1986 SPECIAL REPORT: "BLACK SOAP STARS"

The 1980s was the the turning point for both soap operas and black actors on Broadway and in Hollywood. It was the decade of Dreamgirls, The Cosby Show, The Color Purple, and Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson as superstars, showing that black entertainers were a force and that black consumers would pay to see them. In daytime, the 80s brought on “supercouples”: star-crossed young lovers, living against-all-odd romances torn from the pages of harlequin novels. The casts of soaps began trending younger, straying away from the troubles of older married couples and instead revolving around youthful lovers, their friends, and their meddlesome relatives.

In 1982, All My Children introduced Jesse and Angie. Jesse was Dr. Grant’s nephew, and Angie was the daughter of a wealthy black couple. They were friends and frenemies of other burgeoning young players in Pine Valley: Tad, Liza, Jenny, and Greg. Despite the soap world’s trouble with interracial relationships, it had no problem bringing actual racial tensions to the forefront. Liza falsely accused Jesse of rape, thinking that a black man could be easily convicted. Jesse was exonerated, and later pursued a romance with Angie. Their parents didn’t want them together, making for a classic Romeo-and-Juliet tale. Defying those odds, they became daytime’s first black supercouple.

Other networks took notice. Another World began expanding the character of Quinn Harding, a black female architect, by giving her love interests, relatives, and friends. So did Days of Our Lives, which gave the black police officer Abe Carver more to do besides solve crime. In one bizarre storyline on The Young and The Restless, Tyrone Jackson, a black law student, disguised himself as a white man to take down a crime ring. Even Ryan’s Hope, which focused on an Irish-American family in New York, slowly integrated, having one of its characters take in a black teenage runaway, played by eventual superstar Tichina Arnold.

“Even though other actors of color had been on the show, they existed alone, without family; they were a community of one, but we were there front and center,” Petronia Paley, who played Quinn, told an Another World fansite in 2009. (Before Paley, Another World employed one black actor: Vera Moore, who played a nurse that only existed to treat ill white characters.) “Diversity and inclusion are the buzzwords now, but ‘back in the day’ in [the fictional] Bay City, there was a community of people of color who were movers and shakers making a difference. They were there with lives and loves and troubles just like everybody else.”

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