Okay, let’s get the family connections out of the way first. Yes, Roxie Roker’s cousin is Al Roker. Confusingly, her father was Albert Hubert Roker, and his father was Albert Lincoln Roker, Sr., and how they dealt with that in the family, I could not say. And she was married, for a while, to a man named Sy Kravitz, with whom they had a son named Leonard. Who goes by Lennie. Who has a daughter named Zoë with Lisa Bonet. Astoundingly, Roxie died two minutes after midnight on the day after said daughter’s seventh birthday, which is a near enough thing that I can’t be the only person who wonders if perhaps the clock was fudged.

I’ll admit I haven’t seen much of Roker’s work—I’m much more familiar with the rest of the family, really. I don’t care for All in the Family and have never actually seen The Jeffersons that I remember. The only two things I’m sure I’ve seen of her acting were Roots, which I was unable to find a still of her in, and Amazon Women on the Moon. Which obviously she was not in for very long. But The Jeffersons was, of course, an important show inasmuch as it was one of the first shows to be about a black family, and definitely one of the first shows to be about a higher-class black family.

And Roker, importantly, was part of the first major interracial couple on television. This isn’t “Kirk and Uhura kiss under the influence of alien mind control.” This is “she was on 196 episodes, and I’m pretty sure the characters were married for all of them.” As established, I don’t know how the show treated them, as that would require having watched the show, but however they were treated, they were there. Which is more than can be said even quite a lot of today.

Oh, and they didn’t initially want to hire her, because they didn’t think she “looked like” a black woman who’d be married to a white man, whatever that means. Fortunately, she happened to have a picture of Sy and Leonard with her. Proving that, whatever that may be said to look like, it definitely looked like her as well? It’s such a weird requirement, as if families of any type looked like anything in particular. I suspect but cannot prove that it’s because of . . . skin tone. After all, Roxie Roker definitely didn’t pass the paper bag test.

The Internet Broadway Database appears to be having security issues, and my computer’s suggesting I not try looking at it. But she did win an Obie, and she was nominated for a Tony, and it looks like it was for the same role. She worked in the Negro Ensemble Company in New York. She was a reporter who hosted a public affairs show called Inside Bed-Stuy. She was a children’s advocate in Los Angeles who received honours from the city for it. All in all, quite the woman and quite the actress. Well worth paying attention to.

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