Here is a lovely tribute to Bea Arthur (1922-2009) of Maude and Golden Girls TV fame, who passed away over the weekend. This is from the blog Florida's Daughter:
I was a 12-year-old Black preadolescent growing up on the Southside of Chicago when Bea Arthur first entered my life - 5-feet-9 and deep-throated when I was being socialized to squeaky-speak. I don't recall making the racial distinction, after all, this was during the era when positive Black television characters, female or male remained rarities. I recall now that Maude Finley had a maid, Florida Evans, a take-no-shit Black woman with challenges and troubles of her own that were later portrayed in the sitcom Good Times (which left me with an entirely different perception of Blacks, women and men).Nonetheless, much of who I am - an independent minded Black woman free to say and do as she pleases unrestricted most of the time by cultural and family dictates - is rooted in what I observed, and did not see on television. Maude - outspoken, politically liberal, three times divorced, an advocate of civil rights, and a woman's right to choose - was my hero. By the time the show left the air in 1978, I had been married two years and was expecting my second child, but not before submitting to two abortions; mirroring in my own life Maude's revolutionary decision to have an abortion in her late '40s.
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