Like so many children, I believed my life wss boring and mundane. In those early years, television was my saving grace. I planned my free time around watching certain tv shows.
When I was very young, watching The Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday evening was a big event in many African American households and my household was no exception.
The Ed Sullivan Show introduced or reintroduced African Americans to artist that looked and sounded like them. At that time, seeing an African American performer on tv was not commonplace. When African Americans appeared on television, they usually played the role of someone providing a service (i.e., a maid, a shoeshine person, etc).
For that reason, watching finely dressed, elegant and highly skilled artist like Pearl Bailey, Ella Fitzgerald, Sammy Davis Jr., Louis Armstrong and Harry Belafonte perform on The Ed Sullivan Show was a new and life changing experience for many African Americans.
Because of The Ed Sullivan Show, these artists and other entertainers like Diahann Carroll, James Brown, The Jackson 5, Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder and Nina Simone were seen by a diverse television audiences and went on to have careers that made them household names in the United States and abroad.
