The ultimate tragedy we were presenting was simply another instance of man's cruelty to man, instigated by ignorance and prejudice." As Carla's storyline played out on TV screens in the late 1960s and into the 1970s, viewers were watching the first non-white lead character to be featured in a front-burning, sustained storyline for several years on a soap opera. To that end, One Life to Live became the most-watched daytime soap opera among African Americans, followed closely behind by All My Children, also created by Agnes Nixon, the only other soap opera at the time to focus consistently on providing storylines for Black characters. By the 1980s, it was estimated that 12% of all African American households watched soap operas, twice the rate of white households, for which actress Ellen Holly was given partial credit. (In fact it was Nixon's sister soap All My Children that debuted daytime's second Black leading female character, Nancy Grant, played by Lisa Wilkinson, who arrived in Pine Valley in 1973 as the wife of John Danelle's character Frank Grant and stayed on the canvas for 11 years. Black publications such as Jet featured the two actors, who were married in real life, in cover stories.) Throughout her fourteen-and-a-half years on the program, Holly was given varying degrees of autonomy in the sculpting of the character of Carla and the storylines in which she would be involved. Holly's input was solicited at first because there were no Black writers on the One Life to Live writing staff; head writer Sam Hall eventually convinced ABC to hire a Black writer because he wanted to lend more authenticity to Carla's storyline. Ellen Holly's primary role on One Life to Live paved the way for more Black actors and actresses to be given prominent storylines on other daytime soaps. In 1968, the year Holly debuted on One Life to Live, only three Black actors were featured in a recurring status or higher on U.S. daytime soap operas; that number would increase to 25 by 1982, with Al Freeman, Jr., who played Carla's husband Ed Hall, becoming the first Black man to win a Daytime Emmy Award in a leading category in 1979. When asked about the cultural impact of Black storylines which aired on One Life to Live, Holly said in a 1979 interview with Ebony magazine, "There are enormous stretches in this country where they don't know