Rochester, Mammie and Other Stereotypes of Yesteryear

[Tropicana]

Powerful comments by Evanovitch in response to one of my comments. Much to discuss here so I have started a new thread:

Your biggest ting is bout how blk women cyaan get certain rolls on tv like dis have anyting fi duh wid de price ile in saudi arabia. You believe u really believe and serve God, but it is more like yuh believe and serve a god. A god like the ones u church ppl diss the egyptians over, but since yt ppl tell yuh bout god yuh believe yuh have de right one but do not see how bounded you are to certain tings.

Anyhow gwaan run wid yuh tings dem, mi really hope yuh wake up to the true reality of what The Creator is and what you're here for.

i don't thing he gives a rats batty bout de nex reality show are blk women and men making fools a demself pan tv ar film.

Newsflash...God cares about every aspect of of life.

If you don't think Black people getting roles on TV is important, you have a very short memory. It is not that long ago when Black people were hardly on TV or in magazines period. I guess you would be happy turning the calendar back to when Rochestah prevailed...what an embarrassment.

Rochestah prevailed...

u do know dat u missed the otherside of the coin in that show....the fact that the whites were unable to cope sans the blacks not to mention the irony of despising someone based on their race even as u relied on them for ur basic n intimate survival...and of course u miss the repartee on the part of Rochester...he gave as good as he got in conversation...sigh....

Here is an example:

nothing shameful about Rochester...

Well we'll disagree on this.

the shame lies with n on the part of the whites who had this ****ed up thinking...don't...black fetching n stepping showed how insecure white people really were in that they chose to believe that people were kowtowing instead of mekking fools of them the whites....

This would make a huge interesting discussion on it's own.

Do you think the average person (adult or child) caught those subtleties? Instead it came across as a very negative portrayal of Black people and perpetuated embarrassing stereotypes.

Looking back on it now, these are some nuances that are present today on closer examination but they were not widely apparent at the time. Ditto for the Mammie stereotype that was present in movies. Ditto for Stepin Fetchit.

Let's not forget the important part of the role that butlers and other domestic workers played in influencing the thinking of the people for whom they worked and challenging stereotypes. The movie the Butler also drives home that point and apparently Martin Luther King also addressed it.

Definitely, as one Black actress (can't remember who maybe Hattie McDaniel) pointed out she was paid much more for playing a maid in movies than she would have been paid for being a maid in real life. Eddie Anderson, the actor who played, Rochester ended up being a very wealthy man so certainly he benefited from this career opportunity but at what cost.

Dismissing the access of Black performers to meaningful, non-stereotypical roles as a non-issue is definitely a case of people not knowing their history or choosing to forget it. When Mammie and Rochester were just about the only games in town, this had a very detrimental impact on the self-esteem of Black young people. Ditto with young ladies picking up a fashion magazine and seeing only White people...ditto with picking up a catalogue and seeing only White people. This was not that long ago. I can't believe that people have forgotten this or that they dismiss this as unimportant.

Was Rochester ever on TV in Jamaica by the way?

[Tropicana]

Interesting to look back on some of these performers:

Eddie "Rochester" Anderson was born in Oakland in 1906. His father, Big Ed Anderson, had been a minstrel performer; his mother, Ella Mae, had been a circus tightrope walker until an accident ended her career. Eddie Anderson started out in vaudeville and had appeared in a number of films when he debuted as the voice of a Pullman porter on Jack Benny's popular radio show in 1937. Audiences responded with such enthusiasm that the canny Benny soon made Rochester his man Friday and inseparable sidekick, and the duo starred together on radio, in movies and on television for twenty-three years.

He was born in Oakland, California, USA on September 18, 1905. As a boy, Anderson sold newspapers on a street corner and permanently damaged his vocal cords (he had to yell loudly to attract attention), leading to his trademark "raspy" voice.

Anderson began his show business career at age 14 in a song-and-dance act with his brother Cornelius and another performer. They billed themselves as the Three Black Aces.

He began his career in Radio and in 1937, Anderson made what was supposed to be a one-shot appearance on the The Jack Benny Program. The audience loved his droll humor and he became a regular member of the cast. The show easily made the transition to early television and as "Rochester van Jones" (known simply as "Rochester") Anderson constantly deflated Benny's pomposity with a high-pitched, incredulous, "What's that, boss?

As a legacy of blackface minstrelsy, the pairing of Benny and Anderson was based on comedy routines of the White master and his slave Uncle Tom.

The high esteem in which the two actors held each other was evident upon Benny's death in 1974, in which a tearful Anderson, interviewed for television, spoke of Benny with admiration and respect.

By 1942, he was earning $100,000 a year and for a time was the highest-paid Black actor in Hollywood. Anderson invested his money wisely and became extremely wealthy.

In addition to his partnership with Benny, Anderson appeared in over sixty motion pictures, including Uncle Peter in Gone with the Wind, Cabin in the Sky, and as one of the taxi drivers in Stanley Kramer's It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. He reprised his Rochester role in Topper Returns, this time as Cosmo Topper's valet (though he jokes about 'Mr. Benny' in the film).

Anderson died in 1977 due to heart disease at the Motion Picture Country House and Hospital in Los Angeles, California. Eddie Anderson was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 2001.

http://black-face.com/Eddie-Rochester-Anderson.htm

This is funny. He was so well known by voice and sight that he had to disguise his voice and the panel had to wear a blind fold:

[Tropicana]

Vannie you are the first person I have ever heard to say the Rochester character was not negative. Ditto Amos and Andy and the others I have mentioned.

I was curious to see if I could find anyone else who shared your view so I dug and eventually found this article that agrees with you about Rochester. The feeling was that the character evolved. I had no idea Rochester went back so far. I also never realized the raspy voice, as mentioned earlier, was from vocal strain. I thought it was a demeaning way of portraying the character.

In the early days the character of Rochester owed a good deal to commonly held racial stereotypes. He loved to drink, particularly gin. Rochester loved gambling and chasing women. His tastes in food ran to fried chicken and watermelon. Even in the early days while Rochester may have resembled many of the common black stereotypes, at the same time he differed a good deal from them as well. Rochester was decidedly not dim witted the way that Stepin Fetchit and Willie Best's characters were, and while he was a servant he was not exactly servile either. Like the white characters on The Jack Benny Programme Rochester mocked and belittled Jack. And like every other character on the show Rochester always got the better of Jack as well. Ultimately Rochester would confront and even ridicule Jack in ways that no other black character in any other radio show or any motion picture would have been permitted to do to a white man at the time.

It would be during World War II, when the horrors of the Holocaust became public knowledge, that Jack Benny and his writers made the decision to remove all traces of ethnic stereotyping from Rochester's character. Gone were the jokes about Rochester drinking gin, gambling, chasing women, eating fried chicken, and eating watermelon. Already intelligent and somewhat mocking towards Jack Benny, Rochester became the American equivalent of Jeeves, a sly, assertive manservant who more or less has his employer's life under his control. It is Rochester to whom Jack Benny goes when he needs to know how to spell words like "superfluous" and "discrepancies." And it is often Rochester who gets Jack out of trouble. While Rochester was still Jack Benny's valet and chauffeur, he was very much treated as Jack's equal.

In the end Jack Benny and Eddie Anderson became a comedy team, much in the same way that Bob Hope and Bing Crosby or George Burns and Gracie Allen were. What made them a success as a team was not simply that they were two verytalented men, but that they were also very close friends who were quite comfortable with each other.

http://mercurie.blogspot.ca/2012/09/what-character-eddie-anderson.html

This raises similar points about Amos an Andy who have always been perceived as examples of highly negative stereotypes.

But those few seasons seem to have resonated with some audiences. Sure, Kingfish was a nefarious schemer, and Andy an ignorant doofus, but Amos ran his own cab company, and Calhoun was a lawyer (an unscrupulous one, but still a lawyer). The “Kingfish Buys A Lot” episode features a black businessman in a suit and tie toward the end, which unfortunately was a pretty rare sight on 1950s television.

First I am seeing the show but I have read about it. It in this issue, Kingfish also wears a business suit is also a property owner:

This was at a time when the primary African-Americans on television were servants, like Jack Benny’s Rochester (who at least outsmarted and got the best of his employer frequently); although Oscar-winner Hattie McDaniel played the lead in Beulah, she was still a maid. (TV would not depict a non-servant African-American female lead until Diahann Carroll as a single mother/nurse inJulia, a comedy that wound up being so controversial it also only lasted for a few seasons from 1968 to 1971.

For those who thing this is a fluffy issue, this is important to point out.

Get Christy Love!, which aired for one season from 1974 to 1975, featured the first and last African-American female lead in a major-network drama until Kerry Washington in Scandal. Last year.)

http://www.avclub.com/articles/amos-n-andy-was-the-rare-representation-of-black-c,101275/

[My Looh]

During my childhood these ladies broke the mould of how black folks were portrayed on TV.

Anybody see Diahann Carroll on the Emmy's last night? She still looks good for her age I thought.

[My Looh]

Whether you love him or just wish he would shut up, Bill Cosby played agent Alexander Scott on the TV series I Spy, another groundbreaking role for African Americans at the time.

[Tropicana]

Excellent examples My Looh.

Here is another classic oldie that broke the mould. Nothing but a Man with the fabulous Abbey Lincoln (who I met once....mi noh business if some a onoo no like de name dropping a truth mi a talk) and Ivan Dixon. All 7 parts are on Youtube.

A landmark independent film, Nothing but a Man is the first dramatic story featuring a largely black cast created for an integrated audience (the work of black filmmakers such as Oscar Micheaux was intended for audiences who patronized black-only theaters). White filmmakers Michael Roemer and Robert M. Young traveled through the South in 1962 in search of ideas for a fiction feature set during the growing turbulence of the civil rights era. Their story, based in Alabama but shot in southern New Jersey, is only tangentially related to the movement toward equality. Duff, an itinerant black railroad laborer (Ivan Dixon), romances and marries Josie, a small-town preacher's daughter (Abbey Lincoln). Duff insists on being treated with respect, but his stance is personal rather than political. After he settles down in the town with Josie, he comes up against white bosses who want to make sure he knows his place and black men such as Josie's father who don't want to rock the boat for fear of losing what little advantage they have. Duff's relationship with his own father (Julius Harris), a broken-down drunk living in Birmingham, teaches him valuable lessons about dignity and self-worth.

It is unfortunate that TV did not keep pace and today, we seem to be going backwards with fewer Black female leading ladies. Interesting it is soap operas that tended to have Black performers in ground breaking roles as doctors, lawyers, business people, and other professionals.

This is not a fluff issue. If young people do not see themselves reflected in anything but menial roles, thugs and booty shaking ho's how will they aspire to anything. It is tough to aspire to what one does not see.

Wasn't there another Diahann Carroll film...Claudine or something like that. I believe this conformed to stereotypes in many ways, single mother on welfare with many children who dated a garbage man (played by James Earl Jones). But the roles were played with dignity that made one see beyond the prevailing stereotypes of the jobs that were prevalent at that time.

[Tropicana]

Notice she nevah drop baggy and im nevah did try fe jump her bones....

...and he married her and took on the responsibility for 6 children....

The film didn't sugar coat anything either. These were real people with real problems.

[Tropicana]

This gives a good snapshot of some of the stereotypes prevalent in the early days of TV. It's long though s I will share just a bit:

Blacks in TV:
Non-Stereotypes Versus Stereotypes

African Americans were present at the birth of television. They were regularly before TV cameras in local and network programming. Granted, they were usually seen in the context of mu*sical entertainment. Granted, too, that blacks almost always appeared as guests rather than regulars or hosts—and when they did host their own series, blacks did not enjoy success. But these were the early days of video. Few expected overnight changes in entertainment patterns. And the fact that there were so many African-American personalities to be found in the young me*dium kept viable the promise of bias-free programming. There were, however, ominous signs in early TV. The most threatening was the great popularity of black entertainers when they ap*peared in controversial stereotyped roles.

If the history of blacks in early television suggests that shows stressing authentic images failed to establish lasting success, the same cannot be said of those series and programs presenting African Americans in caricatures drawn from a tradition of preju*dice. The mass audience, and consequently sponsors and stations, looked more approvingly on the mammies, EDITS, and Uncle Toms of the past than they did on blacks seeking approval through non-stereotyped talents.

The mammy figure—usually portrayed as a portly black maid in a white household—was a familiar stereotype. She emitted a certain human warmth that was sometimes difficult to discern beneath her aggressive self-confidence and implacable personality. In early television the black maid was a highly popular character. Between 1953 and 1964, Lillian Randolph played Louise, a maid for the Williams family on Make Room for Daddy (later called The Danny Thomas Show). She also appeared in the mid-1950s as Birdie Lee Goggins, the maid on the syndicated The Great Gildersleeve series—a role which she had enacted on the radio version of that program for more than a decade before it came to video.

This has been my understanding of Rochester.

Black men were also successful in stereotyped characteriza*tions. Eddie Anderson had little difficulty moving his Rochester character from radio to TV on The Jack Benny Program. As Benny's valet, confidant, and "conscience," Rochester had been a strategic part of the broadcasting success of the program since 1937. He contributed substantially to its television popularity once Benny moved his show to video in the 1950s.

Although Jack Benny and his writers had toned down considerably the minstrel-show quality originally possessed by Rochester on the radio, Anderson's character was still a stereotype. Usually the only black in the telecast, Rochester was a chauffeur and general handyman for his white boss. Anderson's naturally harsh voice gave him a vocal quality akin to the throaty "EDIT" dialect developed by minstrel-show endmen who cracked race jokes between themselves and the white middleman, the interlocutor. Although he was not as stark a caricature of black man*hood as Sleepy Joe and Bill Jackson, Rochester did little to advance the cause of the realistic portrayal of African Americans in popular culture.

If Eddie Anderson failed to enhance the image of blacks in television, Willie Best was absolutely detrimental to that image. Ironically, Best was also the most prolifically employed black actor in early TV. Best entered movies in the 1930s where, as a younger version of Stepin Fetchit, he was nicknamed "Sleep 'n' Eat." He could pop his eyeballs when nervous, speak classic pidgin English, and shake his lanky body at the thought of entering a graveyard.

http://jfredmacdonald.com/bawtv/bawtv2.htm