What John Amos taught me about having — and being — a father

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John Amos taught me what it was like to grow up with a father in the house – and to be one.

That’s because Amos – who died in August at the age of 84, though his death wasn’t disclosed publicly until Tuesday – first came to my attention playing righteous dad James Evans, Sr. on the legendary 1970s sitcom Good Times.

As a young, Black boy growing up in a home without my father in Gary, Ind., the best window I had into what it might be like to have a concerned, powerful, ethical male in the house was seeing how James Sr. worked with Esther Rolle’s Florida Evans to keep their kids on track. It didn’t hurt that this new kind of TV family lived in what appeared to be Chicago’s Cabrini-Green housing project, about 40 miles northwest of Gary.

Good Times presented the first network TV sitcom centered on a two-parent, Black family – in fact, Rolle herself had initially insisted that Good Times’ family have a father – and it meant a lot to a kid who sometimes longed for that in his own life.

James Sr., as Amos played him, was imposing and could get physical – he once gave a whipping to a friend of his youngest son Michael, when that friend dared to disrespect the family and refused to do homework during a sleepover. (Yup, stuff like that happened in my neighborhood all the time.) But he was also a loving, devoted, hard-working dad, who often balanced several jobs while trying to give his kids everything they needed to build lives outside of a deprived, occasionally dangerous neighborhood.

There was little doubt James Sr. could be tender in ways that fathers in my neighborhood rarely were in real life.

Resisting a racist TV industry

It wasn’t until I got older that I realized Amos also embodied another important reality: the Black actor had to use all his talents and wiles to make his way – constantly struggling to subvert and overcome the racist demands of a white-centered TV and film industry.

On Good Times, that meant fighting with producers of the show, including legendary executive producer Norman Lear, when the show’s scripts began focusing more on Jimmie Walker’s character, James Evans Jr., or “J.J.”

J.J.’s habit of shouting “dyn-o-MITE!” while bugging his eyes after dropping a cheeky rhyme recalled classic “coon”-style stereotypes for Black performers from the past. And Amos often recounted how much that irked him back then.

“I felt too much emphasis was being put on J.J. and his chicken hat and saying ‘dynomite’ every third page,” Amos told the Archive of American Television in a 2014 interview. “But I wasn’t the most diplomatic guy in those days. And they got tired of having their lives threatened over jokes…That taught me a lesson. That I wasn’t as important as I thought I was to the show or to Norman Lear’s plans.”

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Lear admitted in his 2014 memoir, Even This I Get to Experience, that the attention showered on J.J. made Amos so “glum and dispirited,” that the producer wound up writing the actor out of the show at the start of the series’ fourth season.

Just like that, the two-parent Black family that had inspired me so much was undone – fractured by an offscreen car accident that claimed James Sr.’s life.

A TV pioneer who became the image of Black fatherhood

I didn’t know about the backstage struggles back then, but even as a young viewer I could see that something important had been lost. Turns out, Amos wasn’t just another actor spouting off about a supporting player outshining him; he had begun his show business career as a writer/performer – one of his early jobs in 1969 was as a writer on The Leslie Uggams Show. Amos knew how important quality words were for great acting.

His first big part came in 1970 as Gordy Howard, the weatherman on The Mary Tyler Moore Show – the series’ only Black character – which put Amos on the map and caught Lear’s attention when they were casting Good Times. And not long after he left Good Times, Amos landed another legendary job – playing the adult version of Kunta Kinte, the enslaved man at the heart of ABC’s surprise 1977 miniseries hit, Roots.

In fact, Roots was a bit of showbiz sleight of hand. Well aware that white audiences might grow uncomfortable with a miniseries centered on the family history of African American author Alex Haley and its early genesis in slavery, producers of Roots often cast Black actors as enslaved people who white audiences already knew and loved.

Amos, with his history on popular shows like The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Good Times, fit perfectly as a grown up version of the character then-newcomer LeVar Burton played as a young man. (The moment when a slave catcher cuts off Kunta Kinte’s foot after an escape attempt remains seared in my brain, nearly 50 years after originally seeing it on TV.)

For me, the one-two punch of his parts on Good Times and Roots cemented Amos as a towering image of Black fatherhood in pop culture.

Back then, Black performers were working hard to take scripts crafted by white producers and make their characters as authentic as possible, balancing the expectations of Black audiences hungry for better representation with a white-dominated industry often stuck in old, demeaning patterns.

Amos could make his points forcefully. He told the Archive of American Television about blowing up at a white, British director on Roots who seemed unconcerned about a Black baby shivering during a night shoot.

Hearing the former pro football player tell stories about occasionally threatening white producers and directors to get his way, I saw a familiar dynamic. Sometimes, when the system is geared against you, intimidation is the only way to make your concerns truly heard.

An actor beloved by Black and white audiences

Over the years, Amos’ classic roles in TV and film piled up: Hunter, Coming to America, The West Wing (as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), Let’s Do It Again, Die Hard 2, and much, much more. He’s even reportedly in the new spinoff series Suits: LA, as his last role.

(In a sad denouement, after conflicts between Amos’ children, his daughter Shannon Amos found out about her father’s death on Tuesday when media outlets reported it, according to her Instagram post.)

But for me, Amos’ greatest legacy remains as a TV pioneer who played proud, Black male characters with strong ethics and a devotion to family just when Black audiences needed to see them most – surviving a load of slights, fights and punishments in the process.