My main purpose in writing this article is to convey to readers in India, who have not even heard of Sherman Hemsley, of his monumental cultural impact upon Mainstream American Society.

Television programs that were created by Norman Lear and Bud Yorkin, that is their "new comedies", that were produced in the 1970s radically altered the boundaries of permissible expression in American television. African Americans in television comedy entered what might be called the Age of the New Minstrelsy. The coon character, that rascal-ish, loud, pushy, and conniving stereotype, strongly achieved in...