Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: They all laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round.
They all laughed when Edison recorded sound.
They all laughed at Wilbur and his brother when they said that man could fly.
They told Marconi wireless was a phony. It's the same old cry.
[00:00:21] Speaker B: Welcome back to 100 Years of Television.
This is episode number 36, Countdown 71.
What's you talking about, Kingfish?
For 100 weeks that started in October 2025, this podcast is going to recall the top 100 milestones in the first 100 years of television and video.
The countdown will culminate on September 7, 2027.
That's the 100th anniversary of the day. Video as we have come to know it first appeared on Earth.
I'm Paul Schatzkin, author of the Boy who Invented Television, the definitive biography of Philo T. Farnsworth, who invented the world's first all electronic television system.
In the last episode, we watched Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz transform the business of television with their hit comedy I Love Lucy.
Today we're going to see how television in the 1950s reflected America's racial divide around a program called Amos and Andy on the Radio, nobody can tell you're not wearing blackface.
Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll were veterans of vaudeville when they first met in the early 1920s.
When they started working together, they staged tent shows that often included regional dialects in their routines.
In their act, Gosden and Carell drew on a tradition that stretched back to the early 1800s, when white performers darkened their skin with burnt cork and exaggerated their lips in in a theatrical practice known as blackface.
They found their place on stage in a uniquely American form of traveling amusement called minstrel shows.
It was theater built on the ridicule and racist caricatures of an enslaved population, but it packed houses for decades on the 20th century minstrel circuit. Gosden and Carell developed their comic rapport in skits that leaned heavily on unflattering black stereotyp, risible dialect, laziness, scheming and superstition.
Gosden, who had learned wireless operation in the Navy, began experimenting with radio to promote the act. It wasn't long before he and Carell took the act itself to the air.
By 1925, they were hosting a regularly scheduled 15 minute ad libbed comedy on Chicago's independent radio station, WGN.
Carell and the Life of the Party featured the duo performing in various dialects, including the exaggerated ethnic jargon and speech patterns that they'd honed in blackface on the minstrel and vaudeville circuits.
In 1926, Gosden and Carell started performing on WGN as Sam and Henry, a serialized radio show built around those same black caricatures.
Gosden and Carell created, wrote and performed the show, establishing a template for white actors portraying black characters in farcically comic situations on the radio.
After a contract dispute with WGN, Gosden and Carell took their act to NBC's Chicago affiliate, WMAQ. But for legal reasons, they had to leave the character names behind.
In March 1928, they relaunched the show with a new name, Amos and Andy.
By the early 1930s, Amos and Andy was the most popular radio program in America. Every Monday through Saturday, families tuned their radios to the show's 15 minute serialized story arcs. By the end of the decade, the show regularly reached more than 40 million listeners, Black and white, spawning merchandise, films and phonograph recordings.
But beyond the laughter, Amos and Andy quickly became a cultural flashpoint in a country still seething in the cauldron of racial segregation and just beginning to reckon with the cultural impact of mass media.
Within the black community, the response to Amos and Andy was always, well, complicated.
Some listeners accepted the show as a rare portrayal of any kind of black life in America. Others announced its depiction of black people as shiftless, scheming buffoons and for perpetuating the kind of stereotypes that were better left as relics of slavery's past and the Jim Crow present.
Civil rights groups, most notably the national association for the Advancement of Colored People, the naacp, condemned the program for promoting images of black Americans as figures of comic ridicule rather than serious individuals worthy of full participation in American society.
Nevertheless, Amos and Andy aired on NBC until 1938, when CBS lured it away in a lucrative sponsorship deal with Campbell's Soup.
CBS had gone on the air only two years after RCA launched NBC in 1926, but the upstart network's ambitious founder and president, William S. Paley, spent nearly two decades trying to surpass his rival in prestige and ratings. The rivalry ramped up when CBS staged what became known as the Paley Raids, luring many of NBC's radio stars to CBS with very favorable financial arrangements.
Among the assets that Paley pursued were Freeman Gosden and Charles Carell and their creation, NBC's flagship program, Amos and Andy.
After losing the rights to Sam and Henry when they left WGN for wmaq, Gosden and Carell had been careful to preserve their ownership of Amos and andy. But in 1948, after airing the show on its radio network for nearly a decade, CBS made them an offer they could hardly for $2.5 million. That's about 35 million in $2026. CBS obtained all the rights to Gosden and Carell's creation, the characters, the scripts and creative control.
Though set for life, Gosden and Carell stayed with the radio show as performers under contract to CBS, and continued to write and consult on scripts and production.
After securing all the rights, CBS moved ahead with plans to bring Amos and Andy to television in the early 1950s, and obviously the first decision the network had to make was what to do about the casting.
It was painfully apparent that two white actors performing black characters in the audio equivalent of blackface was not going to translate well to television.
With Gosden and Carell still writing and consulting from the wings, CBS called up a cast of black actors.
Tim Moore as George Kingfish Stevens, Alvin Childress as Amos Jones, Spencer Williams as Andy Brown, Ernestine Wade as Kingfish's wife Safire and Nick Stewart as Willie Latman, Jefferson and other regulars who rounded out the largest ensemble of all black actors ever seen on early network television.
Amos and Andy was engulfed in controversy from the moment it premiered on CBS TV on Thursday, June 28, 1951.
For as long as it had been on the radio, Amos and Andy's racial caricatures were in a very real sense, invisible.
White audiences could imagine the characters however they pleased, and black audiences could at least enjoy the storylines without the actual sight of white actors in blackface.
By casting an all black ensemble for the TV show, CBS managed to circumvent the literal blackface problem. But Amos and Andy still embodied all the racial stereotypes that grew out of its origins in those 19th century minstrel shows.
The NAACP and other civil rights groups immediately denounced the series for perpetuating those demeaning one dimensional stereotypes.
The association launched a national campaign demanding the show be taken off the air forcefully and effectively, arguing that it portrayed outmoded lampoons of African Americans as lazy, ignorant, dishonest and clownish.
The NAACP went so far as to issue a formal report, the Factual Analysis of the Amos and Andy TV show, which itemized the demeaning portrayals and emphasized the broader harm they posed to public perception and the national standing of black Americans.
NAACP branches across the country urged their members to contact local affiliates and advertisers to demand the show be pulled. They organized letter writing drives, community meetings and editorials in black newspapers.
The campaign gained momentum when prominent voices in the black press and civil rights community echoed those concerns, framing the show not as harmless entertainment but as a modern extension of the minstrel stereotypes in the radio era, it had been easier for the networks to absorb most of the controversy around the show. But once it went on tv, CBS owned the property outright and was solely responsible for its content and its impact.
That meant that the steadily escalating protests were directed at a single obvious target. William S. Paley and his network.
Amos and Andy earned high ratings for cbs, but the backlash was too much for the network and its sponsors to ignore.
The NAACP campaigns made Amos and Andy one of the first flashpoints over the continuing racial bias that persisted in the United States nearly a century after the Civil War.
And for Bill Paley, Amos and Andy became a personal tarnish on his efforts to brand CBS as the Tiffany of networks.
CBS never issued a formal apology, but the program was quietly canceled in 1953 after just two seasons and 65 episodes.
However, those 65 episodes were enough for the show to live on well beyond its brief life on the network.
In syndication, reruns aired well into the 1960s.
The program continued to be especially popular in Southern markets, where local station owners were less inclined to be persuaded by the naacp.
Black leaders in the urban north were more successful in pushing for the show's cancellation, and the momentum of the civil rights movement in the 1960s made the show's continued airing untenable.
CBS, which still owned the show, quietly withdrew the series from syndication in 1966 and has kept it off the air ever since.
The legacy of Amos and Andy is as complicated as the history of the country that spawned both the medium and its content.
To its benefit, Gosden, Carell and CBS created the first television show to feature a recurring all black cast.
On the other hand, the characters those actors were cast to portray were shaped by decades of racist tropes and degrading parody.
Amos and Andy last flickered through the ether in 1966, but clips and whole episodes can still be found today on YouTube.
Amos and Andy vanishing from the airwaves cleared the path for more authentic representations of black life in America.
On September 17, 1968, just two years after the last episode of Amos and Andy aired in any kind of broadcast syndication, NBC presented Diane Carroll as a widowed nurse raising her son in Julia, the first American TV series to star a black woman in a non servant role.
In the decades that followed, the Jeffersons, Good Times and the Cosby show would offer a broader in if at times still contested spectrum of black life on television.
From the first century of television, Amos and Andy remains the archetype of a cautionary tale. It asks us to look closely at who gets to tell the stories, how those stories are framed, and what we choose to laugh at.
And it is fitting to remember that while Amos and Andy's white creators went on to wealth and great acclaim, the actors who portrayed their characters on television went on to lives of modest obscurity.
In some respects, the evolution of Amos and Andy embodies both the medium and its audience.
In its earliest days, television reflected the status quo.
With the imperative to reach larger audiences with higher production values. The medium began to reflect the changes that enveloped the post war nation.
And as television emerged from its late 1940s infancy into its troubled adolescence in the 1960s, the new medium became a driving force in the changes to come.
This brings us to the end of number 71 in the countdown of the top 100 milestones in the first 100 years of television. Stay tuned for the next episode or when the Today show comes to NBC.
Thanks for listening to 100 Years of Television, a two year countdown to the centennial of television on September 7th, 2027.
For more, aim your gizmo to 100yearstv.com this podcast was written, recorded, engineered and uploaded by me, Paul Schatzkin and and is a production of Farnovision.com if television was invented by somebody named Farnsworth, then why don't we call it Farnovision?
[00:16:12] Speaker A: They all said we never would be happy. They laughed at us. And how but how you got to laugh at them.
