Nicest Kids in Town

by Delmont, Matthew F.

  The Philadelphia public school system is, in other words, a Negro system. But it is more than that: it is a ghetto system overburdened with the intellectual, moral and economic remnant of society. The private and parochial schools have siphoned off the cream of Philadelphia’s school-age population, both Negro and white. The children who go to the public school system are those who have no where else to go.73

  Fonzi went on to degrade black teachers “recruited from hole-in-the-wall type Southern Negro state colleges” and to call the Philadelphia public schools “the most obscene institutions in the city.”74 Echoing attacks on welfare that gained strength in the mid-1960s, Fonzi described the visit of a truancy officer to a poor neighborhood in order to criticize a mother of seven on public assistance and to ask “what sort of behavior can be expected from a child who doesn’t know what a father is or whose older sister is a whore?”75 In this attack, Fonzi singled out William Penn, a majority-black all-girls school in North Philadelphia, as an example of what he felt was wrong with Philadelphia’s public schools. Noting the school’s “Code of Behavior” (Do act like young ladies at all times. Don’t use profane or foul language.), he scoffed: “How ridiculous such minimum middle-class standards seem in contrast to actual behavior not only at William Penn but in most of the schools. Young ladies? Dozens drop out each year because of pregnancy.”76 Fonzi further described the success of small groups of students in counseling and motivation programs as “diamonds in a pile of manure.”77

  In its coverage of the story, the Philadelphia Tribune reprinted Fonzi’s article, followed by a two-part rebuttal by Floyd Logan. Logan likened the article to those authored by “Southern racist writers” who sought to “denigrate the image of the Negro child, his mental ability, character, health, home and family background, even his birth, in order to emphasize his unassimability into predominately white schools.”78

  While it is tempting to dismiss Fonzi’s article as the thoughts of an isolated bigot, his criticisms of black students came at the peak of the struggle over school segregation in Philadelphia. Against civil rights activists who pushed the school board to take affirmative steps to integrate Philadelphia’s schools, Fonzi’s racist article provided rhetorical support for antibusing protestors who contended that black students were culturally deprived and would benefit from remedial education rather than integration.79

  Logan and Moore rebutted the claims of these antibusing leaders. In response to Mayor Tate’s intervention into the busing plan, Logan resigned his position on the Mayor’s Citizens Advisory Committee on Civil Rights.80 Taking a more vocal position on desegregation than he had in the 1950s, Logan told the Tribune: “All this business about asking white people if they want colored children in ‘their schools’ is nonsense. We’re talking about law, not opinion polls. The School Board must have the courage to do what is right regardless of opposition from either whites or Negroes.”81 In a speech at a NAACP meeting, Moore extended Logan’s critique to the subject of the neighborhood school: “The only difference between a segregationist like Paul D’Ortona and one like Gov. Wallace is that one uses ‘neighborhood rights’ and the other ‘states rights’ to disguise his basic desire to keep the Negro enslaved.”82 Moore’s statements highlighted the concept of neighborhood schools as one of the most powerful ideas available to officials and citizens who opposed desegregation efforts. The neighborhood schools concept tapped into sentiments that led white homeowners in Philadelphia and other cities to organize groups to “defend” their neighborhoods from what they perceived to be the threat of black migration.83 The discourse of neighborhood rights also resembled the freedom of choice rhetoric used in southern school districts after civil rights advocates challenged massive resistance laws in federal court. Matthew Lassiter argues that antibusing groups in Charlotte crafted an “identity politics of suburban innocence that defined ‘freedom of choice’ and ‘neighborhood schools’ as the core elements of homeowner rights and consumer liberties.”84 By maintaining segregation in both housing and schools, these groups, in Philadelphia and elsewhere, sought to preserve localized forms of racial privilege. Like the school board’s antidiscrimination rhetoric, moreover, holding up neighborhood schools as an ideal allowed school officials, politicians, and citizens to adopt a color-blind ideology and avoid integration without publicly supporting segregation.

  Respect for the neighborhood school concept also underscored the Lewis Committee’s report on school integration required by the Chisholm case. Appointed by the school board, the Lewis Committee was an interracial group of community representatives interested in integration. The report affirmed the committee’s “unanimous belief in the principal of integrated public education,” but outlined preconditions for reorganizing schools to achieve full integration that would have been difficult for even the most optimistic integration advocate to envision. The committee recommended:

  First the community as a whole and especially those people living in predominantly white neighborhoods must be convinced that the very existence of the city and their own enlightened self-interest depend on their acceptance of integration as the modern and satisfactory pattern for life—in housing, in jobs, and in education. … The second fundamental need to be realized before integration of the schools on a wide basis can take place successfully is to improve the educational achievements of the schools themselves.85

  The Fellowship Commission’s limited success in persuading people to embrace anti-prejudice ideals made the first requirement seem far-fetched, while the years of neglect of majority-black schools like Franklin made the second equally unrealistic. The report concluded with suggestions for integration that the schools might implement at an undetermined future date, and recommended that the busing of white children to foster integration be given “no further consideration.” Instead, the committee suggested additional compensatory and remedial education for students in underperforming schools, primarily black and Puerto Rican youth. Set in the context of protests and counterprotests over what the schools could and should do to address school segregation, the Lewis Committee’s report sided with the segregationist antibusing groups and absolved the school board of taking any affirmative steps to promote integration.

  The fight over educational discrimination in Philadelphia’s schools continued after the Lewis Committee report, but the school board would not make any serious moves toward desegregation after 1964. Maurice Fagan and the Fellowship Commission celebrated the opening of the Community College of Philadelphia after a fifteen-year legislative and public relations campaign. The Community College opened doors to higher education for a large number of students.86 Floyd Logan continued to work on educational issues, focusing on the schools near his home in West Philadelphia (the new West Philadelphia High School gymnasium was named after Logan in 1979).87 Cecil Moore continued to be the most prominent and outspoken black leader in Philadelphia. On the educational front, Moore tried to reopen the Chisholm case in 1966 to get a ruling, but his request was denied. Moore also led an eight-month protest of Girard College, a boarding school for fatherless boys that excluded black youth. Although Girard College was unaffiliated with the public schools, the school’s ten-foot stone walls made it a highly visible symbol of racial exclusion in North Philadelphia. Protests at the school in the summer of 1965 provided an outlet for the anger felt by black teenagers and received extensive coverage from the Philadelphia Tribune.88

  In addition to the Girard College protests, Moore played a supporting role as a younger generation of Black Power activists organized high school student protests in the summer and fall of 1967.89 A decade after Little Rock, the educational inequalities in Philadelphia’s de facto segregated schools became a very public issue. These protests prompted negotiations among students, parents, community activists, and school officials that led to a larger role for black community members in the governance of majority-black schools, including black-only student groups in the schools and black studies courses. At the same time, poli
ce commissioner Frank Rizzo capitalized on white opposition to these school protests and the school reform efforts when he was elected mayor on a strong anti-civil rights platform in 1971.90 At the start of the 1970s, Philadelphia’s schools were among the most racially segregated in the country, with 93 percent of black students attending majority-black schools and one in twenty attending all-black schools.91

  On the legislative front, the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission issued an order in 1970 requiring five state public school districts to develop plans to balance the racial composition of students in their schools. The Philadelphia school board challenged the Human Relations Commission’s authority to act in the absence of de jure segregation. The case that emerged, School District of Philadelphia v. Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission (1972), was the first of eleven cases stretching over almost forty years. In the wake of U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Milliken v. Bradley (1974), which held that desegregation plans could not extend into suburban school districts unless multiple districts had deliberately engaged in segregated polices, the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court allowed the school board to submit a voluntary plan for integration that did little to lower the number of racially identifiable schools. The Human Relations Commission conceded that with students of color making up the majority of the public school population, racially integrating the school system was not feasible. By the 1990s, the school board submitted a plan to the court that said little about racially isolated schools, focusing instead on general educational reform efforts. The school desegregation case ended in 2009 when the Commonwealth Court judge accepted the school district’s five-year strategic plan that was approved by the Human Relations Commission and the educational advocacy groups representing the defendant. The plan, Imagine 2014, outlined several goals, including the school district’s commitment to increase the compensation for teachers in low-performing schools, to allow low-performing schools to select teachers without regard to seniority, and to institute weighted student funding within five years to increase the resources available at low-performing schools.92 While unnoted in the school board’s press release, in making this plan for the future of Philadelphia schools, the school board also echoed the past. Imagine 2014 reiterated the demands for improved educational opportunities for low-income students and students of color made by Floyd Logan and his fellow educational activists over the previous six decades.

  Underlying Floyd Logan’s quest to make de facto school segregation a media issue was faith that publicizing educational inequality would compel the school board to take action. In this view, the Brown decisions and Little Rock provided openings in which to make school segregation a relevant issue for all Philadelphians. As political theorist Danielle Allen has argued, images from Little Rock “forced a choice on U.S. viewers” regarding their “basic habits of interaction in public spaces” as citizens, and that many “were shamed into desiring a new order.”93 While Little Rock raised questions of citizenship for Philadelphians, the local import of this national civil rights story was far less clear. Counter to Logan’s hopes, as Philadelphia’s school segregation became more highly visible, the school board, politicians, and white parents became more adamant about protecting the status quo at the expense of integrated education and equal educational opportunities for black students. Ultimately, Logan did not overestimate the importance of media publicity so much as he underestimated the extent of entrenched white resistance to integration.

  The failure of school integration in Philadelphia made other spaces of intercultural exchange among teenagers more important. Radio programs, concerts, record hops, talent shows, and television shows dedicated to rock and roll became important sites of youth culture in the 1950s. In some cases, these youth spaces allowed teens to interact with cultural productions and peer groups across racial lines. At other times, youth spaces rearticulated the ideals of racial segregation. The next chapter examines the emergence of rock and roll in Philadelphia and the deejays and teenagers who shaped the city’s youth culture.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Rise of Rock and Roll in Philadelphia

  Georgie Woods, Mitch Thomas, and Dick Clark

  The masses of African Americans who have been deprived of educational and economic opportunity are almost totally dependent on radio as their means of relating to the society at large. … Television speaks not to their needs, but to upper middle class America. … No one knows the importance of [radio deejay] Tall Paul White to the massive nonviolent demonstrations of the youth in Birmingham in 1963; or the funds raised by Purvis Spann for the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project of 1964; or the consistent fundraising and voter education done for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Civil Rights Movement by Georgie Woods, my good friend in Philadelphia. … In a real sense, you have paved the way for social and political change by creating a powerful cultural bridge between black and white. … I salute you.

  — Martin Luther King Jr., keynote address, National Association of Radio and Television Announcers Convention, Atlanta, 1967

  Starting in 1957, millions of teenagers across the country tuned into American Bandstand every afternoon to watch Philadelphia teenagers dance to the most popular music of the day. The history of American Bandstand, however, starts not on national television, but with the rise of rock and roll in Philadelphia through radio, concerts, record hops, talent shows, and local television. Like youth across the country, Philadelphia teenagers found meaning in rock and roll, but they did so in ways that were mediated by deejays who sought to capitalize on the music’s popularity with youth. At the same time, these deejays introduced young people to the music that helped form their teenage communities. Attending to the local roots of rock and roll, and the deejays who led this development, highlights the complex mix of commerce and community in the growth and popularization of rock and roll. In addition to showing how American Bandstand emerged from a fertile musical culture in Philadelphia, this local perspective also makes it clear that the show’s particular mix of commerce and community was not the only available option.

  This chapter begins and ends with Georgie Woods, a leading rock and roll deejay who also advanced 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 fund and to promote civil rights protests, in which he also participated. Woods drew 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. In addition to Woods, black deejay Mitch Thomas hosted a locally televised dance show that drew black teenagers from across the Philadelphia region and was watched by teenagers across racial lines. The Mitch Thomas Show 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.

  Rock and roll developed in Philadelphia thanks largely to Woods, Thomas, and their teenage audiences. Dick Clark tapped into this excitement for rock and roll, first as a radio deejay, and later as the host of American Bandstand. Clark acknowledged that Woods’s and Thomas’s programs influenced the music and dance styles on his show. A talented cultural producer in his own right, Clark guided Bandstand from a local program to a national show with lucrative sponsorships. Woods, Thomas, and Clark all capitalized professionally on young people’s interest in rock and roll. The three differed, however, in their visions of what music meant to Philadelphia’s teenagers. For Woods, music became a way to raise money for and awareness of civil
rights. For Thomas, music offered a safe leisure space for teenagers and, through his television show, made black youth culture more visible. For Clark, music was the best way to appeal to, and become famous among, the growing youth demographic. As three of the people who did the most to shape Philadelphia’s rock and roll scene, the careers of Woods, Thomas, and Clark demonstrate how rock and roll became big business, but also how it was capable of being something more.

  As the quotation from Dr. King at the start of this chapter suggests, Woods was part of a generation of radio deejays who played important roles in local black communities across the country. Deejays like “Tall Paul” Dudley White in Birmingham; Purvis Spann, Herb Kent, and Wesley South in Chicago; Spider Burks in St. Louis; Johnny Otis and Magnificent Montague in Los Angeles; and Jocko Henderson in Philadelphia and New York raised money and recruited members for local and national civil rights organizations, serving as what historian William Barlow calls the “media nerve centers of the civil rights movement.”1 Black deejays played important community roles, more so than their white counterparts, because local radio remained the most important form of media among black consumers. Advertisers looked to black deejays to sell products, and by 1963 there were over eight hundred “black appeal” stations, most of them white-owned.2 These commercial interests were important for black deejays like Woods, but they were only part of the story. Through their actions, both inside and outside of the broadcast studio, many black deejays were “local people” in the sense that historians Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard use the term. That is, they exhibited “a sense of accountability and an ethical commitment to the community” that went beyond economic gain.3 Martha Jean “the Queen” Steinberg, who broadcast in Memphis and Detroit, recalled that the mission of black deejays was “to serve, to sell, to inform, to entertain, and to educate our community.”4 The localism of black radio, therefore, both constrained and enabled black deejays. Georgie Woods would never get a shot at national television like Dick Clark, but he would forge relationships with his community of local listeners that enabled him to use music to advance the struggle for civil rights.