“Always the goat”
On May 15, 1931, Miss E.S. Maury sat down to write a letter to the editor on behalf of the Negro History Club of Plainfield, NJ.
“Why should we always be the goat?” she asked. “Other races have gone through the same metamorphosis that we are experiencing; somehow or other, we seem different in every way to all other races that are or have ever existed.”
This was sarcasm, directed at the most popular radio show in the United States at the time: Amos’n’Andy. The show broadcast for 15 minutes every weeknight over the NBC network. More than half of all radio listeners, it was estimated, tuned in — some 40 million people, eager to hear the ongoing saga of two men who had migrated from the South to Chicago.
The characters were Black, but the men who wrote and voiced the program were white: Charles Correll and Freeman Gosden, who claimed personal expertise in “Negro dialect,” though their version was filled with malapropisms. Their speech patterns, E.S. Maury wrote, made no sense.
“When will people realize that there is no Negro dialect? Any one who has ever been South knows that all the people of a given section speak the same dialect irrespective of color. But Amos’n’Andy have their own dialect. No section of the South speaks as they [do],” she said.
Her letter was one of many responses to a campaign by the Black-owned newspaper the Pittsburgh Courier to get Amos’n’Andy taken off the air. That campaign did not succeed, but it’s worth revisiting given the Continuous Wave theme of the month: harm. (See my previous post on Soviet propaganda here).
The Courier letter-writers used the word “harm” a lot when talking about what Amos’n’Andy had wrought on their daily lives. Their children were being mocked, their businesses denigrated, their evening routines ruined as the world seemed to stop and listen to a show that they felt humiliated them.
For editor Robert Vann, the sheer gall of it all was enraging.
“The men portraying the characters are white. The company employing Amos'n'Andy is white. The people reaping the financial gain from the characterizations are all white,” he pointed out in an editorial. “But the people who are getting the black eye out of it all are the Negroes of this country.”
The Pittsburgh Courier, June 27, 1931.
Amos’n’Andy was more than a radio show; from its earliest success, it spawned movies, toys, and even candy bars. In the 1940s, it became a weekly sitcom, and in the early 1950s, a short-lived but notorious television show with Black actors (which is how many people today remember it).
But the early radio program is what had the biggest impact on the future of audio. Broadcasting was less than a decade old when the show arose in the mid-1920s — almost everything else on the air around it was amateur music, vaudeville theatrics, and scholarly lectures. Despite its outward resemblance to a minstrel stage show, Amos’n’Andy was a serialized, character-based drama, the first format like that on air, from which everything else would follow, from soap opera to sitcom.
That confronts us with an ugly truth: Every person now who tells stories in audio has to grapple with the existence, and the success, of this foundational program. What does it mean that the first Americans to succeed at holding widespread listener attention, day after day, were racial imposters? And which voices had to be suppressed for the Amos’n’Andy phenomenon to thrive and grow?
A word about images
That vintage image of an Extremely White Family enjoying A&A is bad enough, but click on the links above, and you will find Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll with their faces slathered in black greasepaint, yukking it up in silly hats. I am not posting those photos here — because those images really do cause a lot of people, including me, pain. But I also think they make the show too easy for us to dismiss, and thus not think about further.
Look, I am white and grew up in the American South — in fact, in a city with two streets named Amos and Andy. Although I don’t remember ever seeing the Amos’n’Andy TV show, I am quite certain my grandparents listened to the radio version and enjoyed it, judging from a family argument I witnessed in which minstrel figures like Sambo and Aunt Jemima came up, and they defended them as “figures of love.”
That made me feel ashamed, and that sense of shame re-emerged when I approached this topic. I tried to listen to old recordings of A&A and found them awful. But also, E.S. Maury was right — no one actually spoke the way people did on that show. I couldn’t understand half of what the characters were talking about.
When I finally got into the Amos’n’Andy scholarly discourse — there is a lot! — I found it encouraging that there is so much analysis of this program. Whether we like it or not, the legacy of Amos’n’Andy is much messier, more instructive, and ultimately more disturbing than its greasepaint surface implies.
Charles Correll and Freeman Gosden in the 1920s.
Funnies on the air
Like many American men in early radio, Freeman Gosden had been trained as a “wireless” radio operator for the Navy during World War I. He’d grown up in a neighborhood of Richmond, Virginia adjacent to a Black neighborhood. He said he based the guileless, kindhearted character that eventually became Amos Jones on Black men he knew in Richmond.
Charles Correll came from Peoria, Illinois, and was an outgoing theater ham, singer and pianist. He would play the deeper voiced, somewhat lonely but expedient Andy Brown.
The original concept of the show started with a call for pitches. A manager at the Chicago Tribune-owned station WGN (“World’s Greatest Newspaper”) thought of exporting the popular serialized format of comic strips to broadcasting. Gosden and Correll were the station’s in-house “artists,” and they worked up a pitch.
Both had performed some minstrel shtick on the theater circuit, but it wasn’t their main act. However, their radio pitch centered around two “blackface” characters. Why?
“We chose black characters because blackface comics could tell funnier stories than whiteface comics,” Correll told an interviewer late in life.
Here it’s useful to bring up this essay, which argues that white minstrel performances, both in America and in Europe, served as a “rite of reversal,” a carnivalesque event in which “the participants relieve tension by pretending to be what they are not.”
The “tension” that Gosden and Correll faced, they were quite clear, was the possibility of failing as merely themselves on the radio. They felt they could take more risks as faux-Black characters. They never tried to hide the fact that they were white, but they figured they could discard their Black vocal masks and try something else if this effort failed.
But as we know, it didn’t fail, and soon the brand-new radio network NBC scooped up the duo in 1928 with a yearly contract for $50,000 each. The sponsor, the toothpaste Pepsodent, wanted a more traditional minstrel show but, as radio historian Elizabeth McLeod writes, “Correll and Gosden vigorously opposed this idea… They well realized that they owed their success to their innovative serial-drama technique.” (45)
Sheet music photo from the mid 1920s.
While Miss E.S. Maury and others were signing petitions and sending letters against Amos’n’Andy to the Pittsburgh Courier in 1931, Gosden and Correll kept on doing what they did every day: retreating to the two-man, imaginary Black netherworld where the show lived in their heads.
Correll and Gosden proved to be the first great radio actors, perfecting a subdued, naturalistic approach to microphone acting that differed sharply from the broad manner that stage actors brought to the air — and their continued insistence on complete privacy while creating their scripts and broadcasting their episodes contributed to this manner of performance. Each afternoon, behind the locked door of their private office on the twenty-fourth floor of Chicago’s Palmolive Building, Correll and Gosden used free association and improvisation to create their daily scripts. With Correll seated at the typewriter and Gosden pacing the floor, the performers assumed the personalities of their characters as they worked out each line and situation.
McLeod has done an epic amount of original research on the radio version of Amos’n’Andy, consulting thousands of scripts, doing interviews, and listening to recordings — all with the clear purpose of rehabilitating the early show’s reputation. She points out in this published exchange that several Black characters Gosden and Correll created for Amos’n’Andy were professionals who did not speak in dialect. McLeod argues that for the time, this represented a sonic defiance of the color line.
“No one forced Gosden and Correll to incorporate such characters,” she writes, calling this choice “subversive.”
But another scholar of the radio show (I told you, there is discourse!), Melvin Patrick Ely, doubts A&A accomplished anything against segregation in the South, or anti-Black discrimination in the North:
Amos’n’Andy became a national sensation partly because it played to whites’ curiosity about the changing life of their black fellow citizens. But neither that curiosity nor the novel features of the show itself ever made much of a dent in the racial fantasy-world in which most white Americans lived…it almost never showed its characters’ race having any effect on their lives.
Crossing the line
Those words “racial fantasy-world” are key, I think. Gosden and Correll were using their voices to construct a parallel racial universe. They learned as they went along where its real boundaries lay.
In December 1931, Amos’n’Andy ran a brief story line which required the two performers to use their “white” voices as police detectives interrogating an innocent Amos as a suspect in a murder. Amos must maintain his composure in the face of mounting insults and threats.
These episodes, Elizabeth McLeod writes, “were by far the rawest and most racially charged scenes in the entire series. They resulted in an official complaint to NBC and [sponsor] Pepsodent by the National Association of Chiefs of Police… In presenting these scenes, Correll and Gosden crossed a line they would not cross again.”
Given the timing, just after the peak of the Pittsburgh Courier’s crusade against the show, one has to wonder if they took the risk in the first place thanks to pressure from the Black public. We’ll probably never know — but if so, that was the only tangible result of the newspaper’s crusade. The Courier’s petition to radio regulators fell on deaf ears. One look at these guys and you can probably guess why.
Such a base purpose
Some of the letters to the Pittsburgh Courier reveal that the Black community was not united in its opposition to Amos’n’Andy. The show did have Black fans, and Gosden and Correll were careful to cultivate them, headlining charity picnics like one put on in 1931 by the Chicago Defender, whose publisher was an old friend.
The letters that most haunt me are not so much about the show, but about the trajectory of radio overall. These correspondents grasped how the medium was shaping up against them. That the one thing you couldn’t be on the radio now was Actually Black.
When radio first arrived, some African Americans hoped that the medium would be an ally by broadcasting constructive racial propaganda. Instead, radio followed the course blazed by other popular media, adapting and creating virulent racial stereotyping of its own as part of making popular, commercial appeals to white Americans. Letters to the editor of the Pittsburgh Courier about Amos’n’Andy reflected a profound sense of disappointment with the use of radio for this purpose. “It is a pity that such a great educational agency as the radio should be desecrated to such a base purpose, or end,” one writer complained.
In the 1920s, some Black-oriented programming could be heard on outfits like the Harlem Broadcasting Corporation (see here, p. 252) which leased time on stations in New York. Other businessmen tried buying their own stations in the 1930s, but to no avail. As the industry consolidated during the Great Depression, broadcasting became one of the most exclusionary workforces in the country.
Neither network hired blacks as announcers, broadcast journalists, or technicians, and certainly no blacks became producers or executives in the national operations. None of the network affiliates was black owned, nor were any of the independent stations. During the 1930s, the few African Americans working in radio were the musicians, comics, and entertainers sporadically heard on the network airwaves.
Some of those Black entertainers, including Ruby Dandridge and Ernestine Wade, were hired in the late 1930s by Amos’n’Andy. The cast started to be integrated. But the money never was.
Gosden and Correll, who by now split their time between Hollywood and Palm Springs, became less involved in the show. It went weekly on CBS in the 1940s, and Ely describes how its jokes and stereotypes actually got cruder with new (white) writers on board.
As for Gosden and Correll, Ely notes that “when the pair talked with two black reporters in [1942], Gosden was reduced to confessing that his current data on the African American character came from a ‘colored boy working for me.’” (199)
Enter TV
In the late 1940s, the duo got millions of dollars to license their characters to CBS for a television adaptation, and they stayed involved through a long audition process for an all-Black cast. As production got underway, Gosden tried to school Spencer Williams, the actor cast as the cigar-chomping Andy — and also a man who had directed nine (!) feature films of his own.
“He wanted me to say ‘dis here and dat dere’ and I just wasn’t going to do it,” Williams told Ebony in 1961. “He said he ‘ought to know how Amos’n’Andy should talk,’ but I told him Negroes didn’t want to see Negroes on TV talking that way. Then I told him I ought to know how Negroes talk. After all, I’ve been one all my life.”
Williams says Gosden left the set and never returned. Meanwhile, the NAACP had been mounting its own campaign against the sitcom, one that took advantage of growing civil rights leverage in post WWII America. Filming for Amos’n’Andy lasted only two years, after which CBS bowed to pressure and canceled it.
While Gosden and Correll kept their millions, Spencer Williams lamented that after playing Andy, he could not get another role in Hollywood. He told Ebony he was living off his pension as a veteran. The actor who played Amos, Alvin Childress, was faring worse at the time, though he’d later get TV roles.
Meanwhile, Amos’n’Andy remained in syndication for several more years. Not a penny of the royalties went to the cast — nor would CBS allow them the right to tour on their own as the still-popular characters.
Spencer Williams as Andy.
I know this whole dismal tale is a lot to unpack, and I feel like I’ve only just gotten started. There are plenty of links in this piece to scholarship, and some further ones to explore below. But what I most value from all this research has been reading about the Pittsburgh Courier campaign.
Those nearly 100-year-old letters remain a powerful testimony to how broadcasting could have done better, if it had had any conscience. Maybe it’s comforting to think we’re different now, but I see plenty of evidence that the same cycle is always ready to roll with the debut of each new media technology. Harming a vulnerable group does not seem like a side effect of technology, but a stepping stone.
The question becomes, how do we interrupt and resist that dynamic? That’s what I hope to explore in my next post.
Meanwhile, here are a few timeline-cleansing recs for further exploration of some of the themes in this post:
To hear the Black press and history brought to life, check out Nichole Hill’s show Our Ancestors Were Messy.
Jennifer Lynn Stoever’s The Sonic Color Line is an epic study of African American literary history through the lens of sound.
Film critic (and my fellow Nieman Fellow) Beandrea July has a profound podcast and accompanying newsletter called Annotations, featuring conversations with other critics about some of these vexatious issues of representation, as well as movies they love. I recommend this episode.
NYU assistant professor Chenjerai Kumanyika’s essay Vocal Color in Public Radio remains one of the best explorations of pressures to vocally “code switch” in narration. He also has a new podcast called Unruly Subjects.
Now eager to see Spencer Williams’ films, some of which were set in my hometown!
Finally, did you know the BBC had a blackface minstrel show on its air until 1978? I did not. David Harewood explores that and other unpleasantries in a documentary.