In the 1950s and early 1960s, during the day, I watched soap operas with my Aunt Fat. Yes, that was her name! She watched The Edge of Night, Search for Tomorrow, and As the World Turns. It was a white world, which was the opposite of the world I lived in. All my neighbors were black. I went to all-black schools with only black teachers. I attended church with only black people. So, I knew we existed, just not on television.
We watched shows like The Andy Griffith Show and Gunsmoke at night, again all white towns. Even the bad guys were white! It was weird to think that there were places in the United States where we were completely absent. I knew about “sundown towns,” white towns where blacks didn’t visit after dark for fear of death. But at least we could come to the towns to do domestic and yard work. Even today, I don’t even want to pass through parts of Alabama after dark.
The only time that I saw blacks on television was on the Ed Sullivan Show and American Bandstand, and when someone in the neighborhood knew that a black performer was slated on the show, everyone was told. The homes of the few people with a television would be packed, as we craved seeing someone who looked like us on the screen.
I remember that the first show with a black man was The Nat King Cole Show, and we did not miss it. He was suave and debonair, and he represented blacks with class. It lasted one season because it couldn’t find a sponsor in those days of segregation and overt bigotry. It seemed blacks were only entertainers, and we didn’t have regular lives worth showcasing on television.
I was in high school before I started seeing many blacks who weren’t criminals on television. Diahann Carrol was a nurse on Julia, and even then, she was a single black mother with a white doctor as her boss. No black father, which was disappointing. Still, I loved it just seeing a black woman on television, although she seemed to live in a white world. When The Cosby Show started with a black family who were upper-middle-class, I was overjoyed. Finally, black people!
Help from Heaven 
A great perspective shared. Funny how it never bothered me in a similar way to watch all the TV heroes as males? The females represented were weak and silly at that time. Seems I viewed TV in a broader human sense and never needed to see people who looked like me in order to understand the virtues presented. I never felt the need to take my identity from the actors beyond that.
I’m wondering if I was more of an outlier or weirdo in that regard. Thanks for the thought-provoking post. ❤
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Many people don’t realize the need to see a representation of themselves in the media world. But it is necessary.
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Nat King Cole and his family and I and my family home is Montgomery AL.
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Wow!
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I attended Washington School, an elementary school, in East Orange, NJ. I am white and half of the class was black. I would walk home from school at lunch time and watch the same soap operas with my mom and it never dawned on me that there were no black characters in the shows. I guess I was used to never seeing African Americans on television. The writers and the producers were racist because I know that I and everybody else I knew would have not cared if African Americans were on shows, in ads or in any venue on television or in the movies. I guess people living in the South would be offended because they were the racists.
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There was one black man on the Jack Benny show. His character was “Lightning”, and his role was that of a janitor. At any given time during the show, he would walk across the stage with a broom in his hand sweeping the stage at an extremely slow pace and that’s how he acquired the nickname “Lightning.” Since I attended school with African Americans and I was very young at the time, I didn’t comprehend that it would be offensive. I thought it was so funny and it could have just as easily been a white man moving across the stage like a snail and called “Lightening.”
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I remember “Amos and Andy.” I didn’t like to watch it, because it seemed to me they made the characters stupid.
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I agree. And some of the stuff on now with blacks as gangsters, pimps, prostitutes, and violence hurts my heart. That’s not the equality I hoped for.
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Representation really matters. It does something to your confidence when you see yourself reflected back at you in art. Funny thing as a kid as a kid I watched alot of cartoons. The live action shows with black casts weren’t common. Then when you did tune into them, they still didn’t really represent YOU. Much more variation in the shows now…
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🎯🎯🎯
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