jan 1, 1977 - Roots

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For a brief period in the 1970s, the trials of working men and women moved center stage in national culture. Reporters wrote of the “blue-collar blues” associated with plant closings and the hard-fought strikes of the decade. A 1972 strike at the Lordstown, Ohio, General Motors plant captivated the nation. Holding out not for higher wages but for better working conditions — the plant had the most complex assembly line in the nation — Lordstown strikers spoke out against what they saw as an inhumane industrial system. Across the nation, the number of union-led strikes surged, even as the number of Americans in the labor movement continued to decline. In Lordstown and many other sites of strikes and industrial conflict, workers won public attention but little tangible improvements.

When Americans turned on their televisions in the mid-1970s, the most popular shows reflected the prevalent theme of struggling families. All in the Family was joined by The Waltons, set during the Great Depression. Good Times, Welcome Back, Kotter, and Sanford and Son dealt with poverty in the inner city. The Jeffersons featured an upwardly mobile black couple struggling to leave working-class roots behind. Laverne and Shirley focused on young working women in the 1950s and One Day at a Time on contemporary working women making do after divorce. The most-watched television series of the decade, 1977’s eight-part Roots, explored the history of slavery and the survival of African American culture and family roots despite the oppressive labor system. Not since the 1930s had American popular culture paid such close attention to working-class life.

The popular 1970s sitcom Good Times examined how the “blue-collar blues” affected a working-class black family struggling to make ends meet in tough economic times. The show’s theme song spoke of “temporary layoffs … easy credit ripoffs … scratchin’ and surviving.” Its actors, many of them classically trained, brought a realistic portrait of working-class African American life to television.

The decade’s popular music heavily featured artists such as Bruce Springsteen, Johnny Paycheck, and John Cougar (later Mellencamp), who turned the hardscrabble lives of people in small towns and working-class communities into rock anthems that filled arenas. Springsteen sang about characters who “sweat it out in the streets of a runaway American dream,” and Paycheck famously declared, “Take this job and shove it!” to delighted audiences. Meanwhile, on the streets of Harlem and the South Bronx in New York, break dancing and rap music emerged — hybrid forms that expressed both the hardship of working-class, urban black life and the creative potential of experimentation. Early rappers emerged from the block party scene in working-class black and Latino neighborhoods, where MCs competed to put on the best dance beats and attract the biggest crowds.

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