Jester Hairston

When I worked on Amos 'n' Andy I couldn't let it bother me that the other black characters were played by whites, because what could I do? It offended me, but the only way that a black man could get a role was to go ahead and take whatever the white man would give him because the pictures and studios belonged to him. I didn't make any fuss. If I had, they would have called me a Communist and ran me out of Hollywood. There weren't many blacks in SAG when I joined, but I had to join if I had any intention of staying out here. I worked with a composer named Dmitri Tiomkin on the score for Lost Horizon (1937) and arranged the choral work for many of his scores. Tiomkin didn't give a damn what color you were so long as you could do the work.