While the Fellowship Commission believed that young people held more malleable views on race and presented the most open audience for antira-cist messages, it viewed parents as important influences on teenagers’ racial attitudes, and believed that reaching both teens and adults together as citizens was a critical part of They Shall Be Heard’s goal of fighting prejudice.
Adults also made up a key portion of Bandstand’s television audience, but in this case parents figured as consumers of the show’s entertainment and advertising rather than as local neighbors and citizens. The 1955 Bandstand yearbook, for example, depicts different family combinations in front of a television console under the heading, “The family enjoys ‘Bandstand’ at home, too.” The yearbook continues:
Whether young-in-age or young-at-heart, “Bandstand” viewers at home are just as ardent fans of the program as the teenagers dancing “On camera” in the studio. … In fact, the program is so popular that Mom finds it difficult to leave the TV set when she’s doing the family ironing. … Even Dad (if he’s lucky) gets to enjoy the show, too, as sign-off isn’t until 5 P.M.46
In the course of one paragraph, the yearbook assured potential advertisers that in addition to a devoted teenage following, Bandstand’s television audience included a profitable number of adult viewers. In this image of the audience, the yearbook called upon gender norms in relation to television viewers (e.g., the young housewife watching television while performing domestic chores in the home, and the father coming home from work early to sneak a peak at afternoon programming) that were a common trope for television producers and commentators in this era.47 When Bandstand’s producers prepared to pitch the show to ABC for national broadcast in 1957, they continued to emphasize the profitability of these additional adult viewers and consumers.48
On May 10, 1953, after a twenty-seven-episode run, They Shall Be Heard went on summer hiatus. This happened in part because of the difficulty of getting students during the summer, but more so because WCAU aired Philadelphia Phillies baseball games in the afternoons during the summer months. In the spring of 1953, Franzen expressed hope that the station would be interested in resuming the program in the fall.49 To encourage WCAU to resume the program, Clarence Pickett, the president of the Fellowship Commission, wrote directly to the station president. After thanking him for the valuable airtime and production assistance, Pickett detailed the contributions WCAU made by airing this series:
First, a unique TV discussion format was developed. Second, it was a fine example of the cooperative efforts of the principal educational agencies of our city. Third, many boys and girls from different walks of life were given an opportunity to meet and consider current problems together. Fourth, it was a courageous presentation of significant educational material. And finally, as far as our own particular field is concerned, the program made a significant contribution to intergroup understanding.50
Pickett sent similar letters to the superintendents of the school systems and stressed the importance of cooperation among the public, private, and diocesan schools.
Just before the start of the 1953 school year, Fagan followed up on Pickett’s letter by writing to Margaret Kearney at WCAU. Fagan reiterated the contributions of the show and emphasized the importance of broadcasting contentious intercultural education topics. “It took courage,” he wrote, “for you and WCAU to risk a program which treated such highly controversial matter and which risked presentation with so little rehearsal.” Fagan also reminded Kearney that the Fellowship Commission had cooperated with WCAU to minimize the potential controversy in the discussions:
[I]n each of our planning periods you emphasized the need for sympathetic presentation of the viewpoints to be criticized so that the appeal of the program would be “to see the light” rather than to read out of society those who were unable so far “to see the light” as we think it should be seen. Thus, strongly antagonistic opinions were presented in a friendly, democratic spirit and the young people obtained experience in how to differ without being disagreeable. They also learned the importance of getting as many viewpoints as possible before making up their minds.51
Despite these appeals, the show did not return to WCAU in the fall of 1953. Most likely, as television airtime had become more profitable, WCAU elected to reduce its voluntary cooperation with the school system, or shifted its goodwill time to the less lucrative late morning or early afternoon weekday hours. In addition, the policy of the schools’ television broadcasting department, which distributed evaluation reports to the schools for comments and suggestions on programs, was to “plan series which will be acceptable to all the school systems receiving them for in- school viewing.”52 As such, pressure not to renew They Shall Be Heard might also have come from school personnel who vetted the school television lineup. In either case, after They Shall Be Heard was canceled, the broadcasts produced in cooperation between the city’s commercial television stations and the schools were more didactic, featuring science, language, and musical instruction.
Philadelphia’s school television program remained the largest in the country and was in its sixth year when They Shall Be Heard debuted. The schools continued to produce or coproduce fifteen television shows, including R Is for Rhythm, a music presentation for grade school students, and How Is Your Social IQ? an etiquette program aimed at high school girls.53 The Fellowship Commission, however, no longer played a role in these productions, and none of the broadcasts broached potentially controversial topics.
In addressing their respective viewers as consumers and citizens, Bandstand and They Shall Be Heard were a small part of larger struggle over how consumership and citizenship would be related in the postwar era. Historians Lizabeth Cohen and Charles McGovern have suggested that American identities as “citizen” and “consumer” became linked in the decades before World War II.54 Organized consumer movements pushed policy makers to see participation in the consumer economy as an essential part of full citizenship. “By the end of the depression decade,” Cohen notes, “invoking ‘the consumer’ had become an acceptable way of promoting the public good, of defending the economic rights and needs of ordinary citizens.”55 In the postwar “consumers’ republic,” Cohen argues, this connection of citizenship and consumership underscored a belief that a prospering mass consumption economy could foster social egalitarianism and democratic participation. Private consumption became equated with civic duty itself and shaped many parts of postwar American life. Backed by federal policies and public and private investment, these consumer desires shaped where Americans lived, shopped, and went to school.56
Bandstand’s model of teen television, one focused on the purchasing power of youth, fit neatly into the ethos of postwar consumer citizenship. Bandstand invited viewers to the new Main Street of WFIL–adelphia to participate in a consumption community every afternoon. Bandstand reminded viewers they were part of this community by repeating the names of the neighborhoods, cities, and towns represented in the studio audience and television audience. This community, however, did not ask viewers to do anything beyond continuing to watch the show and purchase the sponsors’ products. Bandstand expanded on this shared experience of consumption to become a national commercial success as American Bandstand.
The Fellowship Commission, in contrast, wanted They Shall Be Heard to be a “public sphere,” a space in which to stimulate debate and influence public opinion.57 Specifically, the Fellowship Commission hoped to increase support for its civil rights message and to persuade viewers to reject racial prejudice and discrimination in housing, education, and employment throughout Philadelphia. The Commission never believed that a television show could resolve all of these problems, but it thought that giving teenagers an opportunity to participate in public discourse on community relations was one way to influence the opinions of people in neighborhoods experiencing changing racial demographics.
Bandstand’s model of teen television emerged victorious, in large part, because federal broadcast policy
gave advertising-supported programs an advantage over civic-oriented shows. As a result, Bandstand broadcast for ten hours a week to the four-state WFIL–adelphia area, whereas They Shall Be Heard relied on a system of voluntary cooperation to access the airwaves for just one hour a week. Bandstand and They Shall Be Heard illustrate, in microcosm, how television contributed to the elevation of consumer culture over civic life.
They Shall Be Heard broke new ground in the field of intercultural education and was among the Fellowship Commission’s most innovative attempts to counter racial prejudice in Philadelphia. They Shall Be Heard’s cancellation dealt a blow to the Fellowship Commission’s antidiscrimination work, but the group redoubled its efforts to improve race relations and end educational inequality in Philadelphia’s public high schools. As chapters 3 and 4 show, Maurice Fagan, black educational activist Floyd Logan, and other civil rights advocates confronted the expansion of de facto school segregation. These activists faced the challenge of making de facto school segregation a visible issue in Philadelphia, a challenge compounded by the loss of a television forum like They Shall Be Heard in which to articulate these concerns.
CHAPTER 3
The de Facto Dilemma
Fighting Segregation in Philadelphia Public Schools
What has been called by certain groups “de facto segregation” in some schools has not been the result of policy by The Board of Public Education. [T]he record of the progress of the Philadelphia Public Schools in the integration movement is among the best, if not the best, of those of the great cities of the Nation.
—Allen Wetter, Superintendent of Philadelphia Schools in “For Every Child: The Story of Integration in the Philadelphia Public Schools,” October 1960
When the Philadelphia School Board published “For Every Child: The Story of Integration in the Philadelphia Public Schools” in 1960, it was the latest and most public rejoinder to the civil rights advocates who criticized the board for failing to address school segregation throughout the 1950s. As school officials continued to issue statements of their progress on integration, however, the city’s public schools grew more racially segregated. Philadelphia illuminates the dilemma posed by de facto school segregation. While many educational activists used the term de facto segregation to describe the discriminatory practices of schools outside the South, for school board officials de facto meant that segregation was the product of market forces and private decisions beyond their control. Casting de facto segregation as “innocent segregation” allowed school officials to claim that they had no legal responsibility or power to address it.
The de facto dilemma—visible school segregation with no means of legal redress—became the defining challenge for civil rights advocates in the North, Midwest, and West in the 1950s and 1960s. As in Philadelphia, educational activists in Boston, Chicago, Milwaukee, New York, and other cities fought recalcitrant school officials to secure equal education for black students.1 In the 1960s, the de facto dilemma also emerged as the dominant roadblock to school integration in the South. While school segregation has traditionally been understood through the dichotomy of de facto and de jure segregation, recent work on Charlotte, Atlanta, Mississippi, and other southern locales suggests that a broad spectrum of white politicians, school officials, and grassroots parents groups took up the language of de facto segregation to justify their inaction on school integration.2 Rather than public displays of massive resistance, these southern moderates and elites voiced rhetorical support for integration and allowed token black students in white schools, but opposed the methods necessary to integrate schools. The de facto explanation crossed regional lines, providing opponents of school integration a color-blind rhetoric to defend the continuation of segregated education.
Historian Matthew Lassiter describes this de facto rational as the “suburban blueprint on school desegregation” that emerged in the late 1960s.3 In this view, private housing choices caused segregated schools, and any resulting racial inequality was beyond the scope of governmental responsibility. This way of explaining away school segregation ignored the role of government agencies in supporting residential segregation, as well as the role of school zoning polices and construction practices in creating and maintaining segregated schools. Since the 1970s, the Supreme Court and many lower courts have embraced this view of schools as innocent victims of natural residential segregation, adopting what American studies scholar George Lipsitz calls an “epistemology of ignorance” dependent on the distortion, erasure, and occlusion of the clear and consistent evidence of racially discriminatory policies in education.4 The de facto rationale, therefore, came to justify a theory of white innocence with regard to school segregation. While the de facto rationale eventually undercut desegregation efforts across the country, educational activists in Philadelphia were among the first to encounter the dilemma it posed.
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. For black teenagers and civil rights advocates, the city’s public schools, like Bandstand, became sites of struggle over how to prove and overturn racially discriminatory policies. In their differential treatment of black students and their denial of charges of discrimination, the Philadelphia school board’s policies resembled those of Bandstand’s producers. Bandstand’s producers, for example, insisted that the show’s admissions policy was color-blind, while the school board embraced antidiscrimination rhetoric without committing itself to affirmative steps towards integration. This rhetoric obscured the fact that Bandstand consistently excluded black teens from the show’s West Philadelphia studio and the school system tracked black students into lower-level curricula. Moreover, while Bandstand’s producers took the segregationist side of neighborhood fights over integration in order to present a safe image of youth culture to advertisers, the school board contributed to these neighborhood racial changes only in one direction by building schools in areas that exacerbated de facto school segregation. If Bandstand made television an important site of struggle over segregation and the representation of youth culture, Philadelphia’s civil rights advocates made public schools sites of struggle over segregation and the daily experiences of young people.
The fight against Philadelphia’s school segregation gained momentum in the 1950s thanks to Maurice Fagan of the Fellowship Commission and Floyd Logan of the Educational Equality League. Fagan served as the executive director of the Fellowship Commission, Philadelphia’s leading interracial civil rights coalition, and was a major figure in the city’s Jewish civil rights community. Fagan was part of a generation of Jewish community workers who turned to intergroup relations as a tool to fight prejudice and keep postwar anti-Semitism at bay.5 Logan founded the Educational Equality League with fifteen other black citizens in 1932 at the age of thirty-two and was Philadelphia’s leading advocate for black students and teachers in the public schools in the 1940s and 1950s. In attempting to reform education in Philadelphia, where the school board was largely isolated from political debates and public opinion and educational issues received little newspaper coverage, Fagan’s and Logan’s first challenge was to make educational discrimination an issue that resonated with citizens beyond the neighborhood level.6 Fagan worked to make Philadelphia a focal point for a national network of social scientists interested in prejudice and race relations. He implemented the work of social scientists such as Gunner Myrdal, Kenneth Clark, and Gordon Allport at the grassroots level by partnering with school officials to distribute an array of antidiscrimination education materials. His commitment to addressing prejudice at an individual level, however, prevented Fagan from working to change the school policies that contributed to de facto segregation.
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 rhetor
ic 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 also used events like the Little Rock school integration crisis to call attention to Philadelphia’s school segregation and educational inequality. Logan’s research and accumulated records on discrimination in the public schools also provided the base of knowledge that the local NAACP branch and other civil rights advocates used to escalate the school segregation issue in the early 1960s. Confronted by Logan and his fellow educational activists, the school board pointed to its adoption of the intercultural educational materials provided by Fagan and the Fellowship Commission as evidence of antidiscrimination progress. The school board played the city’s civil rights advocates against each other, adopting the language of intercultural education and declaring success on the question of integration to avoid making the tangible policy changes that would promote integration. Logan’s struggle to prove the existence of school discrimination and the school board’s manipulation of Fagan’s intercultural educational achievements highlight the difficult challenges northern civil rights advocates faced in fighting school segregation.
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