While Fagan attempted to draw national attention to Philadelphia and introduced the language of intercultural education into the school curriculum, Logan used the schools’ antidiscrimination rhetoric to call attention to the persistent discrimination against black students in the city’s schools. Logan’s educational activism took many forms: he investigated individual cases of discrimination on behalf of students and teachers; he collected information on school demographics and facilities to demonstrate inequality; he pushed the school board to take an official position on discrimination and segregation; and through his public letters and reports he served as an unofficial reporter on educational issues for the Philadelphia Tribune, the city’s leading black newspaper. As the civil rights movement gained national attention, Logan used national events like the Little Rock school integration crisis to increase local awareness of Philadelphia’s school segregation and educational inequality. By the early 1960s, the struggle over de facto segregation in the city’s schools emerged from written demands and evasions into courtroom arguments and street protests. Logan’s research and accumulated records on discrimination in the public schools provided the base of knowledge that the local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) branch and other civil rights advocates used to escalate the school segregation issue. Like their counterparts in cities in the North, Midwest, and West, Philadelphia’s educational activists faced tremendous resistance to integration and educational equality from school officials who insisted that they did not discriminate on the basis of race. Unlike other case studies of de facto segregation, Philadelphia was also home to American Bandstand, and the city provides a unique example of how schools and television articulated similar visions of segregated youth culture.
TEEN TELEVISION AND MUSIC IN PHILADELPHIA
While American Bandstand elected to broadcast a segregated representation of youth culture, other Philadelphians used local television and music to different ends. They Shall Be Heard, a local teenage television program, dealt directly with Philadelphia’s racial tensions at the same time that Bandstand implemented racially discriminatory admissions policies. Created by the Fellowship Commission, the city’s leading civil rights coalition, They Shall Be Heard brought together teenagers of different races to discuss tensions in racially changing neighborhoods, such as West Philadelphia, at a time when Bandstand’s admissions policy prohibited such exchanges. The Mitch Thomas Show, a locally televised dance show similar to American Bandstand, was among the first television shows with a black host (it debuted fifteen years before Soul Train). Thomas’s show highlighted the creative talents of black teenagers and brought images of these teens into Philadelphia homes. The show also offered a mediated space for interracial association and influenced many of American Bandstand’s dancers.
In addition to these local television programs, Georgie Woods, a leading rock and roll deejay, used music to advance civil rights in Philadelphia. Woods’s civil rights activism developed out of his experience working with black teenagers as a deejay and concert promoter, as well as his concern about the lack of black television personalities and black-owned broadcast stations in the city. Woods used his radio show and concerts to raise money for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and to promote civil rights protests, drawing praise from Martin Luther King Jr. for his work. By merging his critiques of the media industry with civil rights work in support of the black teenagers who sustained his broadcast career, Woods offered a model for what music could achieve beyond commercial success.
Enormous social and commercial pressures encouraged American Bandstand to exclude black teenagers, but these alternative local examples suggest that Bandstand’s segregation was not inevitable. American Bandstand’s producers made a choice to pursue a commercial model for teenage television in an era when advertisers and television networks studiously avoided offending the racial attitudes of white viewers. Bandstand’s model of teen television emerged victorious, in large part, because federal broadcast policy gave advertising-supported network programs an advantage over local civic-oriented shows.
TELEVISION AND NATIONAL YOUTH CULTURE
The history of discrimination on American Bandstand is important because the program was the first television show to construct an image of national youth culture. Through a range of production strategies, American Bandstand encouraged the show’s viewers, advertisers, and television affiliates to see it as the thread that stitched together different teenagers in different parts of the country into a coherent and recognizable national youth culture. From large markets like San Francisco and New Orleans to small towns like Lawton, Oklahoma, and Waukegan, Illinois, American Bandstand invited viewers to consume the sponsors’ snacks and soft drinks along with the latest music and dances. More important, the program encouraged teenagers to imagine themselves as part of a national audience participating in the same consumption rituals at the same time. The central problem facing American Bandstand’s producers was that their show’s marketability depended on both the creative energies of black performers and the erasure of black teenagers. Although American Bandstand’s music and dances were influenced by deejays Georgie Woods and Mitch Thomas and their black teenage fans, the image of youth culture American Bandstand presented to its national audience bore little resemblance to the interracial makeup of Philadelphia’s rock and roll scene. As the television program that did the most to define the image of youth in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the exclusionary racial practices of American Bandstand marginalized black teens from this imagined national youth culture.
At the same time that American Bandstand’s producers excluded black teenagers from the program’s studio audience, the show’s image of youth culture moved ethnicity and gender to the foreground. Whereas television programs with ethnic characters like The Goldbergs and Life with Luigi were being replaced by (supposedly) ethnically neutral programs like Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best, because of its specific local context, American Bandstand offered working-class Italian-American teenagers from Philadelphia access to national visibility and recognition. Many of the show’s regulars viewed American Bandstand as a welcoming space that provided a unique exposure for Italian-American teens. American Bandstand also recognized teenage girls for their interest in music and dancing and offered an after-school activity in an era when budget allocations limited the range of extracurricular activities available to young women in Philadelphia’s public and parochial schools. American Bandstand became an integral part of the peer culture in the Italian neighborhoods of South Philadelphia, where many teens watched the show religiously.
TELEVISION, HISTORY, AND MEMORY
As the television program that helped to define teenage identity for a generation, American Bandstand is remembered by millions of people in the United States and internationally and is viewed as a powerful symbol of an era in American culture. Much of this memory rests on the belief that American Bandstand united a generation of viewers across lines of race, class, and region. While Dick Clark insists that he integrated American Bandstand in 1957, this book offers new archival documents, newspaper articles, and oral histories that demonstrate that American Bandstand continued to discriminate against black teenagers until the show left Philadelphia for Hollywood in 1964.
To understand the tension between Clark’s memories and the historical record, this book examines how contemporary concerns may have influenced Clark’s memories of American Bandstand in different eras. When Soul Train started winning viewers away from American Bandstand in the 1970s, for example, Clark emphasized American Bandstand’s role as a champion of black performers. Clark’s memory of integrating the show also responded to music historians and critics who, writing in the wake of the civil rights movement, raised awareness of the frequent exploitation of black music artists by white producers. Writing in the 1990s and 2000s, Clark presented American Bandstand as part of the popular national history of the 1950s. Framed in this way, the supposed inte
gration of American Bandstand becomes part of the national civil rights narrative. This approach evades the specific local history surrounding American Bandstand’s years in Philadelphia, as well as the antiblack racism in Philadelphia and nationally that motivated the show’s discrimination.
American Bandstand is part of the civil rights story, but not in the way Clark suggests. Black teenagers contested American Bandstand’s segregation on several occasions, inspired by both the everyday discrimination they faced in Philadelphia and by national civil rights events like the Little Rock school integration crisis. Although they were not able to change the show’s policies, the efforts of these black teens make clear that American Bandstand’s studio remained a site of struggle over segregation through the early 1960s. Yet, these stories of the black teenagers who made American Bandstand a civil rights issue are erased in Clark’s popular histories of American Bandstand.
Because American Bandstand is so widely known, the show’s images and themes have continued to circulate in popular culture well after the show’s commercial peak. Two productions from the 2000s, for example, present stories of teen television, music, youth culture, and race relations in the American Bandstand era: the Emmy award–winning television drama American Dreams explores race relations in early 1960s Philadelphia on and around American Bandstand; and the musical film Hairspray tells the story of the struggle over segregation on Baltimore’s version of American Bandstand. American Dreams and the Broadway version of Hairspray both debuted shortly after September 11, 2001, and producers presented these productions as nostalgic stories about the American Bandstand era. While both American Dreams and Hairspray portray racial conflicts to raise the dramatic tensions in their respective stories, both productions manage these racial conflicts so as not to offend the fond remembrances of contemporary viewers. For viewers in the 2000s, American Dreams and Hairspray provide narrative proof that individual racial prejudice existed in the past, but was overcome through the racial tolerance of whites and the successful assimilation of African Americans. Rather than arguing that American Dreams and Hairspray are bad history, I am more interested in the ways American Dreams and Hairspray look to the American Bandstand era to tell stories about the past and present, and how these productions foreground narratives of white innocence and interracial unity that work against structural understandings of racism.
When viewed in the appropriate local and national contexts, this history of American Bandstand and postwar Philadelphia provides new insights on the immense resistance to civil rights and racial integration in the North, on the early use of color-blind rhetoric to maintain racially discriminatory policies, on the ways popular culture serves as a barometer of racial progress, and on the persistence of myths of white innocence that deny, disavow, or distort the history of racism in the civil rights era. Dick Clark’s claims about the integration of American Bandstand, for example, exhibit the selective memory that historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall has identified in the dominant narratives of the civil rights era. Against the distortions in many of these narratives, Hall suggests making civil rights “[h]arder to celebrate as a natural progression of American values. Harder to cast as a satisfying morality tale. Most of all, harder to simplify, appropriate, and contain.”3 Like the stories that Hall critiques, Clark’s popular histories of the American Bandstand present segregation as a simple moral question of right or wrong, rather than as a deeply entrenched system of policies and customs with material consequences. Clark’s claims of integrating the show not only overstate American Bandstand’s role as a force for social good; they also obscure the very reasons why integrating the show would have been noteworthy. Clark presents himself as the brave individual who broke down American Bandstand’s racial barriers, rather than describing the immense economic and social pressures that made segregation the safe course of action. In this way, Clark’s memory of American Bandstand resembles the determined efforts of white homeowners to maintain neighborhood segregation while claiming to be innocent of racial discrimination. As historian Robert Self notes in his study of anti–open housing legislation in 1960s California, white resistance “rested simultaneously on both willful actions and a rhetoric of innocence” that “underscored the physical and social remove that were the privileges of … whiteness as well as the power of segregation to perpetuate racism and false consciousness among whites.”4 While Clark’s investment in the rhetoric of racial innocence is widely shared, unlike the white suburbanites Self describes, Clark became an extraordinarily wealthy media personality by hosting one of the most popular television programs of all time, and his self-mythologizing popular histories of American Bandstand have circulated widely.
As Dick Clark’s claims about integrating the show suggest, something is at stake in how we remember the history of American Bandstand. When I started research on this project, I believed, as Clark has claimed, that American Bandstand was fully integrated in the 1950s. I expected to contrast the show’s integration with the segregation of Philadelphia’s public schools and neighborhoods and explore how popular culture fostered interracial attitudes that challenged the existing racial order. The historical evidence ultimately led me to see how American Bandstand emerged from strong desires to protect racial segregation in both Philadelphia’s neighborhoods and schools and also in local and national youth consumer culture.
Rather than a mythical history in which American Bandstand made a major contribution to desegregation, this book investigates how television, neighborhoods, and schools became segregation battlegrounds in postwar Philadelphia and how these sites produced racial difference within the burgeoning national youth culture. I tell this story by drawing on a range of textual, visual, and aural evidence both inside and outside of the archives, including letters, meeting minutes, speech transcripts, handbills, city government reports, grant proposals, census data, maps, newsletters, newspapers, magazines, editorial cartoons, high school yearbooks, photographs, television programs, radio scripts, films, songs, popular histories of American Bandstand, American Bandstand memorabilia, and twenty-one original oral histories with people who grew up in Philadelphia and attended, watched, and/or protested American Bandstand. Through these sources I explore the choices American Bandstand’s producers made in their specific contexts, the choices other Philadelphians made under similar circumstances, and the ongoing struggle over how this history of racial discrimination and antidiscrimination activism is remembered. From television producers and radio deejays to school officials and civil rights advocates, all of the people who make up this history understood the daily lives of teenagers and the representations of these lives as important sites in the struggle for racial equality in postwar Philadelphia. Thanks to American Bandstand, images of Philadelphia teenagers became meaningful for young people across the country. This book reveals how American Bandstand reinforced, rather than challenged, segregationist attitudes, and how this discrimination has been repeatedly disavowed over the past half century.
CHAPTER 1
Making Philadelphia Safe for “WFIL–adelphia”
Television, Housing, and Defensive Localism in Bandstand’s Backyard
Advertisers … there’s $6 Billions [sic] waiting for you in WFIL–adelphia. SELL ALL of America’s 3rd market on WFIL–TV. You can really go to town—to hundreds of towns in the rich Philadelphia market—on WFIL–TV.… Get the most for your money, the most people for your money. Schedule WFIL–TV.
—WFIL–TV call for advertisers, Philadelphia Inquirer, 1952
Do you like your home and neighborhood? Then why not protect them?
—Angora Civic Association flier
Throughout 1954, white and African American teenagers fought outside of WFIL–TV’s West Philadelphia studio on an almost daily basis. Philadelphia experienced more than its share of racial tension in this era, but these teenager brawls stand out because they were sparked by a television program. WFIL–TV broadcast the popular, regionally televised teenage dance show Bandstand (whi
ch became the nationally televised American Bandstand in 1957). It broadcast Bandstand to parts of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland, a fourstate region it called “WFIL–adelphia.” In its calls for advertisers, WFIL emphasized the station’s ability to help advertisers reach millions of these regional consumers.1 WFIL–TV was a particularly lucrative advertising venue because it was part of Walter Annenberg’s media empire, which also included WFIL radio, the Philadelphia Inquirer, TV Guide, and Seventeen magazine, among other properties.
At the same time WFIL aimed to capitalize on its regional market, the area around the station’s West Philadelphia studio became a site of intense struggles over racial discrimination in housing. Just blocks from Bandstand’s studio doors, white homeowners associations and civil rights advocates fought a block-by-block battle over housing. Groups of homeowners like the Angora Civic Association sought 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 funded the show and forced Bandstand’s producers to take a position on integration. Fueled by the show’s commercial ambitions, the producers chose not to allow black teenagers to enter the studio. By blocking black teens from the studio, Bandstand, like the white homeowners associations, sought to protect homes from the perceived dangers of integration.
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