Why couldnt classic tv shows have had more black characters?

Cafe Society
1

I’m a big fan of classic tv shows. Andy Griffith, I Love Lucy, Gilligan’s Island, Beverly Hillbillies, Leave it to Beaver, etc… But when I watch the old reruns I’m often embarrassed about how few black actors were on them. For example LITB had only one black actor in its 7 year run, and she was the Rutherford’s maid. There was also only one episode featuring a hispanic, a boy Beaver brings home from school but speaks no English. Andy Griffith, a tv show set in the south, had the occasional black actor in the background but only one with a speaking part who appeared in an episode of Mayberry RFD as Opies football coach (now the spinoff - Gomer Pyle USMC had an interracial military unit). Beverly Hillbillies - well their is a show that often featured the confederate flag but actually did somewhat better with one episode featuring Ellie bringing home a black friend from school and later, the girls 2 black brothers (LA Rams football players) coming by and mistaking the Clampetts backyard old cabin as a kind of racist ploy. Grannies “vittles” of course wins the young men over. On I Love Lucy, one black person appears as a railroad porter but I cannot fathom why a top Black performer like Ella Fitzgerald could not have performed with Rickies band. Hogan’s Heroes featured a black character who had equal billing but it’s like they were confused what to do with him since sneaking him out of the camp around Germany would have been tricky.

I never watched it but Jack Benny did have a black house servant named Rochester.

Thing is all those shows featured numerous guest stars, why couldnt a couple of them been black? Ok I can see not wanting there to be an inter-racial couple but why not a coworker or classmate? Were advertisers that hateful they would have pulled sponsorship?

OTOH classic “Little Rascals” even back in the 1930’s featured black and white kids, and even the occasional Asian, going to school together and being friends.

2

I don’t have an answer, but a slight nitpick: Roy Glenn also appeared in an ep of “Mayberry RFD.”

Intersting thing about Ivan Dixon’s character in “Hogan’s Heroes” was that he seemed to be cast just to have a Black Body. His character was pretty straight-laced, as opposed to comedid. Also, as I read from one person, about all he ever did was tell Col. Hogan, “Message from London, Colonel,” or “So what do we do, now?”

I think shortly before “Beverly Hillbillies” had Black guest stars, I saw a Black extra in a crowd scene taken outside the Commerce Bank.

Other than that, I got nuthin’.

3

for as “liberal” and “progressive” Hollywood acts like these days, back then it was quite exclusionary. If it wasn’t, people like Moses Horwitz, Louis Feinberg, and Amos Muzyad Yakhoob Kairouz might have been able to perform under their real names…

4

The OP lists selected shows but there are others. The early 1970s TV show, Room 222, aired on ABC on Friday nights and was part of a famous and memorable lineup:

8:00pm: The Brady Bunch
8:30pm: The Partridge Family
9:00pm: Room 222
9:30pm: The Odd Couple
10:00pm: Love, American Style

Room 222 had key African Americans as school instructors in the cast.

There are others like The Mod Squad and I, Spy.

But yes when I think of older classics like Hazel, Father Knows Best, Marcus Welby, M.D., The Donna Reed Show, Dennis the Menace, That Girl, Family Affair, and others, they were very “white-washed”.

When listing these shows I’m trying to remember the ones I watched in black-and-white TV, before shows came out in color. Pun not intended.

Why, for example, couldn’t there have been The Donna Summers Show?

5

I’ve never seen any of those shows, being before my time and not an American, but in 1940 around 90% of Americans classified as ‘white’, 1960 = 88%, now = 65-70%, by the end of the century people won’t imagine America to be a white country.

So maybe those racist old Hollywood producers were merely reflecting their reality rather than indulging in wicked ignoral ?

And I’m gonna say being lynched would beat being not cast in a sitcom for me at least.

6

An interesting article (here), titled Blacks and White TV describes the late 1960s as the golden age for African Americans on TV.

7

Uh…yeah? And the network executives, producers, the directors, the actors, and a whole lot of folks watching at home, too. While these shows were on the air, black children were getting hosed down streets and being attacked by dogs by the government, with plenty of TV-watching folks nodding their heads in approval.

And if they weren’t hateful themselves, at the very least they were too afraid not to cater to hateful people.

8

The article mentioned upstream (and, here)
is interesting. Mentioning Bill Cosby in I Spy:

Also…

9

White people thought Black people were very different from themselves, and in many ways inferior: either as a matter of heredity or cultural development. Racists thought it was hereditary, Liberals thought they were just 1,000 years behind.

Therefore, they should have their own place, and Whites theirs. It was considered the polite thing. We forget what the concept of “polite” was before the advent of “cool.” Politeness encompassed class as well as race restriction, so as to keep things “nice,” and going smoothly.

White people preferred to turn a blind eye on Black society. If examined it showed nasty things like violence (“they all carry straight razors”), gambling, substance abuse and (gasp) sex outside of marriage. Whites liked their Blacks invisible and handing them towels and pouring coffee.

But what about the actual Liberals in Hollywood? Basically, like the Blacks, fuck them too. In the early 1950’s, McCarthyism chased social activism our of Hollywood. After the June 1963 March of Washington, the race issue could not be ignored. But in the 10 year interim, people didn’t want trouble. They’d had their fill in the Depresson and WWII. And the conformity and complacency showed: imagine if the Housewives of Orange County, et al. were their equivalent middle age women in the 50’s, and wanted to wear silly little hats and flower print Mother Hubbards? That shows how different things were.

Even if you wanted to showcase the great stories that Black life and culture offered you had two choices; patronize it to the point of racist caricature (cue “Zippedy-do-dah”), or write shows about the actual experiences of Black people. And that would have to include how shitty Black people were treated by white people. Problematic.

Julia (post-1963) made a facile attempt at this. In once episode, her son had been called a terrible word at school. It was obvious what that unspoken word was, and it gave Diahann Carroll the opportunity to deliver a Emmy-clip monologue about the first time she was called, using the word for the only time on the episode or the entire series, “a nigger.”

But then at the end, it was revealed that the word that he’d been called was “fatso.” Ha ha ha, kids say the darndest things, and we white people are really good at heart.

10

First of all, you have to remember that TV shows on networks were primarily vehicles to sell advertising. As such, you are very sensitive to audience complaints, and there was a fear that by portraying a Black actor in a role, you’d get complaints from viewers and stations in the South. This had at least some validity; there were often complaints about Blacks appearing on TV outside a few well-defined roles (servant, entertainers). A Black lead actor might cause affiliates to drop the show, which would cause lower ratings and thus less ad revenue. Before the mid-60s, the networks didn’t want to offend their southern affiliates, so they avoided it.

I Spy ran into this problem, but NBC must have thought that the show would be successful enough to make up for it.

The problem then becomes one of popularity. If you check the list above*, only a a small number of the shows listed are considered “classic TV.” Most have been shown in syndication, of course, but only 3-5 of them are well known today. It just happens that most of the shows that are still part of the culture are not on the list. It’s not that the classic shows didn’t use Black actors, but just not as regulars.**

Re Our Gang (the Little Rascals): Black children were always one of the acceptable portrayals, along with servants. See Donald Bogle’s classic discussion of Blacks in film, Toms, Coons, Mulattos, Mammies, and Bucks.

*Note that the first two shows on the list are variety shows. You could feature Leslie Uggams on them because she was performing songs, not portraying a character.

**The Dick van Dyke show is pioneering in this respect, making strong statements on racial equality, and even casting Greg Morris as a character whose race had nothing to do with the plot. His Sticks Mandalay in “Bupkis” could have been either white or black. Morris, BTW, was very active as a guest star before being cast in Mission: Impossible.

11

The other thing to keep in mind is that it was absolutely taboo for whites and blacks of different genders to even touch each other. So, if you had a black guy on a show, you are limited to how you can have him interact with any of the white women on the show. The famous “inter-racial kiss” between Kirk and Uhuru was ground breaking, even though the camera panned in such a way that you couldn’t actually see the kiss (and it was done under duress).

It was only in 1967 that the SCOTUS stuck down miscegenation laws, and at the time there was overwhelming opposition, socially, to interracial marriage among whites even in states where it had historically been legal.

12

Let’s not forget Amos and Andy.

The problem was society was segregated, and TV reflected that. Segregation didn’t have to be the law, social segregation was everywhere.

13

For the same reason that I, in the 1950s, had no black friends. So if my life had been filmed as a TV drama, there would have been no black “actors”. This was not from choice. America was in fact highly segretaged in the classic TV era – by law in the south and by social custom in the north. I grew up in a city that had no black residents, and there were no black children in my school… I went to college in the south in the 50’s, and of course I had no black classmates.

TV shows of the 50’s were, at least to some degree, a reflection of the actual demographics that existed on the ground. Black were then marginalized into menial, backgrouind members of society, and were not shopkeepers of deputies or school teachers, nor even next door neighbors. Mayberry was in the segregationist South.

14

Because people were segregated back then. And anyone who says different wasn’t there.

When Dick Clark signed Chubby Checker to sing Peppermint Twist on Bandstand, he was told “You know he’s a colored boy.” Dick replied “I’m not interested in his color. I’m only interested in his music.” Fortunately, he had enough clout to do this.

15

So was Different Strokes and Webster the first fusion/white savior shows?

16

Because of segregation, there *were *black shopkeepers & schoolteachers–in black neighborhoods. Also black lawyers & doctors. Not deputies, no. And they were only next door neighbors in “their own” neighborhoods.

In 1956,the great Nat King Cole had his own TV show. But it could not last because there were no nationwide advertisers–absolutely necessary in those days.

We certainly still have problems, but some things have definitely improved. (Like Sleepy Hollow, a witty batshit fantasy with black & white costars and a diverse supporting cast. Diverse enough that race is part of a character; nobody is “The Black Character.”)

17

I am kind of boggled by this thread - that it can even be asked seems to indicate a profound lack of experience with the race history of the US.

The really short answer is “racism,” which was an entirely different force in the 1940s-1960s, maybe even a little into the 1970s. Any answer - like those above - really boils down to very general surveys of how blacks were perceived and presented in mass entertainment. TV is (or at least was) a very conservative industry, trying to please as many people as possible with every offering, and with only three or four channels to do it. Leaving blacks out of a cast offended no one of consequence - that selfsame black minority and a smallish number of racism-conscious lib’rals. Including blacks could offend a large swath of viewers, especially through the South. Including empowered, story-centric or educated blacks could result in significant boycotts of the episode, program or sponsors.

While this might be before the birth of many Dopers, it represents the very real situation within the last fifty years. Look at the famous example of the interracial kiss on Star Trek - it’s still discussed as a big watershed moment, not the least because the studio and broadcaster chose to go against a large and still-powerful audience segment to run it.

Ingrained racism. All answers devolve to that simple answer, plus the endless ramifications that involved “money.”

18

Over the last month, I’ve had two friends my age that said their parents didn’t allow them to watch The Simpsons when it first came out. I always watched it, but from what I remember, the kids who weren’t allowed to watch The Simpsons watched The Cosby Show. Both times I said, “You must have been a Cosby kid.” Both people responded that they weren’t allowed to watch The Cosby Show because it had black people. They aren’t racist and their parents have never done or said anything to make me think they’re racist, so it’s strange. I guess 25 years ago was a different time?

19

That’s a little late, but as an extension of how white America saw things for the first 20-30 years of the television industry… (utterly straight face) Ya think? :smiley:

20

I was surprised that people still thought like that in the late 80s.