Before he played Archie Bunker’s equally outspoken neighbor, George Jefferson, on All in the Family, and before George moved on up to a dee-luxe apartment in the sky in The Jeffersons, Sherman Hemsley was a stage actor with a passion for music. But it was Jefferson (and Norman Lear‘s groundbreaking sitcoms) who would turn the intensely private, Philadelphia born Hemsley into an entertainment trailblazer.

Lear was so convinced that Hemsley was the right man to play Jefferson that he waited a full two years for the actor to wrap his theater commitments and report to the All in the Family set. Lear’s instincts were correct: Hemsley parlayed the show’s writers’ words, plus snippets of real people from Hemsley’s own early years, into a character that showed a Black patriarch character in a brand-new way.