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September 7, 2027 will mark 100 years from the day when electronic television made its first appearance on Earth.  To generate interest in the Centennial,  this website and accompanying podcast are going to Count Down the Top 100 Milestones from the First 100 Years of Television over 100 weeks until September 7, 2027.
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On the radio, nobody can tell you’re not wearing blackface. 

Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll were veterans of vaudeville when they first met in the early 1920s. When they started working together, they staged tent shows that often included regional dialects in their routines.

In their act, Gosden and Correll drew on a tradition that stretched back to the early 1800s, when white performers darkened their skin with burnt cork and exaggerated their lips in a theatrical practice known as “blackface.” They found their place on stage in a uniquely American form of traveling amusement called “minstrel shows.” It was theater built on ridicule and racist caricature of an enslaved population, but it packed houses for decades before and after the Civil War.

On the minstrel circuit, Gosden and Correll developed their comic rapport in skits that leaned heavily on unflattering Black stereotypes: risible dialect, laziness, scheming, and superstition. 

Gosden – who had learned wireless operation in the Navy – began experimenting with radio to promote the act. It wasn’t long before he and Correll took the act itself to the air.  

By 1925, they were performing regularly on Chicago’s independent radio station WGN, where they hosted a program called Correll and Gosden, The Life Of The Party – a 15-minute, ad-libbed comedy that featured the duo performing in various dialects, including the exaggerated ethnic jargon and speech patterns that they’d honed in blackface on the minstrel and vaudeville circuits. 

In 1926, Gosden and Correll started performing on WGN as Sam ‘n’ Henry, a serialized radio show built around those same Black caricatures. Gosden and Correll created, wrote, and performed the show – establishing a template for white actors portraying Black characters in farcically comic situations.

After a contract dispute with WGN, Gosden and Correll took their act to NBC’s Chicago affiliate, WMAQ – but for legal reasons they had to leave the character names behind. 

Old Origins, New Show

In March, 1928 they relaunched the show with a new name: Amos ‘n’ Andy. 

By the early 1930s, Amos ’n’ Andy was the most popular radio program in America. Every Monday through Saturday, families tuned their radios to the show’s 15-minute, serialized story arcs. By the end of the decade, the show regularly reached more than 40 million listeners – Black and white – spawning merchandise, films, and phonograph recordings.

But beyond the laughter, Amos ’n’ Andy quickly became a cultural flashpoint in a country still seething in the cauldron of racial segregation – and just beginning to reckon with the cultural impact of mass media.  

Within the Black community, the response to Amos ‘n’ Andy was always complicated. Some listeners accepted the show as a rare portrayal of any kind of Black life in America; others denounced its depiction of Black people as shiftless, scheming buffoons, and for perpetuating the kind of stereotypes that were better left as relics of slavery’s past and the Jim Crow present.  Civil rights groups, most notably the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), condemned the program for promoting images of Black Americans as figures of comic ridicule rather than serious individuals worthy of full participation in American society.

Nevertheless, Amos ‘n’ Andy aired on NBC until 1938, when CBS lured it away in a lucrative sponsorship deal with Campbell Soup. 

Old Show, New Network

CBS had gone on the air only two years after RCA launched NBC, but its ambitious founder and president, William S. Paley, spent nearly two decades trying to surpass his rival in prestige and ratings. The rivalry ramped up when CBS staged what became known as the “Paley raids” – luring many of NBC’s radio stars to CBS with very favorable financial arrangements. ^⁠1

Among the assets that Paley pursued were Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll and their creation, NBC’s flagship program, Amos ‘n’ Andy.  

After losing the rights to Sam ‘n’ Henry when they left WGN for WMAQ, Gosden and Correll had been careful to preserve their ownership of Amos ‘n’ Andy. But in 1948 – after airing the show on its radio network for nearly a decade – CBS made them an offer they could hardly refuse. For $2.5 million (~$34 million in 2025 dollars) CBS obtained all the rights to Gosden and Correll’s creation –  the characters, the scripts, and creative control.  Though set for life, Gosden and Correll stayed with the radio show as performers under contract to CBS and continued to write and consult on scripts and production.

New Medium, New Cast

After securing all the rights, CBS moved ahead with plans to bring Amos ’n’ Andy to television in the early 1950s. And, obviously, the first decision the network had to make was what to do about the casting. It was painfully apparent that two white actors performing Black characters in the audio equivalent of blackface was not going to translate well to television. 

With Gosden and Correll still writing and consulting from the wings, CBS called up a cast of Black actors: 

• Tim Moore as George “Kingfish” Stevens
• Spencer Williams as Andy Brown
• Alvin Childress as Amos Jones
• Ernestine Wade as Kingfish’s wife Sapphire
• Nick Stewart as Willie “Lightnin'” Jefferson.  

Other regulars included 

• Johnny Lee as Algonquin J. Calhoun
• Jester Hairston as Henry Van Porter
• Sisters Lilian and Amanda Randolph as Madame Queen and Mama Stevens

… rounding out the largest ensemble of all-Black actors ever seen on early network television.^⁠2

Amos ‘n’ Andy was engulfed in controversy from the moment it premiered on CBS-TV on Thursday, June 28, 1951.

For as long as it was on the radio, Amos ’n’ Andy’s racial caricatures were “invisible.”  White audiences could imagine the characters however they pleased, and Black audiences could, at least, enjoy the storylines without the actual sight of white actors in blackface.^⁠3 

By casting an all-Black ensemble for the TV show, CBS managed to circumvent the literal blackface problem, but Amos ‘n’ Andy still embodied all the racial stereotypes that grew out its origins in those  19^th century minstrel shows. 

The NAACP and other civil rights groups immediately denounced the series for perpetuating those demeaning, one-dimensional caricatures. The Association launched a national campaign demanding the show be taken off the air, forcefully – and effectively – arguing that it portrayed outdated lampoons of African Americans as lazy, ignorant, dishonest, and clownish. The NAACP went so far as to issue a formal report, The Factual Analysis of the Amos ’n’ Andy TV Show, which itemized the demeaning portrayals and emphasized the broader harm they posed to public perception and the social standing of Black Americans.

NAACP branches across the country urged their members to contact local CBS affiliates, sponsors, and advertisers to demand the show be pulled. They organized letter-writing drives, community meetings, and editorials in Black newspapers. The campaign gained momentum when prominent voices in the Black press and civil rights community echoed the concerns, framing the show not as harmless entertainment but as a modern extension of the minstrel stereotypes.  

In the radio era it was easier for the networks – NBC until 1938, CBS from 1939 onward – to absorb most of the controversy that surrounded the show. But once it went on TV, CBS owned the property outright and was solely responsible for its content and its impact.  That meant that the steadily escalating protests were directed at a single obvious target:  William S. Paley and his network. 

The Tarnished Tiffany

Amos ’n’ Andy earned high ratings for CBS, but the backlash was too much for the network and its sponsors to ignore. The NAACP campaigns made Amos ’n’ Andy one of the first flashpoints over the continuing racial bias that persisted in the United States nearly a century after the Civil War.  And for Bill Paley, Amos ‘n’ Andy became a personal tarnish on his efforts to brand CBS as the  “Tiffany of Networks^⁠4.” 

CBS never issued a formal apology, but the program was quietly canceled in 1953 after just two seasons and 65 episodes. 

Those 65 episodes were enough for the show to live on well beyond its brief life on the network. In syndication – where programs are licensed to individual stations rather than a single network and its affiliates – reruns aired well into the 1960s. The program continued to be especially popular in southern markets, where local station owners were less inclined to be persuaded by the NAACP.  

Black leaders in the urban North were more successful in pushing for the show’s cancellation, and the momentum of the civil rights movement in the 1960s made the show’s continued airing untenable. CBS – which still owned the show – quietly withdrew the series from syndication in 1966 and has kept it off the air ever since.^⁠5

The legacy of Amos ’n’ Andy is as complicated as the history of the country that spawned both the medium and its content. To its benefit, Gosden, Correll, and CBS created the first television show to feature a recurring, all-Black cast.  On the other hand, the characters those actors were cast to play were shaped by decades of racist tropes and degrading parody.

Amos ‘n’ Andy last flickered through the ether in 1966, but clips and whole episodes can be found today on YouTube.^⁠6 

Nevertheless, Amos ‘n’ Andy vanishing from the airwaves cleared the path for more authentic representations of Black life in America.  On September 17, 1968 – just two years after the last episode of Amos ‘n’ Andy aired in any kind of broadcast syndication – NBC presented Diahann Carroll as a widowed nurse raising her son in Julia, the first American TV series to star a Black woman in a non-servant role. ^⁠7In the decade that followed, The Jeffersons, Good Times, and The Cosby Show would offer a broader – if still contested – spectrum of Black life on television.

The Medium is Becoming The Message

From the first century of television, Amos ’n’ Andy remains the archetype of a cautionary tale. It asks us to look closely at who gets to tell stories, how those stories are framed, and what we choose to laugh at.   And it is fitting to remember that while Amos ‘n’ Andy‘s white creators went on to wealth and acclaim, the actors who portrayed their characters on television went on to lives of modest obscurity. 

In some respects, the evolution of Amos ‘n’ Andy embodies both the medium and its audience. In its earliest days, television reflected the status quo. With the imperative to reach larger audiences with higher production costs, the medium began to reflect the changes that enveloped the postwar nation.  And as television emerged from its late 1940s infancy into its troubled adolescence in the 1960s, it became a driving force in the changes to come.  

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Speaking of YouTube: In this 1986 documentary, George Kirby “takes a fond look at the controversial radio and television show and attempts to determine if the series was a positive first step for Blacks into the world of entertainment or not, and examines the events that led to the show’s expulsion from the airwaves in 1966 after complaints from civil rights activists. Highlighted with rare clips of radio show creators Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, and clips from the Amos n’ Andy TV series. Commentary by Alvin Childress, Ernestine Wade, Reverend Jesse Jackson, Redd Foxx, Marla Gibbs, and Henry Lee Moon.

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¹ Among the stars Paley poached from NBC were Jack Benny, Burns & Allen, and Edgar Bergen.

² Research affirms that The Amos ’n’ Andy Show was the first television series to feature an all-Black cast—and remained unique in that regard for the next two decades. A 1949 CBS show, Uptown Jubilee (also known as Harlem Jubilee or Sugar Hill Times), was an all-Black variety program, but it wasn’t a serialized sitcom and aired only briefly, for five episodes.

³ While Gosden and Correll continued to play the principal characters for as long as Amos ‘n’ Andy aired on the radio, by the late 1940s, Black actors took their place for in-person promotional appearances – but the voices were still two white men.

⁴ It’s not clear when CBS started calling itself “The Tiffany of Networks.” It started shortly after World War II when Bill Paley started to cultivate an air of prestige and quality for his networks news and entertainment programming. The branding may have gained some traction in the mid 1950s when CBS conducted color-TV demonstrations in a building formerly occupied by a branch of  Tiffany & Co., the upper-crust jewelry and fashion brand.

⁵ Like its competitors NBC (now part of Comcast Universal) and ABC (now part of Disney), CBS has gone through numerous corporate reconfigurations. As of 2025, the newly merged Paramount Skydance Corporation owns CBS – and the continuing rights to the vanquished Amos ‘n’ Andy.

⁶ That Amos ‘n’ Andy has found new life on the Internet is a reflection of the challenges of the 21st century media environment.  CBS still owns the rights, so the presence of episodes on YouTube is unauthorized. They have been uploaded by private collectors from old syndication prints, kinescopes, and videotapes that circulated before 1966.  Though CBS has not re-released or licensed the series, its enforcement is inconsistent; uploads often get taken down when flagged, but many slip through because of the sheer volume of material and the spotty nature of copyright policing online.

⁷ At time of this writing, the premier of Julia on NBC in 1968 is slated to appear as #46 in the Countdown to the Centennial.

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