The two men also portrayed the black southern duo disguised in blackface in a 1930 full length (77 minutes) film based on the radio series called Check and Double Check distributed by RFO Radio Pictures. Gosden and Correll provided the voices for the characters in the series until 1948 when they began integrating blacks into the cast. Blacks tuning into the radio program found an opportunity to laugh in the midst of Jim Crow. The radio series aired nightly from 1928 until 1955.Īmos ‘n’ Andy provided white listeners, the target audience, with an escape from the daily hardships of the Great Depression. While Amos was portrayed as mature and hardworking, Andy was immature and often the victim of the foolish schemes devised by George “The Kingfish” Stevens, the lodge leader of the Mystic Knights of the Sea, a fictitious black fraternal organization. They opened the Fresh Air Taxi Company and Amos married Ruby Taylor, the daughter of a middle class family. The radio series was about Amos Jones and Andrew Brown, two farmers who left their land near Atlanta, Georgia, for Chicago with $24 and four ham-and-cheese sandwiches. Amos ‘n’ Andy began as a radio series on WMAQ, the Chicago Daily News station. As a teenager he worked as an usher at the Main Street Theatre where he spent hours memorizing comic routines featuring white actors imitating southern black dialect and culture. His great grandmother was the first cousin of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy. Correll was born and reared in Peoria, Illinois. Gosden met Charles Correll in 1921 working at the Joe Bren Producing Company in Durham, North Carolina. As a boy from an aristocratic family he was heavily influenced by Lost Cause propaganda, which depicted slavery as purely an economic system that provided happy-go lucky blacks with work, food, shelter, and loving paternal masters concerned with their well-being.
Gosden, the son of a Civil War Confederate Army veteran, grew up in Richmond, Virginia. In Griffith’s distorted adaptation of American history corrupt Northern white carpetbaggers, lazy black politicians and black rapists masquerading as soldiers had seized control of the South after the Civil War prompting the chivalrous, Christian white men of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) to restore law and order.Īmos ‘n’ Andy was the creation of two white men, Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, the first full length American feature film. The crisis of Southern white masculinity during Reconstruction (1865-1877) was at the center of D.W. Black men were portrayed as chicken and watermelon thieves in early film shorts following Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The development of cinema would add a new dimension to the stereotyping of the African-American community. Minstrel shows were the earliest form of American humor and set the stage for depictions of blackness in popular culture. Black performers like Bert Williams also blackened up for minstrel shows. All of this amounted to a less than flattering attempt to duplicate blackness through grotesque forms of cultural appropriation and racial cross dressing. These actors used burnt cork to darken their faces, dressed in tattered clothing, spoke in broken English, and performed Negro spirituals and jigs. White performers, Dan Emmett and Thomas Dartmouth “Daddy” Rice, introduced minstrelsy to American popular culture in the 19th century. Why did civil rights leaders believe that this series was harmful to African-Americans? Was this boycott a necessary endeavor during the Civil Rights Movement? Did this series become a scapegoat for a segment of the black middle class and elite more concerned with defining all pop cultural images of the African-American community by their imposed standards of respectability and blackness than the show’s actual impact on the black masses? The Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) network cancelled Amos ‘n’ Andy after a national boycott led by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). As it turned out Amos ‘n’ Andy was the most controversial series in television history. Years later I learned that not everyone viewed one of my favorite childhood shows with the same enthusiasm. I just knew that this was one of the funniest shows that my young eyes had ever seen. I never asked my dad why the show was not on television. We had to rent videocassettes from Erol’s, a now defunct video rental store, to watch the episodes. Unlike the other “classic” shows, Amos ‘n’ Andy reruns did not come on television. One summer he introduced me to a series called Amos ‘n’ Andy. During childhood my favorite television shows were cartoons, The Cosby Show, and the black-and-white classic series I Love Lucy, Leave it to Beaver, and The Three Stooges, which I watched with my dad.
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