The NBC television sitcom, Sanford and Son, was created by writer-director and independent producer, Norman Lear, whose lengthy list of successful, long-running, and often controversial television programs revolutionized primetime television during the 1970s. The popular program chronicled the escapades of Mr. Fred G. Sanford, a cantankerous widower living with his thirty-something son, Lamont, played by Demond Wilson, in the Watts section of Los Angeles, California. Sanford and Son was the first program with a most Black cast to appear since the cancellation of the Amos 'n Andy show nearly twenty years earlier.

Airing from 1972 to 1977, Sanford and Son was the American version of a British program called Steptoe & Son, which featured the exploits of a Cockney father-and-son junkman team. In the starring role of Sanford and Son was veteran actor-comedian John Elroy Sanford, popularly known as Redd Foxx, whose bawdy recordings and racy nightclub...