| AFTER AMOS & ANDY
Where did they go after Amos and Andy went off the air. From "The Adventures of Amos'N' Andy
by Melvin Patrick Ely
Available on the internet
It would have been hard to convince many black actors--especially those who had appeared on Amos ‘n’ Andy--that the aftermath of the protest of 1951 represented a victory at all. Like the show’s producers and the management of CBS, the cast had expected a long and profitable network run for the series. The actors received only limited residual payments from the syndication of the shows but not, apparently, because of racial discrimination. Rather, the precedent for paying substantial residuals had not been firmly established in the new business of TV syndication when they signed their contracts. At least twice after production of Amos ‘n’ Andy ceased, former cast members made personal appearance tours in their old TV roles--but by their own account, CBS stepped in to halt these.
Still, there was little truth in the popular legend of later years that pictured the former stars of the series living out their lives broken-hearted and impoverished. Spencer Williams had come out of retirement to play the role of Andy; when the show was cancelled, he lived on income from Social Security and a Military pension. Amanda Randolph (Mama) went on to play the maid in Danny Thomas’s long-running situation comedy series. Ernestine Wade (Sapphire) played the organ in funeral parlors, worked as a legal secretary and bookkeeper, and occasionally appeared on radio and television. Jester Hairston, who had filled the minor role of Henry Van Porter, a self-styled socialite, continued his principal career as a well-known director of black choral groups; years later, he provided music for Robert Schuller, the television minister, and returned to series TV in the mid-1980s as a supporting actor in the popular all-black sitcom, Amen! Alvin Childress (Amos) worked as a civil servant and sometime actor in movies and TV. Nick Stewart (Lightning), with his wife Edna, ran a theater in Los Angeles which they had founded earlier; plays were still being produced there in the 1980s.
Tim Moore (Kingfish), Amos ‘n’ Andy best-know alumnus, appeared several times on Jack Parr’s Tonight show and served as master of ceremonies in a Los Angeles nightclub. To his friends and to the world, he had become almost inseparable from his role in Amos ‘n’ Andy . He made headlines in 1958 when, having remarried after the death of his first wife, he fired a gun during an argument with members of his new spouse’s family, whom he accused of eating a beef roast he had left in his refrigerator. The local papers had a field day, with the prize for punning doubtless going to the worthy who headlined the story, “Police Hook Kingfish for Beef Over Roast.” “I’m the old Kingfish,” Moore reportedly told the police when they reached the scene. “You should have seen the in-laws scatter when I fired that gun.” Eleven months later, Moore was dead of tuberculosis. At his funeral, the church overflowed with “thousands of his friends and fans.” Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll served as honorary pallbearers, but it was Moore’s black colleagues, including Alvin Childress, Johnny Lee (lawyer Calhoun), Spencer Williams, and Flournoy Miller, who carried his remains to their final destination.
Gosden and Correll themselves did not suffer greatly from the controversy over Amos ‘n’ Andy . Though by turns perplexed, hurt, and angered by the protest of 1951, they continued to appear on radio until 1960. In a concession to the now-dominant format in commercial radio, the team in their last few years on the air mostly played popular records, with Amos, Andy, and the Kingfish as virtual disc jockeys. In 1962, after the failure of Calvin and the Colonel,a TV cartoon series in which the two supplied voices for animal characters, Gosden and Correll retired for good. Now in their early sixties and seventies respectively, they were wealthier than ever and, by most accounts, far from preoccupied by the criticism they had received over Amos ‘n’ Andy. The pair’s network employers hardly qualified as pitiable victims of the controversy either. CBS had some unpleasant moments in 1951 and made a good deal less money from Amos ‘n’ Andy than it had expected to, but the company still earned a healthy income by syndicating the TV show for more than ten years.
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