Nicest Kids in Town
Page 1
THE GEORGE GUND FOUNDATION IMPRINT IN AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES
The George Gund Foundation has endowed this imprint to advance understanding of the history, culture, and current issues of African Americans.
The Nicest Kids in Town
AMERICAN CROSSROADS
Edited by Earl Lewis, George Lipsitz, George Sánchez, Dana Takagi, Laura Briggs, and Nikhil Pal Singh
The Nicest Kids in Town
American Bandstand, Rock ’n’ Roll, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in 1950s Philadelphia
Matthew F. Delmont
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University of California Press
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University of California Press, Ltd.
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© 2012 by The Regents of the University of California
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Delmont, Matthew F.
The nicest kids in town : American Bandstand, Rock ’n’ Roll, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in 1950s Philadelphia / Matthew F. Delmont.
p. cm. — (American crossroads ; 32) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-520-27207-1 (cloth : acid-free paper) ISBN 978-0-520-27208-8 (pbk. : acid-free paper)
1. Philadelphia (Pa.)—Race relations—History— 20th century. 2. African Americans—Civil rights— Pennsylvania—Philadelphia—History—20th century. 3. Segregation—Pennsylvania—Philadelphia— History—20th century. 4. Civil rights movements— Pennsylvania—Philadelphia—History—20th century.
5. American Bandstand (Television program)
6. Minorities on television. I. Title.
F158.9.N4D45 2012
323.1196’073074811—dc23
2011038775
Manufactured in the United States of America
20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Rolland Enviro100, a 100% post-consumer fiber paper that is FSC certified, deinked, processed chlorine-free, and manufactured with renewable biogas energy. It is acid-free and EcoLogo certified.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Making Philadelphia Safe for “WFIL–adelphia”
Television, Housing, and Defensive Localism in Bandstand’s Backyard
2. They Shall Be Heard
Local Television as a Civil Rights Battleground
3. The de Facto Dilemma
Fighting Segregation in Philadelphia Public Schools
4. From Little Rock to Philadelphia
Making de Facto School Segregation a Media Issue
5. The Rise of Rock and Roll in Philadelphia
Georgie Woods, Mitch Thomas, and Dick Clark
6. “They’ll Be Rockin’ on Bandstand, in Philadelphia, P.A.”
Imagining National Youth Culture on American Bandstand
7. Remembering American Bandstand, Forgetting Segregation
8. Still Boppin’ on Bandstand
American Dreams, Hairspray, and American Bandstand in the 2000s
Conclusion
Everybody Knows about American Bandstand
Notes
Index
Illustrations
1. Philadelphia turns up its nose at Detroit
2. The Angora Civic Association flier
3. Teens at West Philadelphia High School prom
4. Joe’s Snack Bar ad in West Philadelphia High School yearbook
5. WFIL pitch to potential advertisers
6. WFIL–adelphia broadcast market
7. Bob Horn interviews audience members during the daily roll call
8. By 1955 Bandstand became a space for white teenagers
9. High School Fellowship Clubs brought together students of different backgrounds
10. Teenagers participating in discussion on They Shall Be Heard
11. Students were left to graduate from Thomas Edison High School after new Northeast High School opened
12. & 13. Before and after pictures depict the loss of the Edison High School’s trophies and history
14. WCAU-TV “on the scene” report from Little Rock
15. Racial tensions among teenagers in South Philadelphia following Little Rock
16. Georgie Woods with his teenage fans
17. The Re-Vels, one of the most popular teenage vocal harmony groups in Philadelphia
18. Mitch Thomas debuts on WPFH
19. WFIL–TV advertisement for Dick Clark and American Bandstand
20. Cecil B. Moore presents singer Jackie Wilson and deejay Georgie Woods with NAACP awards
21. American Bandstand opening credits
22. Dick Clark talks with visiting teens
23. The American Bandstand Yearbook, 1958, picked up the station map theme
24. American Bandstand’s regular dancers became stars
25. Philadelphia Tribune advertisement for “Dick Clark American Bandstand Shoes”
26. Close-up shot of dancers’ feet
27. American Bandstand teens’” new” version of the Stroll
Acknowledgments
I am fortunate to have received encouragement from family, friends, mentors, and colleagues for as long as I can remember. My mom, Diane Delmont, gets top billing because she has played the largest role in my life. Among many things, what I value most is that she taught me the importance of working hard every day and being nice to people. I could not ask for a more dedicated and caring parent.
My extended family have, each in their own way, shaped the person I have become. Thank you to Kaye Henrikson, Bobbie and Lindy Stoltz, Katie Stoltz, Terry Lick, Leari Jean and Jewel Anderson, Frank Bowman, my late aunt Joanne Tucker, Jason Tucker, Mel Wernimont, Nancy Wernimont, Nicole Wernimont and Ramses Madou, and Zach Wernimont for their love and support.
Thank you to all of my teachers, especially Mrs. Knox and Mr. Hauer at Burroughs Elementary School and Mike Byrne, Solfrid Ladstein, Michael Manning, Robert Slater, and Colonel (Ret.) John Gritz at Saint Thomas Academy. Thanks also to Tim Kelly whose generosity enabled me to attend Saint Thomas Academy. Thanks to Peter Lindsay for answering various questions about social theory as a sophomore at Harvard and to Adam Biggs for reading multiple drafts of my undergraduate senior thesis. I now understand much better how much work that entails.
While I did not end up working in marketing, Chris Clouser has been a generous and kind mentor.
I am blessed to have many good friends from different stages in life. Thanks especially to Jason Christopher, Doug Hoffert, Shawn Anderson, Tim Arnold, Victor Danh, Jake Ewart, Jake Lentz, Ken Miller, Cabral Williams, Paul Berens, Kevin Berry, John Foley, Peter Fritz, Dave Semerad, George Smolinski, Joe Wills, Kate Arnold, Kara Alexander, Sonia Berlin, Don Casey, Jessie and Ben Davis, Holly Eagleson, Emilie Ewart, Kara Hughes, Katie Monin, Sarah and Matt Sherman, Heather Stroud, Brian and Debra Ballentine, Dave Ben-Merre, and Keri Holt.
I thank Matt Garcia and Susan Smulyan for being excellent mentors and advisers, as well as helpful critics of my work. They saw this project grow from its earliest stages and were always supportive. I also learned a great deal about teaching from watching them; I try to put this into practice on a daily basis. It’s safe to say that I would
not have become the type of researcher or teacher that I am without them as role models. I also learned a lot from Lynne Joyrich and Carl Kaestle during our discussions for field exams and while working on my dissertation. Thanks to Evelyn Hu-Dehart for giving me a place to work at the Brown University Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in the Americas, and for her job advice. Thanks to James Campbell, Bob Lee, and Ralph Rodriguez for being friendly and supportive. Thank you to the staff at the Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning, especially Rebecca More and Laura Hess, for helping me become a better teacher. Thanks to my graduate school colleagues in the department of American Civilization, especially Jin Suk Bae, Liza Burbank, Alma Carrillo, Tom Chen, Joe Clark, Erin Curtis, Sara Fingal, Caroline Frank, Gill Frank, Jim Gatewood, Morgan Grefe, Karen Inoyue, Jessica Johnson, Stephanie Larrieux, Eric Larson, Mireya Loza, Angela Mazaris, Gabriel Mendes, Ani Mukherji, Nicole Restaino, Mikiko Tachi, Gosia Rymsza-Pawlowska, Felicia Salinas, Margaret Stevens, Aslihan Tokgoz, Sarah Wald, Susanne Wiedemann, and Miel Wilson. Special thanks to Marcia Chatlain and Mario Sifuentez for being great office mates and friends in graduate school.
The Brown University Graduate School, Temple University Urban Archives, Philadelphia Jewish Archives Center, and Scripps College all provided financial support to defray research costs. Margaret Jerrido, Brenda Wright, John Pettit, and the other staff members at the Temple University Urban Archives were very friendly and helpful on several early mornings and late afternoons. The staffs at the Philadelphia City Archives, Philadelphia Schools District building, Philadelphia Jewish Archives Center, and African-American Museum in Philadelphia were also very generous with their time and expertise. Thanks to Terry Scott at West Philadelphia High School, Don Synder at South Philadelphia High School, and the librarians at William Penn High School, Northeast High School, and West Catholic High School for keeping their schools’ yearbooks in safe places and for allowing me to look at them after their long school days. Thank you to everyone who took the time to talk to me about their memories of growing up in Philadelphia. Arlene Sullivan deserves a special thank you for putting me in touch with several other American Bandstand folks.
My editor at University of California Press, Niels Hooper, has been very supportive in bringing this project to print. Eric Schmidt, Kate Warne, Mary Francis, Hillary Hansen, Kim Hogeland and Caitlin O’Hara have also offered support at key stages. Thanks to Sybil Sosin for her careful copy editing. Thanks to George Lipsitz and Jay Mechling for offering comments on the draft manuscript that greatly strengthened this book. Thanks also to Josh Kun, Dan Horowitz, and Erika Doss for their support of my research.
Thank you to Tara McPherson, John Carlos Rowe, and Phil Ethington for organizing an engaging National Endowment for the Humanities/ Vectors digital humanities seminar, and to all of the fellows who offered helpful suggestions as I prepared a digital companion to this book.
I’ve found, at Scripps College, an extraordinary place to teach American Studies. Thanks to Julie Liss, Rita Roberts, Sheila Walker, Bill Anthes, Nancy Neiman Auerbach, Hal Barron, Sid Lemelle, Mark Golub, Hao Huang, Eric Hurley, Amy Marcus-Newhall, Stu McConnell, Lily Geismer, Chris Guzaitis, Frances Pohl, Dan Segal, Diana Selig, Claudia Strauss, Cheryl Walker, and all my other colleagues at Scripps College and the Claremont Colleges. A special thanks to Cecilia Conrad, Michael Lamkin, and Lori Bettison-Varga for their early and consistent support.
Finally, thank you to Robert Scholes for teaching what turned out to be the most important seminar in my life. Numbers are not real, but if they were I would have to find a very large number to properly thank Jacque Wernimont for her love. I’ll always associate this book with our summers in Philadelphia and the many happy memories before and after. We’ll always have 4500 Springfield Avenue. A final thank you to Xavier Sebastian for arriving just before the deadline to submit these acknowledgments. Your timing is perfect and we love you greatly.
Introduction
In August 1957, teenagers across the country started watching teenagers in Philadelphia dance on television. Thanks to American Bandstand, the first national daily television program directed at teenagers, Philadelphia emerged as the epicenter of the national youth culture. The show broadcast nationally from Philadelphia every afternoon from 1957 to early 1964 and featured performances by the biggest names in rock and roll. In addition to these musicians, the local Philadelphia teenagers who danced on the show became stars. For the millions of young people across the country who watched the program every day on television, these Philadelphia youth helped to shape the image of what teenagers looked like.
More than fifty years after the show first broadcast, American Bandstand’s representations of youth culture remain closely linked both to the show’s legacy and to larger questions about popular culture, race, segregation, and civil rights. Billboard magazine journalist Fred Bronson, for example, argues that American Bandstand was a “force for social good.”1 Bronson bases this claim on Dick Clark’s memory that he integrated the show’s studio audience when he became the host in 1957. “I don’t think of myself as a hero or civil rights activist for integrating the show,” Clark contends, “it was simply the right thing to do.”2 In the context of local and national mobilization in favor of segregation, underscored by widespread antiblack racism, integrating American Bandstand would have been a bold move and a powerful symbol. Broadcasting daily evidence of Philadelphia’s vibrant interracial teenage culture would have offered viewers images of black and white teens interacting as peers at a time when such images were extremely rare. Clark and American Bandstand, however, did not choose this path, and the historical record contradicts Clark’s memory of integration. Rather than being a fully integrated program that welcomed black youth, American Bandstand continued to discriminate against black teens throughout the show’s Philadelphia years.
The real story of American Bandstand and Philadelphia in the postwar era is much more complicated than Clark suggests. It requires understanding not only how American Bandstand became racially segregated, but also how the show influenced and was influenced by racial discrimination and civil rights activism in the city’s neighborhoods and schools. In telling this story, this book explores five main themes: first, how television and housing formed overlapping and reinforcing sites of struggle over segregation; second, how school officials in Philadelphia, like Bandstand’s producers, opposed meaningful integration while claiming to hold color-blind, nondiscriminatory policies; third, how American Bandstand’s decision not to integrate, while motivated by very real social and commercial pressures, was not inevitable; fourth, how American Bandstand used television production strategies to construct an image of national youth culture and encourage viewers and advertisers to see the show as the center of this imagined community; and finally, how American Bandstand is part of an ongoing struggle over how the history of racism and civil rights in the North is remembered.
TELEVISION AND HOUSING
The location of American Bandstand’s studio highlights how the everyday material reality of race in Philadelphia’s neighborhoods intersected with televised representations of race. Bandstand broadcast from a studio in West Philadelphia during a period of intense struggles over racial discrimination in housing. Just blocks from Bandstand’s studio doors, groups of white homeowners like the Angora Civic Association organized to prevent black families from moving into West Philadelphia. The racial tensions around Bandstand’s West Philadelphia studio threatened to scare off the advertisers who were the show’s lifeblood. Specifically, Bandstand’s producers sought to broadcast advertiser- friendly content to the show’s viewers in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland. WFIL–TV called this fourstate region “WFIL–adelphia” and emphasized the station’s ability to help advertisers reach millions of these regional consumers. Bandstand’s producers wanted to make the show’s representations of Philadelphia teenagers safe for television advertisers and viewers in WFIL–adelphia, and they decided to achieve this goal by not a
llowing black teenagers to enter the studio. Both WFIL and white homeowners associations justified their defense of racial segregation through a language of private property and profit that monetized and racialized space. The anti-integration sentiments of the homeowners associations, of white suburbanites, and of the advertisers eager to reach these viewers influenced Bandstand’s admission policies, while Bandstand’s daily broadcasts of its exclusively white studio audience disseminated these anti-integrationist views to a large regional audience. Looking at these overlapping forms of “defensive localism” in housing and television helps to explain when, how, and why Bandstand implemented racially discriminatory admissions policies. The policies, adopted during the show’s early years as a local program (1952–1957), limited the range of racial representations the show presented to viewers when it went national in 1957. They also made Bandstand a target of protests by the black teenagers who were excluded from the show.
TELEVISION AND SCHOOLS
The Philadelphia teenagers who danced on, watched, or protested American Bandstand did so not just as media consumers, but also as students and citizens. Like Bandstand, high schools shaped the everyday experiences of young people in Philadelphia; and in their differential treatment of black students and their denials of discrimination, the Philadelphia school board’s policies resembled those of Bandstand’s producers. Bandstand’s producers insisted that the show’s admissions policy was color-blind but repeatedly denied admission to black teenagers; at the same time, the school board embraced antidiscrimination rhetoric while tracking black students into lower-level curricula and building schools in areas that exacerbated school segregation. Philadelphia’s civil rights activists challenged the school board’s claims of innocence with regard to school segregation and racial discrimination. Jewish civil rights leader Maurice Fagan and black educational activist Floyd Logan waged separate media campaigns, including television and radio broadcasts and newspaper articles, to call attention to the city’s educational inequality. Fagan and Logan used these media outlets to make educational discrimination a front-page issue in Philadelphia. Fagan also worked to make Philadelphia a focal point for a national network of social scientists interested in prejudice and race relations by implementing the work of social scientists such as Gunner Myrdal and Kenneth Clark at the grassroots level and by partnering with school officials to distribute an array of antidiscrimination education materials.