In 1951, the N.A.A.C.P. had clearly seen enough of the televised version of “Amos ‘n’ Andy” — the visual adaptation of the popular radio show that had white minstrels voicing supposed Black characters. That year, according to Robin R. Means Coleman’s “African American Viewers and the Black Situation Comedy: Situating Racial Humor,” the N.A.A.C.P. put out a manifesto, in its bulletin, on “Why the ‘Amos ‘n’ Andy’ TV Show Should Be Taken Off the Air,” stating that the show “tends to strengthen the conclusion among uninformed and prejudiced people that Negroes are inferior, lazy, dumb, and dishonest,” and cataloging the show’s portrayals thusly: “Every character” is “either a clown or a crook”; “Negro doctors are shown as quacks and thieves”; “Negro lawyers are shown as slippery cowards”; “Negro women are shown as cackling, screaming shrews”; “All Negroes are shown as dodging work of any kind”; and “Millions of white Americans see this ‘Amos ‘n’ Andy’ picture of Negroes and think the entire race is the same.”
The N.A.A.C.P. was right: “Amos ‘n’ Andy” disgracefully offered audiences a portrayal of Black Americans as impecunious dolts. And the N.A.A.C.P. was right to call this out. But from our perspective today, what notably appears to be missing from its indictment is any grievance that the show fails to call attention to the myriad injustices that Black people suffered historically and at the time. Listing its criticisms, the N.A.A.C.P. didn’t complain that “Amos ‘n’ Andy” ignored the reality of racism. Or that it did not, for instance, focus on characters being abused by police officers or finding themselves unable to secure housing outside of languishing Black neighborhoods.
This approach — emphasizing the demand for positive portrayals of Black life, rather than calling for more examination of Black struggles — was typical of how Black demands were couched back then. A few years later, an episode of the TV news show “See It Now,” hosted by Edward R. Murrow, spotlighted the Black operatic virtuoso Marian Anderson’s tour of Asia. The episode, which was broadcast in December 1957 and documented Anderson’s exceptional cultural diplomacy (the whole thing is worth watching), juxtaposed with events of the preceding September, when segregationists resisted the integration of Little Rock Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., by Black students who became known as “The Little Rock Nine.” On her tour, Anderson was asked by interviewers about American race relations and she answered with statesmanlike aplomb — acknowledging that America was battling racism from within, while maintaining an optimism that we would move beyond it. Nevertheless, as Allan Keiler recounts in “Marian Anderson: A Singer’s Journey,” one viewer, presumably Black, wrote a letter complaining that the episode was still too pessimistic, neglecting greater mention of “the many of our race who are on top.”
Back then, civil rights messaging, including Anderson’s, focused on how Black people were overcoming racism, not just on how it held us back. But that kind of message generated criticism of the sitcom “Julia” a decade later.
“Julia,” which ran for three seasons starting in 1968, was about a Black registered nurse, played by Diahann Carroll in her signature unflappable style. Her character was a professional woman, a single mom of an adorable son and the widow of a Vietnam War veteran, who negotiated a white world in which she occasionally encountered prejudice and dispatched it with crisp dismissal. (Though, it should be noted, many episodes dealt with other issues entirely.) To the N.A.A.C.P. of the late 1950s, “Julia” would’ve been just the ticket, portraying a financially independent, self-assured Black everywoman.
But as Donald Bogle documents in “Primetime Blues: African Americans on Network Television,” Carroll recalled that Harry Belafonte, the actor and civil rights activist, “launched a full-scale assault on ‘Julia,’ then asked me not to do it.” Bogle notes that Robert Lewis Shayon, a TV critic for The Saturday Review, wrote that the sitcom’s middle-class setting was “a far, far cry from the bitter realities of Negro life in the urban ghetto, the pit of America’s explosion potential.” After Carroll responded to Shayon’s criticism by noting that for many, watching TV can be a form of escapism at the end of a typical trying day, Shayon later wrote that the show:
distorts reality and deals in double-truth. The business of TV comedy is not primarily to make people laugh: it is to manage consumption; and if in so doing it dulls critical sensibilities in people who have ‘had a pretty grim day,’ it contributes its share to the rigidity of a way of life in which black Americans suffer more severely than others.
Shayon was white and his take on a show about middle-class Black contentment was what we might now call woke, in some ways more intuitive to many than the N.A.A.C.P.’s response to “Amos ‘n’ Andy.”
Which brings me to the way race is handled on the new HBO Max show, “The Gilded Age.” As Dave Itzkoff of The New York Times reports, the creator, Julian Fellowes (of “Downton Abbey” fame), considered having the show’s central Black female character, Peggy Scott, played by Denée Benton, be introduced to other characters as a maid. This would have been an honest depiction of some Black people’s station amid wealthy white New Yorkers in 1882, but an incomplete one. Benton requested that the creators consider a different conception of her character, and they did — Peggy starts out as the personal secretary to Agnes Van Rhijn, the society matron played by Christine Baranski. And as the show proceeds, we learn that for Peggy, an aspiring writer, a secretarial position is something of a step down, as she eschews the ready-made path that her parents want for her: taking over her father’s pharmacy and her prescribed place in Black society.
Miracle of miracles, “The Gilded Age” is portraying in living color (at least through the show’s most recently released episode) Brooklyn’s Black bourgeoisie of the era, and some of its history. That is, many Black New Yorkers, terrorized by the 1863 Draft Riots — which included the torching of a Black orphanage on Fifth Avenue — and by the generally oppressive conditions for Black people in an openly bigoted Manhattan, moved across the East River to Brooklyn, where a community of prosperous Black families took hold. Who knew that we would ever see, in high-def, this affluent Black Brooklyn, with characters played by actors as august as Audra McDonald and John Douglas Thompson? (Of note, also, is one of the show’s executive producers, Salli Richardson-Whitfield, known for her acting roles in movies such as “Antwone Fisher,” who directs four “Gilded Age” episodes this season.)
The victory here is the kind that the critics of “Amos ‘n’ Andy” would have saluted, even if the critics of “Julia” might have been more skeptical. That is to say that “The Gilded Age,” at least so far, isn’t reckoning with the 19th-century Black New Yorkers who were making their way in the suffocatingly overcrowded Five Points neighborhood downtown (depicted memorably by Martin Scorsese in “Gangs of New York”). Or in cramped tenements in San Juan Hill on the Upper West Side, where “West Side Story” is set, a neighborhood later demolished to make way for Lincoln Center. In one scene, though, “Gilded Age” does nod to the racial stratification of the time, irrespective of class: As Peggy and her father stand on a sidewalk, white pedestrians pass, and she and her father know that they’re expected to stand aside and make way, and they do — their moneyed status and elegant bearing offering no exemption from being treated as second-class citizens.
I like this depiction of the era and have a hope: that we accept it, and others like it, as a win, rather than engaging in a dutiful exercise of contesting and finding fault with this show (and others) for not pointing its camera at Black misery. I’m heartened to see that, so far, articles in The Times, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times have all reported on this as a welcome development.
However, it isn’t fanciful to imagine such an objection emerging, as the series goes forth, when you consider that for years there was debate about whether the “The Cosby Show,” with its upper-middle-class Brooklynite Black family, was a realistic portrayal of Black life in America. Or when “Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class” (the inspiration for last year’s eponymous Fox series) was published in 1999 and its author, Lawrence Otis Graham, found himself described as a guileless chronicler of the Black elite. Or when the general zeitgeist seems to teach us that resenting white power and privilege is more interesting than examining how some people get past them.
But given that Black struggle is these days portrayed rather richly in film and theater, “The Gilded Age” lends a service in showing, beyond museum exhibits and magazine articles, that Black people in another age could triumph despite the obstacles. It brings onscreen life to one of many Black truths, and the one it has chosen to show is of a kind that a truly proud people must not be denied.
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John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He hosts the podcast “Lexicon Valley” and is the author, most recently, of “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.”
