term "Black" on-screen, as opposed to "Negro" which was still considered the correct way to refer to African Americans by many in the U.S. at this time. Holly would go on to write seven more op-eds for The New York Times during her time on One Life to Live. Impact on daytime television Before Carla Gray, there had been no African American lead characters on any daytime soap opera. Prior to creating One Life to Live, Agnes Nixon had worked as head writer on the soap operas The Guiding Light and Another World and had attempted to integrate African American characters and actors into these shows, but with limited success. The most enduring of Nixon's first Black characters was recurring character Peggy Nolan, a legal secretary-turned-attorney on Another World played by actress Micki Grant, who would appear on the soap from 1966 until 1973. In 1967, a CBS soap opera, Love Is a Many Splendored Thing, featured an Asian American, actress Nancy Hsueh, as a leading heroine, but the actress and her character Mia Elliott were written out after six months on the air. ABC as a network was already committed by the late 1960s to broadcasting programming produced by and for African Americans on their five owned-and-operated stations, and the network's vision when One Life to Live was making its debut was to tell stories the other two networks did not. That particular concept — to tell stories other people hadn't told or wouldn't tell — was a hallmark of Agnes Nixon's storytelling. In an editorial published in the industry journal Television Quarterly in 1972, Nixon wrote, "For any dramatic entertainment to be a success [in this day and age] it must be relevant...Perhaps the most gratifying aspect of "relevance" is the way it has permitted us to incorporate into our "soaps" many socially significant issues, to educate viewers while we are entertaining them... For almost two years we told the story of a young Negro woman of light pigmentation who passed as white. This sequence was done primarily because it furnished us with an intense, absorbing drama that attracted viewers. But the mail response substantiated our belief that it was absorbing because it was relevant and because it explained to viewers the sociological motivations for such a denial of heritage and race due to the rejections suffered by the young woman from both the black and white communities.