“I wasn’t going to be part of continuing a myth that subjugated my people to nothing. I wouldn’t help them perpetuate that lie,” Rolle told me. “I knew I had a wonderful father. All the kids I played with when I was growing up had fathers. I refused to be the next Black virgin with a pile of kids and no man in sight.”
Rolle originated the role of Florida Evans on “Maude,” the Norman Lear comedy that starred Bea Arthur. She was so popular as Maude’s maid, she was offered her own spin-off series. Yet Rolle refused the role as it was originally written — she did not want to play a single mother of three.
When I interviewed actress Esther Rolle during her Boston run in a Huntington Theatre production of Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun,” as someone who first saw her in the 1970s sitcom “ Good Times ,” I knew I had to ask her about the show that made her a TV star.
The producers acquiesced. When “Good Times” premiered, Florida had a husband named James. And those who turned to CBS on the evening of Feb. 8, 1974, witnessed a television first — a Black family headed by a mother and father.
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“I prided myself on producing the first Black father on television,” Rolle told me with a smile.
James Evans Sr. was played by John Amos. When it was announced Tuesday that Amos, 84, had died on Aug. 21, I felt a palpable pang of sorrow. As a friend said in a text, “His death hit different.” That’s because of Amos’s groundbreaking portrayal of James.
From Ricky Ricardo on “I Love Lucy” to Mike Brady on “The Brady Bunch,” TV sitcom dads were never in short supply. There were even widowed fathers (“The Courtship of Eddie’s Father”) and wealthy uncles as surrogate dads raising orphaned nieces or nephews (“Bachelor Father” and “Family Affair”). But what was egregiously missing on TV were Black fathers.
In 1968, “Julia,” starring Diahann Carroll, made history as the first sitcom with a Black woman as its titular lead in a non-stereotypical role. She was a mother and nurse but also a war widow — her husband had been killed in Vietnam. It was as if TV networks and producers believed that white audiences could better abide Black widowhood than a Black couple raising their children together.
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But finally embodying so many families that Black people knew or belonged to, Florida and James Evans — and their children, J.J. (Jimmie Walker), Thelma (BernNadette Stanis), and Michael (Ralph Carter) — changed television.
Before “Good Times,” Amos had spent his career rejecting scripts that only offered opportunities for Black actors to play criminals or thugs. Like Rolle, he refused to foster the kinds of harmful stereotypes reinforced in popular media. In his performance, Amos often gave the “Good Times” episodes more nuance and depth than the writers’ words alone could muster. He was just that good.
Set in a Chicago housing project, “Good Times” portrayed James as compassionate toward his children, openly affectionate with his wife, and a man bowed by racist systems and institutions but determined not to be broken by them.
But Amos also revealed the seething fury beneath James’s skin. He was frustrated that he couldn’t do more to raise his family out of poverty. His chauvinistic attitudes would sometimes get the best of him when Florida tried to move beyond the traditional roles that kept James secure in his manhood as the breadwinner — though, truth be told, there was barely enough bread or anything else for a family of five.
Each week, James personified the Black man’s struggle in America in a way previously unseen by TV audiences, especially in a comedy. But it didn’t last. After two seasons, Amos was fired — and James was killed in a car accident.
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At the time, Amos’s abrupt departure was publicized as a contract dispute — a greedy Black man who didn’t appreciate the benevolence of the white TV executives who employed him on a Top 10 show. But in an Archive of American Television interview years later, Amos said that the show’s creative team, including Lear, had had enough of his complaints about the focus on Walker’s J.J., a throwback to the racist buffoonery of TV’s ugly past, at the expense of Stanis’s and Carter’s characters who aspired to excellence instead of foolery.
By firing Amos, CBS got the show it originally wanted — a single Black mother raising three children. More than losing his job, Amos said the show’s regression to a “fatherless Black family” was his biggest regret. “Good Times” would continue for three more seasons, but it was never the same. Even though Florida eventually got remarried, Rolle left the show two years before it finally ended in 1979.
After “Good Times,” Amos had other prominent roles, most notably in the Eddie Murphy film “Coming to America” and “Roots,” the landmark 1977 miniseries about a Black family’s arduous journey from slavery to freedom. But with news of Amos’s death came warm remembrances of James Evans, who became one of Black America’s pop culture paragons.
Even for kids like me who were raised in households with two loving and supporting parents, Amos gave many of us what we didn’t even know we needed — the love, strength, and presence of a Black father writ large and projected to the world.
This is an excerpt from Outtakes, a Globe Opinion newsletter from columnist Renée Graham. Sign up to get Outtakes in your inbox each week.
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Renée Graham is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at renee.graham@globe.com. Follow her @reneeygraham.