Billie "Buckwheat" Thomas

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Billie "Buckwheat" Thomas
Billie "Buckwheat" Thomas in the 1935 Our Gang comedy Teacher's Beau.
Born	March 12, 1931 Los Angeles, California
Died	October 10, 1980 Los Angeles, California

Billie Thomas (originally William Thomas, Jr.) (March 12, 1931–October 10, 1980) was an American child actor best remembered for portraying the character of Buckwheat in the Our Gang (Little Rascals) short films from 1934 until the series' end in 1944. He was a native of Los Angeles, California.

Although the character he played was often the subject of controversy in later years for containing elements of the "pickaninny" stereotype, Thomas always defended his work in the series, pointing out that Buckwheat and the rest of the black Our Gang kids were treated as equals with the white kids in the series. The 1980s Little Rascals animated series adapted from the Our Gang comedies addressed the problem by changing Buckwheat into a clever inventor who is always building ingenious machines for the gang.

After Our Gang was discontinued in 1944, Thomas played some small parts in other films, but soon left show business altogether. As an adult, he worked as a film lab technician with the Technicolor corporation.

Thomas died of a heart attack on October 10, 1980, in Los Angeles, California, at the age of 49.

Three years after Thomas' death, his character was parodied by Eddie Murphy on Saturday Night Live in a sketch that had Buckwheat as the target of an assassination. His assassin, "John David Stutts" (also played by Murphy), was in turn later assassinated in a scene that parallels Lee Harvey Oswald's murder by Jack Ruby. It was meant to be a parody on the extensive and overindulgent media coverage of the recent John Lennon assassination and the attempt on Ronald Reagan's life. The real Buckwheat's son, William Thomas, Jr., strongly protested Murphy's sketch. Murphy performed other parody skits as well, including a murder attempt by Alfalfa and an advertisement for a record, Buh-Weet Sings, the latter containing the opening line which later became an SNL classic: "Hi, Ah'm Buh-Weet. Amembah me?" ("Hi, I'm Buckwheat. Remember me?").

In 1990, the ABC newsmagazine 20/20 aired a segment purporting to be an interview with Buckwheat, now a downtrodden minimum wage grocery bagger in Arizona. However, the interview was actually with a man named Bill English, who had made a career of claiming to be the adult Buckwheat. By the next week, 20/20 had learned of their error (George "Spanky" McFarland personally contacted the media following the broadcast), that the true Buckwheat had been dead for 10 years, and admitted their mistake on-air. Fallout from this incident included the resignation of a 20/20 producer, and a negligence lawsuit filed by the son of William Thomas.^[1]