Inspired by Entertainment Weekly’s recent special issue A Celebration of Black Film, LIFE presents this collection of photos from its archives featuring groundbreaking Black stars.
Most of the multi-talented actors and actresses in these photos are shown outside of the world of film—either acting in a theatrical production or singing. But the names include pioneering figures of cinema: Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, Lena Horne, Hattie McDaniel, Ossie Davis, Dorothy Dandridge, Sammy Davis Jr., Diahann Carroll and also Cicely Tyson, who died on January 28, 2021.
Enjoy this tribute.
Front cover of Entertainment Weekly: A Celebration of Black Film
Back cover of Entertainment Weekly: A Celebration of Black Film
Hattie McDaniel collected her Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of Mammy in ‘Gone With the Wind’; she was the first African-American to win an Oscar.
WHEN ABC BROADCAST A REMAKE OF AN episode of All in the Family, shot before a studio audience in 2019, the network recreated the Bunker family home In Queens, New York, down to the doilies and faded wallpaper, with Woody Harrelson and Marisa Tomei taking up Carroll O’Connor and Jean Stapleton’s roles as Archie, the ultraconservative loading-dock worker, and his kindly wife, Edith. Set in 1976, the episode centers around the unexpected arrival of David Brewster, their son-in-law Mike Stivic’s high school friend, a Vietnam War draft dodger who fled to Canada but just sneaked home for Christmas. When Edith invites David to join them for the holiday dinner, Mike cautions his friend not to tell Archie what he’d done—and to avoid such topics as “politics, religion, sex, books, movies, war, peace, guns . . . grapes, lettuce.”
Archie, meanwhile, has invited his pal Pinky Peterson, whose son Steve was killed in the war. Mike’s worst fears are realized—David’s secret spills out and the joyous gathering quickly devolves into a bitter confrontation over the war, with a spitting-mad Archie yelling, “What he done was wrong!” Finally Pinky stands up and makes peace. “My kid hated the war too,” he says. “But he did what he thought he had to do. And David here, he did what he thought he had to do . . . if Steve was here, he would want to sit down with him. And that is what I want to do.” Pinky then walks over to David and shakes his hand.
All in the Family debuted 50 years ago in January 1971, two years before the United States withdrew from Vietnam, and four years before that divisive conflict ended. Fifty-eight thousand Americans died in Southeast Asia, and when the Christmas special originally aired in 1976, the war was still a festering wound. The very day ABC restaged the show in 2019, Congress had started impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump, and the country found itself as polarized as ever. So much had changed in four-plus decades—and yet so little.
Back in the 1970s, of course, it was bold for a sitcom to take on such a sensitive topic as the war. But All in the Family was unlike anything seen before on television. Up until then, TV had a blandly homogenous quality. Three networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC, ruled the airwaves, and the newly created Public Broadcasting Service had a niche audience. They all worked under a draconian Television Code, and offered wholesome and uncontroversial family entertainment. There was no political content, and situation comedies were inhabited by white middle-class families, noble lawmen, and quirky country folk. One of the few working-class shows was The Honeymooners, which centered around Brooklyn bus driver Ralph Kramden, his wife, Alice, his sewer worker friend, Ed Norton, and Ed’s wife, Trixie. It went off the air in 1956 after just one season, but would gain classic status in reruns. The Honeymooners influenced another series about working stiffs—this one animated: The Flintstones, which first aired in 1960 and featured Fred Flintstone, a prehistoric quarryman from the town of Bedrock, his wife, Wilma, best buddy, Barney, and his wife, Betty.
That was about it for blue-collar comedy until Archie Bunker barged into America’s living rooms. Here was a full-throated “angry white man” from the borough of Queens who proudly proclaimed, “I hate change.” Americans had never seen a character like Archie on their television screens. He epitomized President Richard Nixon’s Silent Majority—conservatives who felt overlooked by the general public and Washington politicos—and he broadcast his biases and prejudices every week as he jostled with Mike and his feminist daughter, Gloria, while demeaning the superficially dim but disarmingly insightful Edith.
Yet though Archie was proudly reactionary, he harbored a hidden kindness, and the show possessed a subversive and not so subtle radicalism. During All in the Family’s nine seasons on CBS, creators Norman Lear and Bud Yorkin used their series as a televised soapbox to masterfully portray the upheavals and concerns racking the United States. They slyly wove current events into a sitcom and used the medium to explore the rifts within American society and culture. The show pondered the war, the Watergate scandal, and the liberal-conservative divide and depicted the country’s changing views on such topics as politics, race, sex, religion, and women’s rights.
The character of Archie could easily have been one-dimensional, even villainous. But Carroll O’Connor’s indelible portrayal presents him as deeply flawed yet oddly likable, with reservoirs of decency—more absurdly misguided than malevolent. Through All in the Family, Lear, the program’s mastermind, sought “to show that if bigotry and intolerance didn’t exist in the hearts and minds of the good people, the average people, it would not be the endemic problem it is in our society.”
As a result, All in the Family quickly did more than become a top-rated, Emmy Award–winning series that promoted a positive, progressive agenda. This revolutionary show about a reactionary man helped foster an openness in culture. It transformed the very nature of what could be broadcast into our homes, and paved the way for other shows with working-class as well as racially diverse protagonists. Half a century later, its humor and message remain prescient, as it plumbs problems that still vex our families and society, and seeks to understand and explain the very soul of America.
Here is a sampling of images from LIFE’s new special issue All in the Family.
The cover of LIFE’s special issue on All in the Family
Chester Maydole/MPTVImages
The cast of All in the Family: Jean Stapleton (Edith), Carroll O’Connor (Archie), Rob Reiner (Mike) and Sally Struthers (Gloria).
Photo by CBS via Shutterstock
Carroll O’Connor and Jean Stapleton performed the show’s opening theme song, “Those Were the Days.”
Photo by CBS via Shutterstock
Archie’s disdain for the liberal son-in-law he called “Meathead” represented a clash of generations and cultures.
Photo by CBS via Shutterstock
In the episode ‘Judging Books by Covers’, Archie Bunker learned that a football-playing friend was gay
Photo by CBS via Shutterstock
Producer and writer Norman Lear (center, in dark blazer) spoke with Carroll O’Connor on the set of the show ‘All in the Family,’ Los Angeles, California, 1971
Photo by CBS Photo Archive/Shutterstock
The dinner table was often where conflicts played out on All in the Family.
Photo by CBS via Shutterstock
After Rob Reiner and Sally Struthers left the regular cast, All In The Family transformed into a new show called Archie Bunker’s Place, which ran for four seasons and centered around Archie’s bar.
Photo by CBS via Shutterstock
In 2017 Norman Lear brought back a reimagined version of one of his hit 1970s shows, One Day At a Time. Pictured are executive producer Mike Royce, executive producer Gloria Calderon Kellett, executive producer Lear, and actresses Justina Machado and Rita Moreno.
ABC’s “Live In Front of a Studio Audience” from 2019 recreated classic sitcom episodes, including one from All in The Family, featuring (l-r) Ellie Kemper, Marisa Tomei, Woody Harrelson, Ike Barnholtz and Jeese Eisenberg.
At this juncture, the answer is not clear. But that’s okay because, wherever it is, odds are, you’ve been there.
The diner is a place of welcome—to families, friends, and loners. In our culture it has been home to Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, the gang from Seinfeld, and of course the guys in the movie Diner. While the phenomenon of the diner can feel like pure Americana, the concept translates globally. In the recent Netflix series Midnight Diner: Tokyo Stories the food is different, but the spirit is the same.
While the coffeehouse and the bar offer a variation on these comforts, the diner stands out because it’s as welcoming to kids as it is to adults, and because its charms are available any time of day (or night).
The photos taken by John Loengard in 1962 capture all this appeal. Loengard was a giant on the LIFE staff, and noted chronicler of such figures as The Beatles and Georgia O’Keeffe. Here he cast his eye on a subject that, while more humble, is every bit as enduring.
The dinner is part of a filling station, and the sign out front promotes two food item: burgers and “bar-b-q burgers.” And Pepsi. What’s telling about these diner photos is how little attention is paid to the food. In one photo a chef-waitress adds French fries onto plates with burgers on them. But the food, while essential to the diner experience, is also beside the point.
Loengard’s lens drinks in all the details. The kid draining his drinking glass. The guys leaning into each other, confiding either their innermost thoughts or their prediction for the game. The women sharing a laugh, while a notice about a public sale sits in front of them. The restless kids moving from booth to counter.
Then there’s the young man carefully picking out songs on a juke box. Because of course this small country diner has a juke box.
Looking at these pictures can make a person hungry, especially these days—and not just for fries.
One of the few things you can count on during a college football season is that Ohio State is going to be pretty darned good. It was certainly the case during the 2020 season, with the Buckeyes in pursuit of a national championship as they have been so many years before.
When you have a big school and a demanding fan base, a championship is an annual expectation. It’s true in Columbus and many other college football towns around the country.
In 1948 LIFE visited Columbus to capture that kind of unbridled enthusiasm for story titled “Frenzied Football.” While much has changed about college football in decades since that story was reported—for instance Ohio State’s conference, the Big 10, now has fourteen teams—certain aspects are quite similar.
Examine these images from 1948 and one immediate difference that will stand out to those know Ohio State football is the stadium. Back then, Ohio Stadium was still open at one end, as it was originally designed. Bernard Hoffman‘s magnificent photo for LIFE captures the grandeur of the fans’ procession to the stadium’s open arms. But “The Horseshoe,” as the stadium is known, has since added new stands to what had been the open end to accommodate more spectators. The stadium now can hold a staggering 104,944 people, up from its original capacity of 66,210 when it opened in 1922. Ohio Stadium is now the third-largest football stadium the country, behind those at Michigan and Penn State.
The more striking difference may be the attire of the people who fill those stands. Look at their dress—the women in their fancy hats, the men in their coats and ties. It’s a far cry from today, when most spectators come dressed in the school colors, and many fans are wearing team jerseys, looking as if they were ready to be called into the game.
But the true constant is the passion for the game. LIFE summed up how all-consuming football was for the local fans: “It is an old Columbus joke that whenever three stenographers and a boss are in the same room they forget about business and start running through backfield plays.”
It shows in the faces of the fans in these photos. Just look at them. Don’t you want to share that excitement?
No wonder they had to make the stadium bigger.
Fans approached Ohio Stadium on a football game day in 1948.
Then as now, football fans could get rowdy; here university employees cut corners of paper laundry bags to prevent students from converting them into water balloons for pre-football game celebrations.
In its January 26, 1962 issue, LIFE’s profile of Debbie Drake opened with a bold proclamation from the 29-year-old woman from Indiana. “I want to be the most important exercise girl in the world,” she said.
Drake did make her mark on history, as the first woman ever to host a national fitness instructional show on television. Her show launched in 1960 and stayed on the air through 1978. In 2015 she was inducted into the National Fitness Hall of Fame.
LIFE’s 1962 story on Drake, headlined “A Pretty Parer of Poundage,” talked about how she grew up “scrawny” but then put on weight after an unhappy teenage marriage and divorce, before turning to fitness. “That’s when the ugly duckling turned into a 38 ½-22-36 swan and an expert in figure improving exercises,” LIFE wrote. The story said that her show was viewed by millions, her syndicated column appeared in 40 newspapers, and her income was “in the $100,000 bracket.” The story also praised her “naive, unrehearsed, girl-next-door sincerity.”
If her persona was charmingly unrehearsed, it was also entirely of her era. In 1964 Drake released a record album of fitness instruction titled How to Keep Your Husband Happy, in which the cover showed a lounging man thinking of Drake going through various exercise poses. At least one cultural critic drew a line from Drake to the controversial Peleton ad that got run off television in late 2019 for its view of women’s fitness as being about pleasing men, rather than its physical and mental health benefits.
While many of Drake’s routines will be familiar to anyone who has taken modern fitness instruction, some of the exercises showcased in LIFE make dubious claims, such as a move while resembles yoga’s cobra pose, and which she said could help erase a double-chin.
Drake also wasn’t shy about appealing to a male audience. Her photo shoot for LIFE magazine included cheesecake poses in a bathtub. In a bit of footage from the Dick Cavett Show (she comes on at the 4:28 mark, after Woody Allen) Drake engages the host in a two-person, face-to-face stretching routine that was nominally about loosening Cavett’s back but also meant to weaken his knees.
It’s a far cry from the you-go-girl messages of personal strength advocated by the legions of Drake’s contemporary progeny on YouTube.
But there’s also no denying that she was in at the start of something big. For Drake, the medium was the message that lasted.
Debbie Drake filmed an episode of her fitness instructional show in a studio in Indianapolis, 1962.
I wasn’t aware of Van Halen’s debut album when it came out in 1978, but I did become aware of it some years later at a time when the consideration of albums, and CDs, was still made with a sense of the whole. How the songs were ordered, how the experience unfolded from the opening track to the last, was one measure of the music itself. In that time it was part of a collective understanding that there had rarely, or never, been a debut album quite so audacious, cocksure, excellent, and embraceable as Van Halen. Who were these guys? The first three tracks went like this. 1) Here’s the band: “Runnin’ with The Devil.” 2) Here’s our guitar player: “Eruption.” 3) Now here’s a cover of a seminal rock song (in which, while paying all due homage, we proceed to kick the s— out of the original): “You Really Got Me.”
They never looked back.
“Runnin’ with the Devil” encapsulated Van Halen’s brashness and joie de vivre, all under a title so succinctly evocative the band’s manager later took it as the title for his book. The song has story, hoots and hollers, the big steady bass notes, and (one more time) Eddie’s joyously melodic guitar runs. “Eruption”—gorgeous, ecstatic, technically astonishing— reframed the potential of the electric guitar. The rest of the 11-song album follows suit, replete with the vocal harmonies on “Feel Your Love,” Alex’s tom-tom riff on “Jamie’s Cryin’ ” (sampled by Tone Lōc on his megahit “Wild Thing” 10 years later), and a kind of, well, call it a coupe de glace in the playful near-finale, “Ice Cream Man.” The band members couldn’t wipe the smiles off their faces, and neither could we.
For rock DJs, 1978 was a fertile year: Bruce Springsteen’s Darkness at the Edge of Town and the Rolling Stones’ Some Girls came out within a week of each other in June. Billy Joel’s 52nd Street and the Police’s Outlandos D’Amour arrived in the fall. None of those records deliver the crucial feeling—how lucky we are to be alive right now—in the way that Van Halen’s lid-lifter does. The feat of yea-saying harkened to the Beats of the ’50s (Is “Runnin’ with the Devil” a three-minute, 36-second interpretation of On the Road?) while also auguring the decade of celebration ahead. February 10, 1978, when Van Halen appeared on record-store shelves, was the day, as Americans would come to find out, that the 1980s began.
