three seasons, ending in 1971, and earned both a Golden Globe and an Emmy nomination for Carroll.

The storylines of these TV detective shows reflected a fast-changing American society, one that did not just reflect the mores of white suburban and rural middle-class viewers. They would be introduced to a grittier, urban environment that featured more blacks in both a positive light - small businesspeople, professionals and law enforcement officers, often with families -

Three TV Series That Produced Black Icons

The shift in TV programming created by Bill Cosby and I Spy spilled over into 1966 and beyond. Other shows saw that adding a black role of substance could not only spice up their appeal and attract audiences but also make them appealing to both critics and civil rights activists, not to mention Emmy voters.

All three major networks debuted series that would go on to become prime pop culture icons right up to 2023. Of the three landmarks, two of them would be produced by Lucille Ball. Ball, the famous comedian and TV pioneer had built her sitcom I Love Lucy into a major Hollywood studio, Desilu, by 1966. That year, she was presented with two series pilots, one with a science-fiction theme and the other with an action-adventure theme.

Ball sold the science-fiction pilot, Star Trek, to NBC for the fall season. The space opera about the intergalactic voyages of the United Earth spaceship Enterprise was unique in that it had a multiracial cast of Earthlings and aliens that included African Lt. Uhura (Nichelle Nichols), the chief communications officer. Uhura and Captain Kirk's kiss in one episodethe first onscreen interracial kiss in history - was among the many firsts achieved by this series, which ran until 1969 and has since become a highly popular and lucrative TV and movie franchise. Nichols was a symbol of the Civil Rights Movement and an enduring inspiration, especially to black women, that the future includes them as well.

The other pilot, a spy series called Mission: Impossible, went to CBS and premiered that fall. It featured a team of five highly skilled civilians who use their unique specialties to form the Impossible Missions Force and are given only the most difficult, almost suicidal, missions to perform for the U.S. government. One agent, Barney Collier (Greg Morris), is a gadgetry whiz who provides the IMF with the complex equipment needed to complete its missions. Morris was so good at portaying Collier that scores of blacks flooded engineering schools and helped create today's tech culture.

The third series, Batman, a live-action comic book broadcast over ABC from 1966 to 1968, was the first to depict a black woman as a femme fatale: Eartha Kitt as the sexy and seductive Catwoman. Kitt's portrayal has defined the role in the movie franchise to this day. (Kitt would also play similarly alluring roles on other network series of the era, including Mission: Impossible.)

The Saturday Morning Invasion

The success of Julia and similar shows proved that there was a burgeoning and profitable market for the networks and their advertisers to appeal to black children. Baby boomers were the first generation to grow up in the shadow of television, and they enjoyed seeing themselves reflected onscreen and seeing commercials for products designed for them: sugary breakfast cereals, Barbie and G.I. Joe dolls, Easy-Bake Ovens, Hot Wheels, banana bikes, etc. Even better, black kids began to see themselves in these commercials. Rodney Allen Rippy, a cute, cherubic 5-year-old, became a household name in the early 1970s for commercials in which he was eating a huge Jack-in-the-Box hamburger.

Rippy's entry extended to the lucrative world of Saturday morning cartoons, previously dominated by the iconic Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show. Once again, Cosby broke new ground with his creation, Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, an animated series that was a sentimental look back on his childhood growing up in a Philadelphia black ghetto. The endearing series, which ran on CBS from 1972 to 1985, proved that American audiences were not just interested in seeing black adults, but they also wanted to see their children, which would set the tone on television for the remainder of the century.

Good Times, Lear's second series, which CBS aired from 1974 -79, offered a view of black family life from a Chicago housing project. The blue-collar Evans family reflected the ills of the decadeunemployment, welfare, crime, discriminationwhile striving for a piece of that promised American pie. They managed to find humor in an often desperate situation and had a breakout star in Jimmie Walker's J.J., who coined the catchphrase, "Dy-no-mite!" The series inspired an imitator, What's Happening!!, an ABC series that aired from 1976-79.

Rise of the Black Sitcom

Beginning in the early 1970s, there was a massive transition in TV programming from shows such as The Partridge Family and The Brady Bunch that depicted white families to shows that documented the large variety of black families and how they cope with modern life. At first, the networks to spearhead this change were NBC and CBS, especially when they aired three series produced by Norman Lear that offered completely divergent views of the black family experience in America.

The first, Sanford and Son, the NBC series starring Redd Foxx and Demond Wilson as a Los Angeles junk dealer and his son, explored the tension in black father-son relationships and between the black and Latino communities in Southern California. It ran from 1972-1977.

It was Lear's third series, however, that has had the most enduring impact. The Jeffersons, which premiered on CBS in 1975, was revolutionary in that it showed a black man, George Jefferson, who rose from a modest background to become a self-made millionaire living in a luxurious apartment building on Manhattan's tony Upper East Side. It also showed how George, a bigot, had to cope with his son Lionel marrying the daughter of an interracial couple. Watching "fish-out-of-water" George and his family navigate both the very different black and white worlds every week was fascinating and funny at the same time. The series lasted until 1985.

Roots: The Mini-Series That Riveted America

America's Bicentennial in 1976 sparked renewed interest in the touchstones of the nation's past and individual genealogy. This reflective period could not avoid America's origin sin, slavery. Alex Haley's semi-autobiographical novel, Roots: The Saga of an American Family (Doubleday, 1976), touched on these dual themes. It traced the life and descendants up to the 1960s of Kunte Kinte, a young African who was captured and sold into slavery in the America of the 1700s. ABC turned the novel into a TV mini-series broadcast on its network in 1977. Starring a young Levar Burton as Kinte, it captivated audiences who had never before seen such graphic (though watered-down) depictions of slavery's horrors. (Haley's novel is now banned in several red states as a backlash against Critical Race Theory.) The novel and mini-series sparked a national conversation on race relations and interest in African American heritage, and even a desire to promote human rights. Many blacks proudly identified with Kinte and his descendants' struggles, which also gained the sympathy of many whites. Sadly, that sense of empathy would dissipate in some quarters over the coming decades.

Jack Benny, black performers were now allowed to carry the ball themselves. Comedian Flip WIlson was given his own comedy-variety show on CBS, the singing group The Jackson 5 was afforded equal TV time as The Osmonds, and black women such as Teresa Graves (Get Christie Love!) now had the chance to be the action superhero. Saturday Night Live, NBC's late-night sketch comedy show that premiered in 1975 and that is now a national institution, featured actor Garrett Morris in its original cast. He was the first of many black performers, including Eddie Murphy and Tracy Morgan, who became household names by first appearing on SNL.

Echoes of the Future: SNL and The White Shadow

By the mid-1970s, American television viewers were quite comfortable seeing blacks portrayed in all facets of life, and in both comedic and dramatic fashion. In a far cry from the days of Eddie "Rochester" Anderson playing comic foil to

One CBS drama series would have a more immediate impact on black youth going forward: The White Shadow. Set in an urban high school, it centered around an ex-pro basketball player (Ken Howard) who set out to turn a basketball team of disadvantaged, mainly black teenagers into a success on the court and in life. What was remarkable about this series, which aired from 1978-81, is that it foresaw the type of high schoolers who would soon change the sport of basketball (and by extension American culture) forever - men such as Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson and Shaquille O'Neal.

Equality at Last

By the early 1980s, American viewers had grown ever more comfortable seeing blacks in multiracial ensemble casts as equals and headlining their own shows. No longer invisible in American society, they had reached the point where they came to symbolize the best of that society. In the new decade, NBC led the way in racial reawakening with its two sitcom series, Diff'rent Strokes and The Cosby Show

Diff'rent Strokes was essentially a reworking of The Jeffersons. Two orphaned brothers, Arnold (Gary Coleman) and Willis (Todd Bridges) Jackson, are adopted by their deceased mother's wealthy ignoring the fact that many black families had achieved white-collar and upper middle-class status by this time. Nevertheless, the show was so popular and iconic that Cosby was called America's Dad, a status previously held by Robert Young and Ozzie Nelson back in the 1950s and Fred MacMurray in the 1960s.

GARYCOLEMAN(CENTER)ANDTODDBRIDGES(RIGHT) WITHTHECASTOFDIFF'RENTSTROKES white employer, Philip Drummond (Conrad Bain), and move in with his family at his sumptuous Park Avenue apartment. Amidst the comedy, serious issues were tackled, including mixed-family relationships and feelings of belonging. It aired from 1978-1985.

However, the series that had by far the biggest impact on American culture into the 1980s was The Cosby Show. After a decade-long absence, Cosby returned to series television in 1984 with this unique sitcom as the physician head of a household living in a stylish Brooklyn brownstone that included his lawyer wife and four children. The Huxtables were an upscale family that faced problems both black and white American families could relate to. Some people, including some blacks, considered the concept of a household headed by two black professionals as unrealistic,

The 1980s closed with black actors well on their way to dominating the medium of television in the next 30 years. A role like that of Burton as Geordi La Forge, the chief engineer of the 24th century spaceship USS Enterprise, once rare on TV, had become so commonplace that no one thought twice of it. In the coming decades, black actors will be free to portray a wider range of backgrounds and emotions.

End Of Part I