One of the very last conversations I had with my mom before the dementia took away her ability to form words, just before she passed away, I teased her about being on the hit television show American Bandstand.
Her family had moved to Philadelphia in the early 1960s, and it was there that she had to enter her senior year in high school as “the new girl.” Of course she had a secret weapon at her disposal in making immediate friends — her smile and personality transcended her model-like good looks. By the time she arrived in Philadelphia Dick Clark had been hosting the local weekly show that was unabashedly geared towards teenagers. The program was wildly popular and filmed from a studio in West Philadelphia until 1964 when it moved permanently to Hollywood.
So I was curious if she had ever gone to the show. I was convinced that she had not because she had never mentioned it before, but on the other hand she loved music and was beautiful so it would have been possible. When I asked her over the phone, I could tell she was smiling despite the thousands of miles that separated us, and she cryptically said “sure” as if she was either joining in on the joke or revealing this hidden secret from her youth.
For those of you who are too young to remember, before the internet and wifi, and before cable television, there was network television and its analog terrestrial sister, radio. In the 1950s and 1960s there were only three networks to choose from (not counting the defunct DuMont and the NTA fledgling networks), and each major city did their own programming with local shows. Usually they were children’s shows with puppets, or cooking shows targeting housewives. But in Philadelphia a young savvy television host named Dick Clark sky-rocketed to stardom when he combined the music that kids were listening to on the radio with television. Soon teenagers across the country were dancing the same dance steps and being fed the same marketing from corporate giants like General Electric (“…this new 11” portable television is only $99!”), all under the watchful eye of Dick Clark and his show’s producers.
Since my mom passed away last April, occasionally I’ll spend an hour or three before going to sleep watching old episodes of American Bandstand on YouTube. I find it strangely therapeutic and calming, and I half-expect to see the image of my mom on the screen, descending from the studio bleacher seating onto the dance floor with her date, “twisting” or doing “the Mashed Potato.” As I listen to The Crystals or Chubby Checker play and watch these clean-cut teenagers dance and subtly try to get as much camera time as possible (across the country these American Bandstand “regulars” became huge stars in their own right, like Instagrammers today), I realize that what I’m seeing is slightly off.
It’s not that the black and white digitized copy of the kinescope is grainy, that is to be expected since these live broadcasts weren’t filmed until later, but that the teens dancing are almost all uniformly white.
Diane Miller Jones, high school graduation photo
Years later In an interview Dick Clark recounted how proud he was of how American Bandstand had broken the color barrier and was racially integrated long before the rest of America. That might be true for the artists he played and brought into the studio to perform (lip synch), but it certainly wasn’t true about the teenagers dancing to these black musical acts while the show was being broadcast out of West Philadelphia.
In his book The Nicest Kids in Town: American Bandstand, Rock ‘n’ Roll, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in 1950s Philadelphia, author Matthew F. Delmont writes how the show’s producers actively worked to maintain the show’s lily-white studio audience while promoting black music acts. As a bit of context, the television studio was located in a racially mixed neighborhood with blacks and whites (of Polish, Italian, and Jewish ethnicities) living in their own enclaves. The demand to get into the show far exceeded the supply, so kids would wait in line for hours, despite the punishing Philadelphia weather of rain, sleet, or snow. Black kids were routinely turned away, however. The reasons initially given were that there was a “dress code” that somehow the black kids never were able to meet, but this subjective obstacle soon gave way to a more officious barrier of needing to have a ticket to get in, which could be obtained by mailing into the show’s producers.
What happened behind the scenes was that the American Bandstand producers, who were ever solicitous of their corporate sponsors, wanted their advertisers to have as an appealing demographic for their products as possible. So when a request for a show ticket came in with a Polish, or Italian, or Jewish sounding last name, the producers readily sent out the free ticket. But if someone named “Washington” or “Jackson” or an otherwise non-ethnic last name requested a ticket, the producers did some sleuth work to research the street address. Delmont recounts how one black kid figured out what was going on: “I engineered a plan to get membership applications," Walter Palmer told Delmont, "and gave them Irish, Polish and Italian last names. They mailed the forms back to our homes, and once we had the cards, we were able to get in that day."
In an article in the online magazine Root, Delmont sums up his thoughts about Clark and his show. “We often use the history of popular culture to talk about the history of race in America. We don't want to remember all-American American Bandstand as discriminating against black teenagers. And that says more about our desire to embrace a more comforting narrative of racial progress than it does about Clark's legacy.
“The decision to maintain discriminatory admissions policies flowed logically from neighborhood and school segregation in Philadelphia, the commercial pressures of national television and deeply held beliefs about the dangers of racial mixing. Integrating American Bandstand's studio audience in the 1950s 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.”
All of which is to say that while I write in “The Last Good Republican” about the fight by a fictitious Carter Ridge to bring about racial desegregation in South Carolina, the reality is that the stain of racism and discrimination is not a uniquely Southern issue. It is an American problem, a legacy that still permeates so much of our country’s problems to this day.
I still love to watch these old episodes of American Bandstand, and if the show has its faults, it is a reminder that we all try to project a more perfect image of who we are than we know to be true. Maybe that is what my mom was telling me in her response “sure.” Believe what you want to believe, she seemed to be encouraging me, and I grasp that glimmer of hope that perhaps, just maybe, I might see mom again, dancing and smiling in a West Philadelphia studio and not just in my dreams.