User Reviews

I watched this episode for the first time when I was only 14 years old and the words used by the KKK man have stuck in my head since then. The words? "I wish he would have let me die."

I just saw this clip again on youtube just a few minutes ago and 32 years later from the first time. I am amazed at how I am still in utter disbelief. You would think that now I am 46 and grown I would get used to the fact that some people in this world will NEVER change and bigotry will NEVER go away.

Is that me or the 14 year old boy talking? HMM I wonder!

#montelpaige

This episode came at a time when the show had become sort of bland. George, in particular, had changed. His bias towards whites seemed to have gone away (for reasons that were never made clear). He no longer used the "H" word, and Tom Willis was suddenly his best friend. A nicer George Jefferson, but not quite believable. George unknowingly goes to a KKK meeting. The leader has a heart attack, and George is the only one who knows CPR. George saves the racist SOB. Interesting. George, as the character was first depicted, disliked whites who had done nothing to him. Would the same man actually save a member of the KKK? Maybe. Perhaps, we really are what we do, and not what we say.

I watched this episode of The Jeffersons on Starz last night and I gave it a 10 rating on the IMDb. It was very propagandistic, but worked beautifully.

George and Tom (Sherman Hemsley and Franklin Cover) want to attend a meeting in their apartment building that Tom heard about after a series of burglaries. Supposedly a group of men want to get rid of undesirables in the building they feel are behind the increase in crime. George is running late to the meeting so neighbor Harry Bentley (Paul Benedict) goes with Tom, and George will show up later.

The guys don't realize this meeting is attended by all white men, and this group is a chapter of the K*K*K. Where the undesirables the other men want to get rid of are black tenants. The group members don't know Tom has a black wife, but when George shows up they realize Tom is an N-lover. The N-word was used once and referred to several times.

This was a seventh season episode produced in 1981. It was scripted by two white sitcom writers (Peter Casey & David Lee). I thought the whole thing was brilliantly executed, even if it was didactic; they kept the liberal rhetoric to a minimum. There's no happy ending in the episode, which I think was also a smart move, because the racial prejudices of the world cannot be solved within a typical sitcom format. It was funny, sad, topical and realistic.