Color bind

Television has struggled at portraying African-American life for more than 50 years

by Jason Gay

If you could bring back the icons of black television history and cast them in a single program, it wouldn't take long to discern how distressing the presentation of African-Americans has been during prime time. Let's set the show in a middle-class household: there's Amos, Andy, and the Kingfish from The Amos 'n' Andy Show, sitting at the kitchen table with George Jefferson and Fred Sanford, waiting for a meal prepared by Beulah, a domestic servant and the star of her own self-titled 1950s sitcom. In the living room, just off her nursing shift, is Julia, played by Diahann Carroll in the late 1960s, explaining to Nat King Cole why she was condemned by black activists for being a "white Negro." Cole, in turn, is seated at the piano, wondering aloud why his acclaimed variety show was canceled after just one season. In the den is Good Times's J.J. Evans, decked out in disco paraphernalia, shaking his long limbs and exclaiming "Dyn-o-mite!" as Tootie from The Facts of Life passes by in her prep-school skirt. Upstairs in the bunkroom, little Webster of Webster is commiserating with Arnold and Willis from Diff'rent Strokes, while Nell Harper of Gimme a Break! changes their sheets. And around the corner, in the study, we would probably find Cosby, wearing a colorful sweater, puffing on a $20 cigar, and shaking his head in disgust.

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It's not a pretty picture. But since the postwar debut of network fare like American Minstrels of 1949, featuring blackface comics Pick Malone and Pat Padgett, television has consistently failed to present African-Americans (or any minority group, for that matter) as positively as it has whites. In the 1950s, as sitcoms like Father Knows Best and Ozzie and Harriet offered a pristine model of white middle-class life, Amos 'n' Andy lampooned blacks as hapless, scheming buffoons. Beulah, the first program with a black female lead, was essentially Father Knows Best with an African-American maid added for levity. Despite vociferous protests from the NAACP, however, these shows were very popular; both Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower made casting recommendations for Amos 'n' Andy. (As J. Fred MacDonald recalls in his 1983 book Blacks and White TV, Truman suggested picking an actor from the all-black Texas University; Eisenhower recommended a black soldier he knew.)

Even as the civil rights movement of the 1960s brought racial struggles to the forefront, prime-time television continued to operate in a separate, unknowing universe. The two major black characters introduced during the decade, Cosby's Alexander Scott (on the secret-agent drama I Spy) and Carroll's Julia, were criticized as raceless assimilationists -- nonthreatening blacks designed to assuage white audiences' fears during a tumultuous period. While blacks and whites clashed in America's streets, characters like Scott and Julia -- with their perfect manners and comfortable means -- moved effortlessly through the white world on the little screen.

The 1970s began with African-American standup comedian Flip Wilson achieving major crossover success as the host of his own variety series, The Flip Wilson Show. But it took a bigot like Archie Bunker to give networks the courage to portray African-American family life for the first time. The success of All in the Family -- Norman Lear's confrontational, sometimes discomforting, sitcom about a blue-collar family in Queens -- gave Lear the clout to develop several black-oriented successors: The Jeffersons (an All in the Family spinoff), Good Times, and Sanford and Son. Here, for the first time, television presented black characters whose lives didn't revolve around whites. More important, the programs, though based in comedy, didn't shy away from addressing racial insensitivities. Nor, obviously, did serious dramatic programming: Roots, the hyperpopular 1978 miniseries based on Alex Haley's best-selling book about his slave ancestors, was unquestionably the biggest television event of the decade.

"The 1970s were a time when television tried to grapple with real social issues -- more so than we're seeing 25 years later," says James Cullen, a Harvard lecturer and the author of Art and Democracy: A Concise History of Popular Culture in the United States (Monthly Review Press, 1996).

Indeed, though the black-oriented shows of the 1970s had their flaws -- Esther Rolle, who played Florida Evans on Good Times, quit the show for a year, charging that Jimmie Walker's J.J. character had descended into minstrelsy -- they represented a solid step forward. The late 1970s and early 1980s, however, witnessed a discouraging return to African-American characters whose lives orbited around whites. One of the biggest shows of the time, Diff'rent Strokes, featured two smart-alecky ghetto kids in the keeping of a rich widower. (Webster, another hit, was essentially Diff'rent Strokes with an even more diminutive star, Emmanuel Lewis.) And in Gimme a Break!, Broadway star Nell Carter was an unabashed Beulah for the 1980s: a black domestic catering to a white family in the suburbs and giving them a dose of black sass.

When The Cosby Show arrived in 1984 and became an immediate hit, it revived some of the momentum that black-oriented programming had lost since the Lear sitcoms of the 1970s. The success of The Cosby Show paved the way for a smash spinoff, A Different World, and a handful of black-themed shows in the late 1980s, including Amen, 227, and Family Matters. Another notable program of that period was Frank's Place, a half-hour "dramedy" starring Tim Reid as a Boston history professor who moved to New Orleans after inheriting a Creole restaurant from his late father. Smart, well-written, and richly textured in its discussion of racial politics, Frank's Place was a critics' darling but a commercial bomb.

The early 1990s brought a new batch of black sitcoms on the Big Three networks, including The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Hangin' with Mr. Cooper. The decade has also witnessed black performers assuming many lead roles on popular drama series, including ER and NYPD Blue. But the biggest development of the '90s by far was the rise of the Fox network, and the subsequent launch of two additional networks, WB and UPN. All three new networks invested heavily in black-oriented programming; Fox had modest hits with such shows as In Living Color, Martin, and Living Single. But while these programs have given new networks a niche audience, they are often wanting in quality. Says one African-American actress: "I go on auditions for these shows, and a lot of the time the complaint that comes back is `Oh, you're so great, but could you be more black, could you be more street?' It's gotten to the point where I just said to my new agent, `If all the projects I'm going to be sent are UPNs and WBs, then forget it. Most of those shows are total shit.' "