January 12: All in the Family

Norman Lear’s groundbreaking television sitcom, All in the Family, premiered on CBS on this date in 1971. The show was shot in front of a live audience and opened Americans to dialogue about many controversial political subjects, including varieties of prejudice that were very much active in white working-class culture. All in the Family became the country’s top-rated comedy from 1972 to 1976. In 1981, Lear founded People for the American Way, an organization designed to check the rise of the Christian Right and preserve church-state separation in America. In 2001, he purchased an early edition of the Declaration of Independence for more than $8 million and sent it on tour around the United States. A veteran of more than 52 combat missions aboard the “Flying Fortress” bomber of World War II, Lear has been one of our country’s most effective communicators of progressive ideas by embedding them within patriotic idioms.

“My dad called me the laziest white kid he ever met. When I screamed back at him that he was putting down a race of people to call me lazy, his answer was that’s not what he was doing, and that I was also the dumbest white kid he ever met.” —Norman Lear