Uncle by Cheryl Thompson

Author:Cheryl Thompson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Coach House Books

The story behind television’s ambiguous embrace of Black life may have surfaced new questions about representation, but it actually traced back to a much earlier period in the history of American pop culture: the radio shows of the 1920s, and Amos ’n’ Andy in particular. By 1951, Amos ’n’ Andy had jumped from radio to the new medium of television. Other popular radio shows like Beulah and The Jack Benny Program were similarly turned into television shows. All three shows played a crucial role in the construction and recasting of racial stereotypes of Black Americans.

In Beulah (1950–53), the title role played by Hattie McDaniel, Louise Beavers, and Ethel Waters over the course of the show’s four seasons, a Black woman is a dedicated, loving housekeeper and it is her job to nurture a white middle-class family. Following the pattern established by her film and fictional predecessors, she cheerfully dispenses homespun wisdom and nutritious meals to the white children and their parents.9 Just as Amos ’n’ Andy reproduced earlier stereotypes of Black masculinity, the Black women characters in Amos ’n’ Andy and Beulah were pigeonholed as Mammies. Although these were negative depictions, characters like Beulah resonated deeply with how many Black women felt in the 1950s.

There was also Ernestine Wade, a Mississippi-born singer and actress, who played the role of Sapphire, the demanding wife of George ‘Kingfish’ Stevens, one of the lead comic figures in Amos ’n’ Andy. ‘Grown black women had a different response to Sapphire;’ observed critical race scholar bell hooks. ‘[T]hey identified with her frustrations and her woes. They resented the way she was mocked. They resented the way these screen images could assault black womanhood, could name us bitches, nags. And in opposition they claimed Sapphire as their own, as the symbol of that angry part of themselves white folks and Black men could not even begin to understand.’10

It is important to point out that when Gosden and Correll sold the rights to Amos ’n’ Andy to CBS, they also gave up playing the title characters. Instead, Amos ’n’ Andy became television’s first all-Black show. But while the television version used Black actors in the main roles – Alvin Childress as ‘Amos,’ Spencer Williams as ‘Andy,’ Tim Moore as ‘Kingfish,’ and Wade as ‘Sapphire’ – they reproduced the same voices and speech patterns established by Gosden and Correll. These were the caricatured minstrel show renditions of Black actors performing blackface routines originally created by white actors in blackface.

The television version drew immediate criticism. The NAACP mounted a nationwide protest shortly after it debuted, describing the show as ‘a gross libel of the Negro and distortion of the truth.’11 These protests were unrelenting and undoubtedly contributed to the show’s cancellation in 1953. However, reruns continued in syndication until CBS finally withdrew them in the mid-1960s in the face of further NAACP protests.12

Like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Amos ’n’ Andy has never really left popular memory, despite its short run. In 2000, for example, the Los Angeles Times reported that

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