[8] The pair hoped that the radio exposure would lead to stage work; they were able to sell some of their scripts to local bandleader Paul Ash,[9] which led to jobs at the Chicago Tribune's station WGN in 1925.

[8] Since the Tribune syndicated Sidney Smith's popular comic strip The Gumps, which had successfully introduced the concept of daily continuity, WGN executive Ben McCanna thought a serialized version would work on radio.

[5][8] WMAQ, the Chicago Daily News station, hired Gosden and Correll and their former WGN announcer Bill Hay to create a series similar to Sam 'n' Henry.

[8] Amos Jones and Andy Brown worked on a farm near Atlanta, Georgia, and during the first week's episodes, they made plans to find a better life in Chicago, despite warnings from a friend.

With four ham-and-cheese sandwiches and $24, they bought train tickets and headed for Chicago, where they lived in a rooming house on State Street and experienced some rough times before launching their own business, the Fresh Air Taxi Company.

Other characters included John Augustus "Brother" Crawford, an industrious but long-suffering family man; Henry Van Porter, a social-climbing real estate and insurance salesman; Frederick Montgomery Gwindell, a hard-charging newspaperman; Algonquin J. Calhoun, a somewhat crooked lawyer added to the series in 1949, six years after its conversion to a half-hour situation comedy; William Lewis Taylor, Ruby's well-spoken, college-educated father; and Willie "Lightning" Jefferson, a slow-moving Stepin Fetchit–type character.

[23] Beginning in 1935, actresses began voicing the female characters, and after the program converted to a weekly situation comedy in 1943, other actors were recruited for some of the supporting male roles.

With the listening audience increasing in spring and summer 1928, the show's success prompted sponsor Pepsodent Company to bring it to the NBC Blue Network on August 19, 1929.

Following official protests by the National Association of Chiefs of Police, Correll and Gosden were forced to abandon that storyline, turning the entire sequence into a bad dream, from which Amos gratefully awoke on Christmas Eve.

Working alone in a small studio, Correll and Gosden created an intimate, understated acting style that differed sharply from the broad manner of stage actors – a technique requiring careful voice modulation, especially in the portrayal of multiple characters.

Their plots flowed gradually from one to the other, with minor subplots building in importance until they overtook the narrative, before receding to give way to the next major sequence; in this manner, seeds for storylines were often planted months in advance.

[34] The later radio program and the TV version were advanced for the time, depicting blacks in a variety of roles, including those of successful business owners and managers, professionals and public officials, in addition to the comic characters at the show's core.

After the associations with Pepsodent toothpaste (1929–37) and Campbell's Soup (1937–43), primary sponsors included Lever Brothers's Rinso detergent (1943–50); the Rexall drugstore chain (1950–54); and CBS's own Columbia brand of television sets (1954–55).

Walls of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church wrote an article sharply denouncing Amos 'n' Andy for its lower-class characterizations and "crude, repetitious, and moronic" dialogue.

The Pittsburgh Courier was the second largest African-American newspaper at the time, and publisher Robert L. Vann expanded Walls' criticism into a full-fledged protest during a six-month period in 1931.

[43] Gosden and Correll did lend their voices to a pair of Amos 'n' Andy cartoon shorts produced by the Van Beuren Studios in 1934, The Rasslin' Match and The Lion Tamer.

"[58] That pressure was considered a primary factor in the show's cancellation, even though it finished at #13 in the 1951–1952 Nielsen ratings and at #25 in 1952–1953[59] Blatz was targeted as well, finally discontinuing its advertising support in June 1953.

[61] The show was widely repeated in syndicated reruns until 1966 when, in an unprecedented action for network television at that time, CBS finally gave in to pressure from the NAACP and the growing civil rights movement and withdrew the program.

[65] Plans were made for a vaudeville act based on the television program in August 1953, with Tim Moore, Alvin Childress and Spencer Williams playing the same roles.

[67] A group of cast members began a "TV Stars of Amos 'n' Andy" cross-country tour in 1956, which was halted by CBS; the network considered it an infringement of their exclusive rights to the show and its characters.

[68] In the summer of 1968, the premiere episode of the CBS News documentary series Of Black America, narrated by Bill Cosby, showed brief film clips of Amos 'n' Andy in a segment on racial stereotypes in vintage motion pictures and television programing.

It told a brief history of the franchise from its radio days to the CBS series, and featured interviews with surviving cast members as well as popular black television stars such as Redd Foxx and Marla Gibbs, who reflected on the show's impact on their careers.

Foxx and Gibbs emphasized the importance of the show featuring black actors in lead roles and expressed disagreement with the NAACP's objections that had contributed to the program's downfall.

[69] In Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s 2012 American Heritage article Growing Up Colored, he wrote: "And everybody loved Amos 'n Andy – I don't care what people say today....Nobody was likely to confuse them with the colored people we knew..."[70] In 2004, the now-defunct Trio network returned Amos 'n' Andy to television for one night in an effort to reintroduce the series to 21st century audiences.

[71] In 2012, Rejoice TV, an independent television and Internet network in Houston, started airing the show weeknights on a regular, nationwide basis for the first time since CBS pulled the series from distribution in 1966.

Although the characters of Amos and Andy themselves are in the public domain, as well as the show's trademarks, title, format, basic premise and all materials created prior to 1948 (Silverman vs CBS, 870 F.2d 40),[74] the television series itself is protected by copyright.

CBS bought out Gosden & Correll's ownership of the program and characters in 1948 and the courts decided in the Silverman ruling that all post-1948 Amos 'n' Andy material was protected.

In 1998, CBS initiated copyright infringement suits against three companies selling the videos and issued a cease-and-desist order to a national mail-order outfit that had offered episodes on videocassettes and advertised them in late-night television ads during the late 1990s.

[7] This effort at reviving the series in a way that was intended to be less racially offensive ended after one season on ABC, although it remained quite popular in syndicated reruns in Australia for several years.

In the 1994 film Pulp Fiction, Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman) and Vincent Vega (John Travolta) visit a '50s-themed diner that offers on its menu an "Amos 'n' Andy" milkshake.