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From Amos to Cosby and Back Again:
The
Portrayal of African-Americans on Television
The portrayal of
African-Americans on television is frequently a controversial topic. Throughout
its rather brief history, television, in its programming, has skewed
predominantly white. This was most clear in the 1950s and early 1960s, and it
even remained true throughout the 1970s, when television shows with mainly
all-African American casts became hits. The success of The Cosby Show in the 1980s helped to improve race relations
somewhat, at least on television. Still, controversy continued, and still does
to this day, as to which shows present negative stereotypes of African-Americans
and which ones do not. Therefore, when one is talking about the history of
African-Americans on television, it is best to begin with the show that is
widely considered to be the epitome of negative stereotypes of
African-Americans on television: The Amos
and Andy Show.
The Amos and Andy Show began life as a radio show in 1928. Two white dialecticians, Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll created it (McNeil, 1996, pg. 44). Set in Harlem, The Amos and Andy Show was the story of Amos Jones, who was voiced by Gosden, and Andrew H. Brown, who was voiced by Correll (Adventures in Cassettes, pg.1). The Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) reportedly paid Gosden and Correll one million dollars each in exchange for the rights to the show (McNeil, pg. 44), and they planned to make it into a television show. However, Gosden and Correll were both white, and the cast of the television show had to be African-American. Therefore, a national search was conducted over the span of four years (Schutz, 1997, page 3). The show finally debuted on June 28, 1951 (McNeil, pg. 44). The television version, just like the radio version, proved to be a big success, and in fact rated 13th in the A.C. Nielsen television ratings for the 1951-1952 television season (McNeil, pg. 1144). However, as soon as the show debuted, it began drawing criticism from various organizations for its allegedly negative portrayal of African-Americans. An excellent example of this criticism came from a bulletin issued by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) on August 15, 1951, entitled “Why The Amos and Andy Show Should Be Taken Off the Air:”
1.It tends to strengthen the conclusion among
uninformed and prejudiced people that Negroes are inferior, lazy, dumb and
dishonest.
2.Every character in this one and only TV show with an all
Negro cast is either a
clown or a crook.
3.Negro doctors are shown as
quacks and thieves.
4.Negro lawyers are shown as
slippery cowards, ignorant of their profession and
without
ethics.
5.Negro
Women are shown as cackling, screaming shrews, in big mouthed
close-ups,
using street slang, just short of vulgarity.
6.All
Negroes are shown as dodging work of any kind.
7.Millions
of white Americans see this Amos 'n' Andy
picture of Negroes and
think the entire race is the same.
(Lowe, 1998, pg. 3)
Despite
protests such as these, The Amos and Andy
Show remained a hit until it ceased production in 1953. The show’s last
original broadcast came on June 11, 1953. After ending its broadcast run, the
reruns of the show were widely syndicated (McNeil, pg. 44). This all changed in
1963, when CBS Films, the company that was syndicating the show, announced that
they had sold reruns of the show to Kenya and Western Nigeria. Soon following
this announcement, the Kenyan government declared that the show would be banned
in Kenya. After this announcement, attention was focused again on the alleged
racism of the series. In 1963, when a station in Chicago, Ill., began showing
repeats of the show, bitter protests began. Gradually, stations began dropping
the show amid the protests, and CBS Films quietly withdrew the show from
syndication in 1966 (Schultz, pg. 3). The debate over whether or not The Amos and Andy Show was racist
continues to this day. Some people feel the show presented an incredibly
negative view of African-Americans, while others, such as Charles Correll’s
grandson, feel that “[The Amos and Andy
Show] was not about racism, but about entertaining a nation that wanted and
needed to laugh (Schutz, pg. 15).” Regardless of people’s opinions, one thing
remains clear. As McNeil said, “Its historical significance should not be
overlooked: It was the first show with an all-black cast, and the only one until
Sanford and Son in 1972.” The Amos and Andy Show is, and always
will be, a piece of television history.
While
there may not have been a television show with an all-African-American cast
until 1971, in the 1960s, television shows did show signs of integrating. I Spy, a drama which ran on the National
Broadcasting Company (NBC) from 1965 to 1968, co-starred Bill Cosby, making it
the first non-comedic television show to star an African-American (McNeil,
404). Mission: Impossible, which ran
on CBS from 1966 to 1973, featured African-American Greg Morris in a supporting
role (McNeil, 556). This was one of several shows from the mid- to late-1960s
that featured an African-American against a predominantly all-white cast. In
1968, the situation comedy (sitcom) Julia
debuted on NBC. It was the first series since the 1950-1953 American
Broadcasting Company (ABC) sitcom Beulah to
star a black woman. Still, throughout the show’s three-season run, it featured
a mainly white supporting cast, so it was not exactly a breakthrough show for
African-Americans, as the cast was mostly white. However, a major turning point
was just around the corner, in that magical decade of the 1970s.
The
aforementioned Sanford and Son
debuted January 14, 1972 on NBC. As was stated earlier, it was the first show
since The Amos and Andy Show to
feature an all-African-American cast. The show was actually based on a popular
British sitcom called Steptoe and Son.
Television producers Norman Lear and Bud Yorkin “Americanized” the show by
recasting the leads with African-Americans, and renamed it Sanford and Son. As was the case with a British sitcom Lear and
Yorkin had previously “Americanized” (they took the British sitcom ‘Til Death Do Us Part, recast the leads,
and made it into All in the Family), Sanford and Son became a big hit. During
four of its six seasons, it garnered higher ratings than any other NBC
prime-time series. In fact, during the 1972-1973 season and the 1974-1975
season it ranked number two in the Nielsen ratings, just behind the aforementioned
All in the Family. The sitcom starred
Redd Foxx (whose real name was John Sanford) as Fred Sanford and Demond Wilson
as his son, Lamont Sanford. Fred worked as a junk dealer, and Lamont was
devoted to helping his father, although he frequently wished he could be doing
something else (McNeil 722).
Though the show was a huge ratings success, its critical success
is another question. Indeed, McNeil wondered whether the show presented “more
objectionable stereotype[s]” than The
Amos and Andy Show (pg. 45), which, as was mentioned before, was basically
forced off the air by civil rights groups a mere six years before Sanford and Son debuted. Other people
also criticized the show as depicting negative stereotypes of
African-Americans. Nevertheless, the show was a great success, and stayed on
the air until 1977, when Foxx and Wilson both left the show. NBC, desperate to
hang on to a hit show, kept most of the supporting cast of Sanford and Son and simply renamed the series Sanford Arms. However, the attempt failed, and Sanford Arms turned out to be one of the first shows of the
1977-1978 season that were cancelled. Still, the success of the original Sanford and Son was clear. Several other
successful sitcoms with mainly African-American casts made their debut in the
mid- to late-1970s. Among these shows were CBS’ The Jeffersons (1975-1985) and Good
Times (1974-1979), and ABC’s What’s
Happening!! (1976-1979). Of course, while CBS and ABC were enjoying
African-American sitcom success, NBC seemed to be left out in the cold, due to
the defunct Sanford Arms. Fortunately
for NBC, though, the 1980s would bring them the most successful
African-American sitcom of all time: The
Cosby Show.
The Cosby Show debuted September 20, 1984. It revolved around the Huxtables, an
African-American family that lived in a townhouse in Brooklyn. Bill Cosby led
the cast as Cliff Huxtable, an obstetrician. Cosby, as was stated earlier, also
was the first African-American to star in a drama, which he did in I Spy. Cliff’s wife, a lawyer named
Clair, was played by Phylicia Ayers-Allen, who was later known as Phylicia
Rashad, after she married sportscaster Ahmad Rashad (McNeil, pg. 181). It was
in this that first marked the first significance of The Cosby Show. The Huxtables were a very successful, two-income
household. On previous television sitcoms, African-Americans had rarely been
seen as overly successful.
The family portrayed in The Cosby Show was a very functional,
nuclear family. The Huxtable’s five children were successful in their own
right. In many ways, the child characters on the show were just extensions of
the child characters on past sitcoms. The difference is that on those sitcoms,
the children were white, while on The
Cosby Show, they were African-American. In fact, The Cosby Show resembled sitcoms of television’s past. It revolved
around the traditional nuclear family with traditional values, and the stories
on the show always taught a moral lesson. However, unlike shows of the past, The Cosby Show was centered exclusively
on black people, and that was key to the show’s success. The Cosby Show was so gentle, and the family life it depicted was
so functional, that if it were centered on a white family, it probably would
have failed, because there would not have been anything to make it stand out
from the crowd. The Cosby Show likely
would not have been a hit.
As it was, though, The Cosby Show was a hit. The fact that
it was a hit show was, initially, somewhat surprising. Since I Spy, Bill Cosby had tried three
television shows, and none were successes: 1969-1971’s The Bill Cosby Show, 1972-1973’s The New Bill Cosby Show, and 1976’s Cos. The Cosby Show also
had another card stacked against it. By 1984, several television analysts had
predicted the demise of the television sitcom (McNeil, 180). Indeed, in the
previous season (1983-1984), only two sitcoms broke into the Nielsen Top Twenty
highest-rated television shows (McNeil, 1157). Previous sitcom hits, such as Three’s Company, were on their last
legs, and new sitcoms such as Family Ties
and Cheers were just barely
staying alive. Against all these odds, though, The Cosby Show emerged victorious, and came in third place in the
Nielsen ratings its first season. It then came in first in the ratings each
season thereafter until the 1989-1990 season, when it again placed second. The Cosby Show helped increase Family Ties’ and Cheers’ audiences, and helped NBC build a powerhouse Thursday night
prime-time lineup, something that the network enjoys to this day.
While The Cosby Show was a great critical and ratings success, it was
also chided by some African-American groups. Ironically, it was the very fact
that the Huxtables were black that earned The
Cosby Show its criticism. It was criticized for not being “black” enough.
These African-American groups also said that few African-American families are
as financially successful as the Huxtables. None of this criticism, though,
undermines the significance of The Cosby
Show. Through its ratings success (which continued until the show ceased production
in 1992), The Cosby Show brought
white people and African-American people together, at least in front of the
television.
Actually, The Cosby Show turned out to be one of
the last television shows white people and African-American people did watch
together. Throughout the 1990s, studies were taken, and these studies showed
that there is not a single non-sports television show in the Nielsen Top Ten in
African-American households that is also in the Nielsen Top Ten in white
households. Todd Boyd, a professor of critical studies at the University of
Southern California, believes that this fact is
evident of more than just our television viewing habits: “The representations
we see in popular culture are another way to point out how segregated we are as
far as race (Goodale, 1998, pg. 13).”
The
audience is not the only thing that have changed since The Cosby Show years. The actual programming has as well. In 1995,
both the Warner Brothers Television Network (WB) and the United Paramount
Network (UPN) were launched, and both networks, eager to find audiences,
decided to develop shows that would appeal to the audience they felt was most
neglected in television: the African-American audience. So far, the idea has
paid off, as both WB and UPN have found audiences. However, these shows have
often been criticized by critics and African-American groups for a severe lack
of the kind of intelligence that The
Cosby Show possessed, and actually may foster segregation. Such shows as
WB’s The Wayans Bros. and UPN’s Malcolm and Eddie (which, ironically,
co-stars former Cosby Show star
Malcolm Jamal-Warner) have been categorized by Harvard psychiatrist Alvin
Poussaint as a “ghettoization of television viewing (Goodale, pg. 13).”
Retired
General Colin Powell has also spoken out against the dysfunctional families and
the dysfunctional human beings seen on these recent African-American sitcoms,
believing that they can affect children in an adverse manner. “If
[dysfunctional television characters are] what it’s all about, then we might as
well go back to Amos ‘n’ Andy,”
Powell has said (Jet, 1998, pg. 46).
Television critic Robert Bianco of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, when
reviewing Malcolm and Eddie, as well
as three now-defunct African American sitcoms, Goode Behavior, Sparks,
and Homeboys in Outer Space, in 1996,
wrote: “In 1966, after years of protests, black audiences finally forced Amos and Andy off the air. Thirty years
later, Amos, Andy and their various cultural cousins are back--with new names
and a new network home, the fledgling UPN. …. [The shows seem] to encourage
aberrant and antisocial behavior (Schutz, page 12).”
The
last two quotations both compare the new African-American sitcoms to The Amos and Andy Show, a sitcom that is
considered so racist it has been basically banned from television for the past
thirty years. As we enter into the 21st century, portrayal of
African-Americans on television appears to have come full circle. If
African-American groups, and television executives, are not careful, everything
old may be new again.
Anonymous.
“Colin Powell Urges Hollywood to Show Youth Better Images of Blacks on TV.” Jet.
Chicago: Nov. 16, 1998.
Goodale,
Gloria. “TV in Black and White. No Current TV Show Ranks in the Top 10 With
Both Black and White Viewers.” The Christian Science Monitor. Boston:
Nov. 20, 1998.
Lowe,
Jim. “Tim Moore.” http://www.geocities.com/~jimlowe/tmoore/tmoordex.html
January 27, 1998.
McNeil,
Alex. Total Television: The Comprehensive Guide to Programming From 1948 to
the Present, fourth edition. New York: Penguin Books, 1996.
Shutz, David. “The Original
Amos ‘n’ Andy Web Page.” http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/2587/index.html December 13, 1998
