![]() ![]() This focused attention a new on the old controversy and in the summer of 1964, when a Chicago station announced that it was resuming reruns, there were widespread and bitter protests. Soon afterward, an official of the Kenya government announced that the program would be banned in his country. The turning point came in 1963 when CBS Films, which was still calling Amos 'n' Andy one of its most widely circulated shows, announced that the program had been sold to two African countries, Kenya and Western Nigeria. Amos 'n' Andy drew sizable audiences during its two-year CBS run, and was widely rerun on local stations for the next decade. Madame Queen was Andy's friend and Lightnin' was the slow-moving janitor at the lodge.Ĭivil rights groups such as the NAACP had long protested the series as fostering racial stereotypes, to little avail. remember, we is brothers in that great fraternity, the Mystic Knights of the Sea."Īmos was actually a rather minor character, the philosophical cabdriver who narrated most of the episodes. More often than not, Kingfish would get them both into trouble, but win Andy's cooperation with an appeal to fraternal spirit-"Holy mackerel, Andy! We's all got to stick together in dis heah thing. The Kingfish was constantly trying to swindle him in one way or another, but the "big dummy" (as Kingfish called him) kept coming back for more. Andy Brown was the most gullible of the lodge members, a husky, well-meaning, but rather simple soul. ![]() Mama, in particular, didn't trust him at all. ![]() That put him at odds not only with them, but with his wife, Sapphire, and her mother. As head of the Mystic Knights of the Sea Lodge, where he held the position of "Kingfish," he got most of the lodge brothers involved in his schemes. Set in Harlem, Amos 'n' Andy centered around the activities of George Stevens, a conniving character who was always looking for a way to make a fast buck. Only Ernestine Wade and Amanda Randolph were brought over from the radio cast. Since they were white, and the entire cast of the show on television had to be black, a much ballyhooed search was held, over a period of four years, to find the right actors to play the parts. The series was produced by Freemad Gosden and Charles Correll, the two actors who had created and starred in the radio version. But at the end of Amos, where it hits Andy, is the last of the original Kline-built homes. It looks ready to fall over. All the houses along Andy are long gone.Amos 'n' Andy - 131 Mp3 Downloads Available "Amos 'n' Andy", is one of the most popular and long-running radio programs of all time, was brought to television in the summer of 1951. But it no longer stands: In 2011 Dallas City Hall built for Pauline Hamilton a modest brick replacement as part of its home repair program. The family's original home was one half of a wooden duplex, which had an outhouse. ![]() Pauline gathered $6 from every family to pave the streets. When the Hamiltons moved in, Amos and Andy were short, dead-end dirt roads where residents couldn't even park their cars. And if indeed Kline intended this to be an all-black neighborhood, which it originally was, he "probably thought it would be amusing to name streets there after Amos 'n' Andy characters," Ely said. That may not be the only reason. Melvin Ely, a history professor at the College of William & Mary who wrote 1991's definitive The Adventures of Amos 'n' Andy: A Social History of an American Phenomenon, said Monday that many business owners in black neighborhoods then referenced Amos and Andy. Tim Moore, at top, was Kingfish, Spencer Williams, while Alvin Childress was Andy. at left, Dallas filmmaker Spencer Williams as Andy. The cast of CBS' version of Amos 'n' Andy included. His son William told this newspaper in 1990 that Kline was a fan of the radio show and just "came up with Amos and Andy on the spur of the moment." And they were the first people on TV who looked like us." But I was not offended because it was our legacy. "This was long before we had streets named for Martin Luther King Jr. "We actually thought it was nice, living on streets named for African-Americans," Gloria said, referring to the television show. And it "depicted the black family at a time when no one else was doing so," writer Trey Ellis told The Root in 2016. If nothing else, Amos 'n' Andy was the only program that exposed white Americans to black doctors and lawyers and a burgeoning middle class. The Hamiltons were among the black families who actually didn't find the show offensive. "We knew who we were," Gloria Hamilton Johnson said Monday. ![]()
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