Norman Lear was woke before “woke” became a derogatory smear. He was woke before it was briefly appropriated in mainstream parlance as a liberal badge of honor. Before he died on Tuesday at the age of 101, Norman Lear was one of the few people alive who entirely preceded the term, which can trace its origins to as far back as 1931 as a warning among African Americans to stay vigilant for racist threats.
That was also the year that Lear, then a 9-year-old Jewish American boy growing up in Connecticut, experienced the awakening of his own social consciousness, coming across a broadcast from the antisemitic Father Charles Coughlin (considered a progenitor of hate radio). “I started to pay a lot more attention to people who were even more different in the eyes of people like Father Coughlin,” Lear told NPR in 2012.
His cognizance of and desire to confront social bigotry permeated his body of work as a producer, starting with his magnum opus All in the Family. Through the white working-class “everyman” Archie Bunker (modeled in part after his own father) and his relatives and neighbors, Lear provided avatars for American households to contend with issues involving race, gender, sexuality and religion.
“He was a conscience for America, someone who reflected the real American life,” says Hector Elizondo, who met Lear more than 50 years ago when he guested on the All in the Family second season episode “The Elevator Story,” in which Archie gets stuck in a lift with a Black businessman, a white secretary and a Puerto Rican couple imminently having a baby. “He supported people who deserved supporting.”
All in the Family became the first series to top the Nielsen ratings for five straight years and would collect a total of 22 Emmys. At one point, the prolific Lear had nine shows on the air and three of the four highest-rated series. Several of his shows featured Black or interracial casts, including Sanford and Son, Good Times, The Jeffersons and Diff’rent Strokes. But early on, as Lear wrote in his memoir, three members of the Black Panther Party visited his CBS office to note that, as with Good Times’ Evans family, Black characters were always represented as impoverished. In response, Lear created The Jeffersons, which follows the titular family after they move on up to the east side, to a deluxe apartment in the sky.
“He listened,” says Gloria Calderón Kellett, co-showrunner of the 2017-2020 revival of Lear’s One Day at a Time. “He very much understood his privilege, and he leveraged it consistently for other people. For him, it was, ‘How can I best serve you guys in the telling of this story authentically?’”
When Lear decided to reimagine One Day at a Time with a Cuban American family, the reboot became a reflection of “what it was like to be Latino under the Trump administration,” Calderón Kellett says. “It awoke conversations that had to be had.”
Lear’s passion for social equity and justice led him to extend his reach beyond his day job as a television producer. In 1981, he founded the civic engagement nonprofit People for the American Way, an organization that continues to work to defend progressive ideals in democracy. “I think there’s a thread through all of Norman’s professional life,” says executive vice president Marge Baker. “His work in entertainment was based on his real concern about the frightening divisiveness and intolerance in our society, and he used his artistry and genius to help people understand what was going on. He thought if he could make them laugh, they would listen.”
That belief fueled Lear’s 2000 gift to the USC Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism to establish his eponymous research and public policy center, which studies the impact of entertainment. “Norman knew intuitively that entertainment has the power to reflect and shape culture, and he had a history of uplifting the stories of underrepresented communities, particularly Black and Latino characters, long before anyone was talking about diversity and representation in Hollywood,” says Erica Rosenthal, director of research at the Norman Lear Center. Even in his ninth decade, he continued to work actively to persuade new generations of storytellers to consider the weight of their words, hosting private events at his home and participating in panels at the Writers Guild, adds Kate Folb, director of the Norman Lear Center’s Hollywood, Health & Society division.
“His stuff has been consistently a time capsule of a moment,” Calderón Kellett says. “I know from messages I still get every single day that it gave visibility and empowered people from the queer community, veterans, people in the mental health community, older women. There were so many people who felt seen for the first time. That’s what Norman consistently did: He shined a light on people that often are not the center of the story.”
