The legendary television producer, who died on Tuesday at age 101, was a champion of diverse casts as well as story subjects that tackled real-world social issues including racism, sexism and religious intolerance.
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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).
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.
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.
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.
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