John Amos got fired from Good Times in 1976 over a chicken hat. The hat belonged to J.J., the prop tied to "Dy-no-mite" three times an episode, and John Amos kept telling the all-white writers' room to take it off the set.
The chicken hat sat on the prop table in 1976. John Amos saw it the way a man sees a warning sign at a railroad crossing.
He had told the writers, in that small CBS room week after week, that the hat had to go. He had told them the storylines about Michael wanting to be a Supreme Court Justice and Thelma wanting to be a surgeon were getting shortened so J.J. could shout "Dy-no-mite" one more time.
The writers had credits and years in network comedy. They told him so.
"Well, how long have you been Black?"
That was his answer, repeated in interview after interview for the rest of his life. He kept going.
"We don't think that way. We don't act that way."
"We don't let our children do that."
The hat stayed on the table.
Before there was a sitcom set, there was a kid from Newark. John Allen Amos Jr. was born December 27, 1939, the son of an auto mechanic and a homemaker.
He grew up in East Orange, New Jersey, and graduated from high school there in 1958. He was good with his fists, good enough to win Golden Gloves.
He was better with a football. He left New Jersey on an athletic scholarship and ended up at Colorado State, where he played for the Rams and earned a sociology degree.
The pros came looking. The Denver Broncos signed him as a free agent in 1964.
On the second day of training camp, a pulled hamstring meant he could not run the forty-yard dash. They cut him.
He played minor league football for years after that, in Joliet and Norfolk, in Wheeling and Jersey City and Waterbury. The Kansas City Chiefs gave him another chance in 1967.
The Chiefs coach, Hank Stram, looked at him and saw something other than a running back. Stram told him to go write.
So he went to New York and took a job as a social worker at the Vera Institute of Justice. He spent his days trying to get bail reductions for men sitting in the Brooklyn House of Detention.
He saw what the system did to Black men who could not afford a lawyer. He carried that into every role he would ever play.
He started writing comedy on the side. He landed work on the Leslie Uggams Show in 1969.
He moved west and became Gordy the weatherman on the Mary Tyler Moore Show. He was the only Black character in the cast, holding his own opposite Ted Baxter from 1970 to 1973.
Norman Lear noticed him. Lear cast him as Florida Evans's husband on the sitcom Maude, where the character was a Harlem fireman named Henry.
When that family got spun off into their own show, the name became James and the city became Chicago. The children became three: Michael, Thelma, and J.J.
Good Times premiered February 8, 1974. It was the first network sitcom built around a two-parent Black family in a housing project.
Amos was thirty-four playing a middle-aged father. He was only eight years older than Jimmie Walker, who played his oldest son, and nineteen years younger than Esther Rolle, who played his wife.
The show was a hit out of the gate. By season three it sat in the top ten of all American television.
Then Jimmie Walker found a catchphrase. The writers heard the studio audience explode every time he shouted it.
They wrote it in again. They put him in a costume with a hat, and the audience screamed louder.
Amos watched it happen scene by scene. He watched the storylines he cared about, the surgeon daughter and the Supreme Court son, get clipped to make room for one more chorus of "Dy-no-mite."
He knew what it was. He had grown up with grandparents who remembered the minstrel show, who remembered when Black faces on a stage meant grinning and shuffling and a checkered jacket.
He had also done his homework as a writer himself. He knew what good lines could build and what bad lines could undo.
He started fighting in the writers' room. Most of the staff was white.
He would point at a line and say, "Uh uh, we can't do this, we can't do that." The writers would lean on their credits.
He would lean back and ask his question.
"Well, how long have you been Black?"
It was not a debate trick. It was a refusal to let credits sit in for experience.
It was the social worker in him, the kid from East Orange, the man who had carried files into the Brooklyn House of Detention. He was not always polite about it.
"I wasn't the most diplomatic guy in those days," he told the Archive of American Television in 2014. "And they got tired of having their lives threatened over jokes."
Esther Rolle shared his frustration. She had said it out loud in Ebony magazine back in 1975.
The phone rang at his house one day in 1976. Norman Lear was on the other end.
"Big John, I got some good news and some bad news. What do you want to hear first?"
The good news was the show had been picked up for another twenty-four episodes. The bad news was he would not be in them.
The line went quiet on his end.
"Are you still there?" Lear asked.
"Yeah, I'm still here," he said. But he wasn't, not on Good Times, not anymore.
"I didn't curse or anything," he said later. "I just hung up the phone."
The writers killed James off in the season four premiere. They sent him to Mississippi for a new job and then sent a telegram to the family with the news that he had died in a car accident.
Florida could not cry at first. She moved through the apartment with the children around her, dry-eyed, until the moment in the kitchen when she picked up the punchbowl and shattered it on the floor.
That scream became one of the most-watched moments in 1970s American television.
Amos went home with no show and no clear next move. He told the Television Academy what it taught him.
"I wasn't as important as I thought I was to the show or to Norman Lear's plans."
Alex Haley's Roots came to ABC as an eight-night miniseries. Amos auditioned for two other parts before they called him in for adult Kunta Kinte.
He almost fainted. "I couldn't believe it," he said of the moment.
"It was like I'd hit the lottery."
Roots aired across eight consecutive nights that January. By the end of the run, more than a hundred million Americans had watched some part of it.
"When I found out we had just about closed the casinos in Vegas," Amos told Mashable in 2016, "that's when it hit home just what kind of impact the show was having." He kept going.
"Because nothing stops the casinos in Vegas."
He earned an Emmy nomination for the role. Roots earned thirty-seven Emmy nominations in all, a record that still stands for any limited series in television history.
He told the Los Angeles Times about driving on the freeway after Roots aired. A big brother pulled up next to him in a piece of ancient Detroit steel, rolled down the window, and looked at him.
Just looked. There were a lot of those looks for the rest of his life.
Roots changed television. It did not change the offers that came to John Amos.
"The truth is, we did not receive the commensurate job offers," he told TheWrap in 2022. "The inequities that existed in the industry as regards to race still existed, even after Roots."
He kept working anyway. He played Cleo McDowell in Coming to America in 1988, the proud man behind the McDowell's burger counter who would not let Eddie Murphy's prince forget who his daughter was.
He played Captain Meissner in Lock Up. He played Major Grant in Die Hard 2.
He played Admiral Percy Fitzwallace on The West Wing, sitting at the table when the President of the United States needed counsel on war. He played fathers, dignified men, the kind of Black father he had been trying to play on Good Times all along.
The kind who did not need a chicken hat to be loved.
Years later he and Norman Lear made their peace. Lear admitted in his 2014 memoir that the attention paid to J.J. had made Amos "glum and dispirited," and that Lear had been the one who wrote him out.
"Ultimately we were friends," Amos told People magazine in early 2024. "It was a tumultuous relationship, which is what I loved about it."
In 2019, on Jimmy Kimmel's Live in Front of a Studio Audience, the cast staged a recreation of a Good Times episode. Amos came back, but not as James, playing a politician named Fred Davis while Andre Braugher took the role of James for the night.
He turned eighty that December, and the cast threw him a party at the studio.
John Amos died at Centinela Hospital in Inglewood, California, on August 21, 2024. He was eighty-four, and the cause was congestive heart failure.
His death was not announced for forty days. His own daughter, Shannon, did not find out he was gone until she read it in the news.
The chicken hat is still in a network archive somewhere. Someone in a Burbank vault can put their hands on it tomorrow.
John Amos cannot. But what he stood against, and what he stood for, is on every Black father in every Black living room who refused to grin for a check.
