The audience organised against the show

**The audience that loved the show most was the one it caricatured, and that audience organised.** Amos 'n' Andy began on WMAQ in Chicago on 19 March 1928, created, written and voiced by two white performers, Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, playing two fictional black men. It grew out of Sam 'n' Henry, which had itself begun as the pair's attempt to adapt a comic strip for radio - the broadcast history in the records calls the show a "radio comic strip". By the 1930-31 peak the audience was enormous: roughly forty million listeners a night, half the nation's radios by the Smithsonian's count, listening to a nightly serial that the record calls the fountainhead of both the situation comedy and the soap opera. The complaint ran through the same machinery the fandom ran. After a December 1930 attack in Abbott's Monthly by Bishop W. J. Walls, the Pittsburgh Courier pushed a six-month campaign, and the reference account records that more than 700,000 African-Americans petitioned the Federal Radio Commission about the show's stereotyping in 1931. The television version, with an all-Black cast told to keep its voices close to the white originals, drew the NAACP's formal protest within days of its June 1951 premiere: its bulletin on why the show should be taken off the air itemised the stock figures - "every character is either a clown or a crook". CBS cancelled the show in 1953; the sponsor had discontinued its advertising the same June. This is the corpus's diagnostic for an audience that exists as an institution rather than a screen: its machinery is its own. A newspaper campaign, a petition to a regulator, a sponsor's boycott notice - each acted on people who were not members of anything the audience owned. **The attachment to the characters was real enough to make the complaint precise, and the complaint was that the images were not theirs to love.**

Consideration. The part where somebody stops and thinks. The research, the diagnosis, the ethics, the lawsuits, the regulators. Roughly fifty years of arguing with itself about whether this is a relationship.