coley: every time you see someone who makes the completely ill informed idea of using blackface as a costume, that was fermented with shows like amos n andy. mother: oh my lord. toofer: you realize this is incredibly offensive? tina fey: yes. toofer: and you realize that blackface makeup re-ignites stereotypes african -americans have worked for 100 s of years to overcome? jacqueline coley: after amos n andy, the idea of people of color, both in front of and behind the scenes becomes less palatable for people who are writing the cheques. patrick gomez: television, it s ultimately there to sell you things, and so advertisers and their input matters. nielsen wasn t even counting black households in their numbers. so of course, you weren t gonna get sitcoms that showed their lives because they didn t care if you were watching or not. billy gray: on father knows best. there wasn t one black person in two hundred and three shows. we had one ethnic person, franc the gardener.
tim reid: back in the 60 s whenever a black person was on television, it was particular pressure. yvette: it was a huge responsibility for diahann carroll to have broken that ground. carroll: it was a bit too much, but i mean the responsibility of it was maybe one that i shouldn t have taken so seriously, marc copage: and it really drove miss carroll to the verge of a nervous breakdown. carroll: and there are a lot of people who think i didn t take it seriously enough. but i do think we were a beginning, that beginning i think has resulted in a lot of the things we see on the air today. [ applause ] the day you get your clearchoice dental implants makes every day a confident day. a never-hide-my-smile day. a life-of-the-party day. a take-on-the-world day. a believe-in-myself day. a flash-my-new-teeth day. because your clearchoice day is the day you get your confidence back for good. a clearchoice day changes every day.