Subsequent commentators would remark the obvious appeal of reinforcing stereotypes that justified the second-class social status of blacks. (The NAACP did register complaints, but these had no effect on NBC at the time.) As one historian, Erik Barnouw, wrote in 1966, "In retrospect it is easy…to see the stories and Amos 'n' Andy as part of the ghetto system. All of it was more readily accepted and maintained if one could hold onto this: 'they' were lovely people, essentially happy people, ignorant and somewhat shiftless and lazy in a lovable, quaint way, not fitting in with higher levels of enterprise, better off where they were."

Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, loc. 320