`Amos `n' Andy' TV Show Star Nick Stewart, Who Played Lightnin', Dies

Jet, Jan 8, 2001

Nick Stewart, best known as Lightnin' on the "Amos 'n' Andy" television series, recently died in Los Angeles. He was 90.

Stewart also gained recognition as the voice of Br'er Bear in the hit 1946 Disney animated film Song of the South. He also founded a Los Angeles theater company. He died of natural causes.

Born Horace Stewart in Harlem in 1910, he tried boxing, dancing and being a comedian, says his son, Christopher Stewart. His first movie was 1936's Go West Young Man.

But, it was as the comic janitor on the hit "Amos `n' Andy" that gave him his greatest notoriety. That series came under tremendous fire for stereotypical depictions of Blacks. His daughter, Valerie, called him a pioneer who was "a part that was a steppingstone that enabled so many thousands of people to get opportunities."

And his L.A. theater also provided a venue for numerous Black performers including John Amos, Nichelle Nichols and Isabel Sanford. He and his wife Edna founded the theater in 1950. Stewart lost the theater in 1996, and it was demolished two years later. He told the L.A. Times in a 1993 interview: "I was Lightnin' by day, but I put on serious Black theater by night."

That same year, Stewart was given a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Beverly Hills/Hollywood NAACP.

He is survived by his wife, three children and three grandchildren.