Amos 'n' Andy on Television (Joseph Duffey)

 Amos 'n' Andy on Television (Joseph Duffey)

The original Amos 'n' Andy was a radio broadcast that was quite successful. In "Restoring Whiteness, Sanitizing Blackness And Authenticating Modern Artifice: Pepsodent Toothpaste And The Visual Branding of Amos 'n' Andy" by Ben Medeiros, "In a sense, then Amos 'n' Andy was a visual phenomenon perhaps even before the radio narrative was heard...the marketing of the characters had sought to make them the 'face' of blackface minstrel comedy..." (Medeiros 2018: 345). The radio broadcast, played by white actors Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, were unashamed in their representation of black stereotypes.

However, the show would have aspirations to be brought to television in the late 1940s. The initial plan was for the characters of Amos, Andy, and Kingfish to be voiced by Gosden and Correll while the black actors on television would lip sync. However, the men would decide that they were not fit for the visual roles. CBS would debut the program's television debuted on June 28, 1951, and Alvin Childress (Amos), Spencer Williams (Andy), and Tim Moore (Kingfish) would be the African-Americans to play the characters. The show's television legacy with CBS was said to have mixed success. As the show received high ratings, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) would immediately oppose the show. According to Doug Battema in "Pictures of a Bygone Era: The Syndication of Amos 'n' Andy, 1954-66," "The characters, wrote the NAACP's Roy Wilkins, 'say to millions of white Americans who know nothing about Negroes, and to millions of white children who are learning about life, that this is the way Negroes are'..." (Battema 2006: 12). Numerous black Americans like Wilkins were not fond of such a portrayal especially with black actors acting these harmful stereotypes. With the show garnering such ratings, one could understand why African Americans would be dissatisfied.