The Chris Moeller Archives

Alvin Childress, Spencer Williams, Tim Moore, Ernestine Wade and their cohorts should be revered today as pioneers. The immensely-popular series began in the late '20s on radio, with white performers cast in each of the voice roles, but the move to television in the early '50s necessitated that CBS employ an African-American cast-- and it was an all-African-American cast incidentally. The television version peaked in popularity in those early '50s, but continued to be broadcast all the way until 1966, when pressure from the NAACP forced it from the air.

Did the characters behave in a foolish manner? Yes. Did they possess characteristics that were considered stereotypical negatives for their race by white America (i.e. laziness, uneducated, dishonest)? Also yes. But it was a comedy program. Exaggeration and mockery comes with the territory. A long running joke on both the Jack Benny and Phil Silvers programs was that their main characters were tight with the dollar, and both stars were Jewish. We rarely hear criticism today that Jewish people were being defamed by these portrayals, though the skinflint stereotype is one that Jewish people have been forced to contend with.

Jackie Gleason on "The Honeymooners" and Lucille Ball on "I Love Lucy" also played the fool on their popular '50s-era programs. In fact, it's fair to say, considering the similarities and the timeline, that both of those shows-- as deeply ingrained today as any in the American television lexicon-- owe quite a bit of their brilliance to the groundwork laid by "Amos & Andy." Like the main characters in the older show, Ralph Kramden and Lucy Ricardo are always striving-- and failing-- at bettering their financial situation, overestimating their abilities and being lured into get-rich-quick schemes. "Amos & Andy" also utilized the multi-camera direction technique four months before "Lucy" did. (Also, you can't get stupider than the Three Stooges, as comic creations go, and they return to your local multiplex in a new incarnation just this week.)

What makes "Amos & Andy" different than these "white" shows, of course, and this is entirely fair to say, is that, for African-Americans during this time, these were the only representations they had on television? But that means the goal now shouldn't be to bury the cultural contribution of "Amos & Andy" and erase it from our national memory, but to continually ask the question, where were all of the other portrayals during that era? Where was the whole picture? In the late '60s, America's race consciousness grew up, and the Amos & Andy-type portrayals were replaced with ultra-dignified screen performances like those of Sidney Poitier. Now, admittedly, the Alvin Childress and Spencer Williams-style dialects age horrendously, but then I don't think Sidney Poitier's work holds up all that great today either. They were all part of a growth process. And, actually, as comedians, I think the performers on television's "Amos & Andy" are pretty damn good. They give great "reads" and possess terrific timing.

The problem is not that "Amos & Andy" is unfit for our time today. It's that some have conspired to keep today's audiences from seeing the show at all. DVDs of the series are available for purchase online, as the episodes' copyrights have fallen into the public domain, but you won't be seeing the show on television any time soon. If it survives at all, it will always be something that has to be sought out.

It was reported once that Bill Cosby tried to buy the rights to the series for the purpose of keeping it from ever being shown again, but it turns out that this was an urban myth. What's interesting about that connection, though, is that Cosby did say extraordinarily negative things about the series in a Playboy Magazine interview in 1968, and when asked in that Q-and-A if there would ever be a series with an all-African-American cast that did not rely on negative stereotypes, he remarked that there likely wouldn't, saying: "If you’re really going to do a series about a black family, you’re going to have to bring out the heavy; and who is the heavy but the white bigot? This would be very painful for most whites to see, a show that talks about the white man and puts him down. It would strike indifferent whites as dangerous; it would be called controversial and they probably wouldn’t want to tune in." Within three years, exactly this type of series debuted on CBS called "All in the Family." It went immediately to #1 in the ratings and stayed there for six years.

Watch this 45-minute documentary on Hulu. It's called "Amos & Andy: Anatomy of a Controversy." It dates back to the late '70s, but it will give you a great insight into what this series was all about. It's a small glimpse into the lives of the people it attempts to portray, but more importantly, and in a much larger arena, it provides a glimpse at its audience.