In the beginning, African American males were used only as the extras and white actors attempted to make themselves look like black actors by using the method of black face. The usage of black face was the attempt to use makeup to make white actors appear to be black. This is clearly depicted in the first Amos and Andy film The Happy Stevensons. In this film, both of the star actors were white but used dark makeup to look African American. Since the civil rights movement there has been interest from American society to bring about more positive representations of African Americans in media, but not without veering in the wrong direction, occasionally portraying African American males in a negative way.
Television is a medium that has transcended racial lines.
This medium has the ability to show us races and cultures that we have never seen before. This ability is one that some feel the media should look at as a responsibility. The author Lewis Diugiuid wrote an article for Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science about how television is the means of most people's impressions of different races than their own. Throughout America's history, black men, teenagers, and boys too often have been depicted as buffoons, criminals, or oversexed animal-like creatures who lust after white women. That followed a design in this country to maintain an inferior, second-class status for black people, date from slaver on through the twentieth century.