Recently I have been watching reruns of popular TV shows I grew up with, and I’m surprised to find that little flowers of fairness popped up and flourished in that wasteland of sexism, racism and homophobia that was the black-and-white television of the 1950s.

Take Dick Powell’s popular Zane Grey Theater. One episode called The Promise is about a new doctor in town who is mocked for taking care of the “squatters,” Mexican immigrants, who farm land on the outskirts of town. When the racist mayor asks one immigrant farmer his name, the doctor says, under his breath, “Twenty years, twenty years and you still don’t know how to ask a man his name in his own language.”

Wow. That’s advanced thinking for the late 1950s.

Was this a harbinger of the modern imperative for bilingualism? Remember George W. Bush running for president and giving speeches in Spanish?

A Death Valley Days episode called The Lady Doctor is about a husband who is frustrated because his wife uses her medical knowledge as the daughter of a doctor to heal local townsfolk.

At one point she treats an ailing Native American chief for food poisoning, risking her life and her husband’s farm if the chief doesn’t recover.

Her husband demands that she spend more time as a homemaker and less as a healer, until the day that he turns up with a broken leg, which she is able to set properly.

Suddenly, the husband appreciates the value of “the lady doctor” in a personal way, and the episode ends with her husband cooking supper on one leg (and burning it!) while she runs off to deliver a local farmer’s baby.

Is this the first house husband, in no less than the 1950s Death Valley Days?

Another Death Valley Days episode is the story of an Army officer in 1875 shot by a Native American’s arrow for trespassing on land agreed to in a treaty that white men will not enter.

He is brought to the Native American camp for a trial by the chief who will decide if he is to live or die. The tribe members who captured him want him killed.

When he enters the chief’s teepee, the chief stands alone with his back to the camera and the man.

Turning to face the camera, the chief is revealed to have black, not red, skin.

He escaped from slavery in 1857, and knew nothing of the Civil War or the Emancipation Proclamation. To save the Army officer from being killed if he is released on treaty land, the chief offers to escort him back to land protected by U.S. law, even though he erroneously thinks he risks being captured as an escaped slave.

The episode ends with the wounded Army officer asking the chief what year he escaped from slavery and realizing that the escaped slave-turned-chief did not know he was a free man, thanks to Abraham Lincoln.

The Army soldier asks to shake the hand of the free man and says, “Nobody can take your freedom from you ever again” or similar words.

Corny?

But in retrospect it confronts surprisingly two sad realities in American history: treaty violations in agreements with Native Americans by whites and the plight of escaped slaves.

It is worth noting here, that in another Death Valley Days episode, Sammy Davis Jr. appears as a black Union soldier. This was the 1950s, before Sammy Davis Jr. was famous, long before TV tried to make amends for its predominantly white view of American culture by including blacks as central to television plots.

Am I trying to clean up 1950s TV’s wasteland of sexism, racism and homophobia?

No.

I’m just surprised to discover in these reruns a few flowers blooming that predict the revolution that would come in the 1960s and ’70s.

Even the comedy I Love Lucy, which refused to use the word “pregnant” on camera and insisted that Ricky and Lucy sleep in separate twin beds rather than a single marriage bed, has its moments of liberation.

Don’t ignore the elephant in the Ricardo apartment: I Love Lucy was multicultural.

Ricky was Cuban. He spoke Spanish, and he was successful. And the dizzy Lucy was Lucille Ball, the brains behind the highly successful Hollywood production company Desilu, which grew from their I Love Lucy show.

And as for Death Valley Days, it had as a narrator a future president of the United States, Ronald Reagan, who appointed the first woman to the Supreme Court, Sandra Day O’Connor, and signed the first nuclear treaty with Russia reducing the number of nuclear weapons.

What’s my point?

American TV was trying. It didn’t give birth to the gender and race revolutions of the 1960s and ’70s, but it may have seeded them.

Here and there.

Paul Keane lives in Hartford.