Come on - you folks never saw the episode “Thelma Lou - Dominatrix” ?
Looks like Mr. Morally Questionable has struck again:
I, too, am shocked that they have Aunt Bee feeling a lack on daytime television. There are children watching this stuff!
It would appear she has retired into obscurity.
BTW, Sampiro, do you think Andy Taylor could have handled the lead in “HACKSAW! - The Musical”?
Maybe the fact that the show had no African-Americans on it–this in NC in the '60’s (hell, in NC, EVER) has something to do with the morall reprehensibility.
If memory serves (always chancy with me), the show’s producers said that they didn’t want to deal with the whole “race issue”, so they eliminated an entire race.
I had never realized, growing up watching reruns of AGS followed by the Dick Van Dyke Show on channel 9 here in Chicago, that there were no blacks in Mayberry at all. When I heard that, I thought back and sure enough–there weren’t.
It changed the way I felt about the show. I lost alot of respect for it, after that.
Uh, have I broken any rules by responding to the loon here?
He specifically requested reasoning for the redaction, so I thought I’d oblige – but it’s awfully hard to explain things without basically saying “You’re a subliterate moron!” which I’m sure ain’t kosher.
Wasn’t that the episode Barney showed her his “bullet”?
This is quite an entertaining little battle. Even though I have never seen a single episode of the show, I will have to keep going back to the Wikipedia entry to see if Hackwrench ultimately gives up on trying to impose his idiocy.
Maybe so but the show was based on Andy Griffith’s boyhood home of Mt. Airy, NC. I don’t know what its population breakdown was at the time but it’s not unheard of for small towns to have no minorities. I grew up in such a town in Illinois in the '70s and it’s still 98.35% white as of the 2000 census.
I grew up a town in NJ that had two or three black kids out of about 500 in grades 4-8.
Well, DNFTT springs to mind. 
And perhaps you might as well throw caution to the winds and actually come right out with the “subliterate moron” label. Speaking for myself, I found your critiques and rebuttals to his “defenses” to be exemplars of courtesy.
I agree. They were courteous, precise, and well-detailed. Thus, I wonder about this Hackwrench person’s ability to comprehend it. What with his…grammatically challenged…writings, and the astonishing naivete shown by what he’s put in his personal profile, I have my doubts.
This has the potential to become one of the lamest edit wars ever.
Oh I know. I have responded to this nitwit on the talk page for the article. If reason doesn’t work I don’t think I will continue this already fairly lame edit war for very long. 
Thanks, kaylasdad and RobuSensei. What a waste of time trying to reason with that loon, though.
I have a feeling this person is one of the “very few” that’s going to end up with his IP blocked, and soon.
I certainly hope you are correct about that but I’m not letting my hopes get too high. On the vandalism page they lay out the guidelines for being blocked. Apparently stupidity isn’t one of the reasons. They more or less say to be considered a vandal you have to have the intent to screw up an article. This knucklehead actually seems to think he is improving it.
In the South though, it is somewhat uncommon. The black families would have lived in seperate areas, but the town would have been used by both.
But when this show aired, they would have had seperate water fountains and the show probably would have veered off in a less than breezy direction.
Right now, Surry County is like 7% black.
Well, the Wikipedia’s founder has told Hackwrench to change his ways, so being blocked seems like a definite possibility if the nonsense continues.
This page mentions that the show’s creators have “admitted” as much, but also points out that parts for African-Americans were written during the program’s later seasons. Even in the earliest days of The Andy Griffith Show, however, “black and white” was an apt description not only of the stock on which the program was filmed/taped, but of the (at least occasional) racial mix evident among background residents of Mayberry.
Incidentally, I watchedEpisode 87 the other day. The mountebank who calls himself “Colonel Harvey” is promoting an “Indian elixir” which turns out to be 85% alcohol. During his pitch, the “colonel” asks (more or less): “Have you ever seen a stressed-out Indian?” Andy looks to Barney and remarks, “I don’t know if I’ve ever seen an Indian!” Mount Airy (the model for Mayberry) is only about 200 miles from the town of Cherokee – of course, that drive takes about four hours even today, and was certainly more time-consuming 40 years ago.
Just to add to that, you say “the South”, but remember, the show takes place in western North Carolina, in the Appalachians, which doesn’t have, and never has had, a large black population. This isn’t the lowcountry, or southern Mississippi. There never were big plantations or a lot of slavery in the area (If you look at the 1860 census data, there were 8949 whites, 134 free blacks, and 1246 slaves in Surry County. Compare that with a place like Jones County, NC, near the Atlantic coast, which, while half Surry’s size, with a total population of 5730, compared to Surry’s 10,380, had about three times the number of slaves; 3415, compared to Surry’s 1246).
Was the ommission of blacks an attempt to avoid portraying the racial tensions in the 60s? Probably, but the absence of blacks isn’t as unrealistic there as it would be in other parts of the South.