Text Version of Norman Lear Lecture featuring Clips from “Sanford and Son”

Lee Marshall: If you’ll recall two weeks ago, we listened as Norman Lear defended his hit series ‘All in the Family’ from network accusations that the show was sending weekly messages out to the rest of the country—messages that the network didn’t necessarily agree with.  Or perhaps better put, messages the network sponsors didn’t necessarily agree with.  And as everyone knows when sponsors are unhappy, networks are unhappy.   But Lear stood his ground and struck back.  The only message that could ever be connected to ‘All in the Family’ was that it was REAL—and that it was this reality that was long overdue. 

The messages, he declared, were the ones given out over the last ten years on network television.  Look at what television had been saying to us –   Families are white and paternal.  Moreover, they always get along.  Always. There’s no angst, no failure, no concerns save whether or not Mom will burn the pot roast the night Dad’s boss drops by for dinner.  More importantly, there’s no sickness.  Everyone looks and feels great all the time.  And there to keep us that way, we’ve got cops and docs who never fail.  In short, argued Lear, television had given us soul-less vanilla—and the message in that was very clear.  The world is white, protestant, healthy… and upwardly mobile.  Virtually every show that aired during the Fifties and Sixties said so… and Norman Lear was about to change all that.  

To show you how unequal racial inequality really was…   The roster of the great and famous visited CBS’s ‘Person To Person’ in 1956—the ’60 Minutes’ of its day, hosted by the journalist of the century, Edward R. Murrow.  Everyone who was anyone was there.  Liberace, Pat Weaver, Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds, Jane Russell, Billy Graham, George Gallup, Jayne Mansfield, Admiral Richard Byrd, Rocky Marciano and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor… but conspicuously absent was Martin Luther King.  In truth, of the 96 Guests That Graced This Hallowed Ground Between 1954 And 1956, Only Two—Dizzy Gillespie And Cab Calloway—Were Black.   And this at a time when a second emancipation was spilling over our nation in every walk of life… every walk but television. 

CBS answered back, quickly pointing to its Negro ensemble series, ‘Amos n Andy’, one that had been a part of its schedule since 1929, when first appearing on radio.  The series that had then been written by two white men, Freeman Fisher Gosden (as Amos)… and Charles Correll (as Andy).  While on radio, no one really cared—or knew.  The men sounded Black and the writing, while racially slanderous by today’s standards, was some of the funniest work ever to appear on radio or television.  

When the series went to television in 1951, black actors graced the screen as leads for the first time—and the only time for the next 14 years.  It would not be until 1965 when another African-American actor would lead in a series that lasted more than one season—Bill Cosby (across from Robert Culp) in the NBC adventure series, ‘I Spy’.   And until 1971 when a black actress would star in hers—actress/singer Diahann Carroll in the short-lived NBC series, ‘Julia’, about a widowed nurse whose husband had died in Viet Nam leaving she and her son to fend for themselves.  Though ‘Julia’ was only to last the better part of two seasons, the show was incredibly popular with females everywhere.  When this series first went on, network executives were afraid that the public wouldn’t accept a series that had a wholly integrated cast that treated all the characters as equals.  Their fears were unfounded and ‘Julia’ helped lead the way for woman and blacks in the ‘70s—right there alongside Mary Tyler Moore herself.

Yet we have to go back a few years, back to 1963, to find the catalyst that sent Bill Cosby into the limelight two years later.  It’s a hell of a story that begins in Birmingham, Alabama, where a sequence of summer violence leads the charismatic Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. to organize a mammoth march on Washington in search of CIVIL RIGHTS.  The incredibly well-disciplined migration had its climax on August 28, 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial where King told 200,000 people at the Washington gathering and millions more via television and radio… “I have a dream.

Reverend King’s Dream became the dream of the youth of a nation.  In defiance of their parent’s pleas and threats, Freedom Marchers took off to help Blacks everywhere… including Meridian, Mississippi.  No one knew it at the time, of course, but King’s powerful speech and march that launched the struggle for an equal rights amendment, was planting the seeds for change in television as well.

If Martin Luther King was the QB who launched the Civil Rights at television, Norman Lear was the wide receiver who caught and ran it through the Seventies.  Lear followed his hit series ‘All in the Family’ with ‘Maude’ in September of ’72… and with ‘Good Times’ in February of ’74 and ‘The Jefferson’s’ a year later. Integration into television was a touchdown!  At one point during the ’75-’76 season, all five shows were in TV’s Top 10—a feat that’s never been accomplished before or since. More than a feather in Lear’s cap, it was a feather in ours.  We bought into them and never looked back.

Lear’s shows were incestuous—which is probably one of the nicest compliments that can be afforded a writer.  It means simply that they’re all character-driven rather than plot-driven… which means of course that the spin-offs are character-driven as well.  Take ‘Maude’ – Beatrice Arthur, playing the character by the same name was Edith Bunker’s liberal-leaning cousin, and proved such a good foil for Archie on ‘All in the Family’ that she received a spin-off series of her own. Strong-willed and opinionated, Maude dominated her household which included husband Walter (played by Bill Macy), and divorced daughter Carol (played by Adrienne Barbeau), allowing for the discussion of hot-button topics including politics, abortion, menopause and rape.  

By the end of the 1970s, the African-American was firmly and forever planted in leading roles across the tube.  But it wasn’t the end of the decade that produced the richest black comedy of the decade, but the beginning.  And once again, it was that all-pro wide receiver, Norman Lear catching the ball for a touchdown.  The series was called ‘Sanford & Son’, and starred stand-up comic Red Foxx as Fred Sanford an aging junk collector who ran his business from his home along with his dissatisfied son, Lamont Sanford (played by Desmond Wilson).  Red Foxx had a reputation for doing things his way and in many ways was a pioneer in television demanding that black directors be brought in to direct his series.  The series was based on a comedy in the U.K. called ‘Steptoe and Son’, only in this case the junk-dealing actors were black—as was most of the cast.  The series here in America showed that a black TV series could be an outright smash hit using only the simplest premise – A father and son who can’t live with each other nor without each other… and the series worked like a charm.  One of six gems that Lear unearthed in the ‘70s… but none of them individually greater than the residual sum of the whole… the integration of the African-American into mainstream television.  Let’s take a look at that change for ourselves.