If you turn on the news or look at any popular TV show, you may see references to the image of African Americans in the U.S. today, but how is this different from how they were portrayed years ago? Because TV and other media are a constant presence in American’s lives, they have had a significant impact on the way people thought and still think about important social issues, especially race, ultimately resulting in the differing viewpoints of blacks from nineteen forty to now.
The Civil Rights movement began in nineteen fifty five with “Rosa Parks, whose refusal to sit in the back of a bus sparked a chain of Civil Rights protests that rocked the South and the nation.” So from the nineteen forties to the nineteen seventies, this time period witnessed how the media handled not only the Civil Rights movement and the image of African Americans
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“All in the Family will shock and offend and start the most violent arguments you ever saw between those who think it’s funny and those who don’t. All in the Family is a situation comedy in which the main character, Archie Bunker, a plain-spoken, hard-working, middle-class American, is a bigot.” and most of his bigotry is towards African Americans. This television show greatly influences the way Americans think about the Negroes, because Archie Bunker is depicted as the average “hard-working middle-class American,” to whom most could relate. But they also show the liberal views of this time in the show through the character Mike, Archie Bunker’s son-in-law. “Mike is a long-haired and mustached, a student and a liberal activist.” And shows a calmer side compared to that of Archie Bunker. This representation of the different viewpoints of the nineteen seventies shows favoritism towards that of the liberal side, which favored Civil Rights and equality for all. This will influence the lives of Americans as they move into the nineteen