Reviews on the Book the Nicest Kids in Town by Matthew
Luther Spoehr, an HNN Book Editor, is Senior Lecturer in the Educational activity Department at Brownish University.
Unfortunately, there'southward a problem with Clark'south apparently self-effacing claim to a place in civil rights history: it's not truthful. Or, in the somewhat more diplomatic words of Scripps College historian Matthew Delmont, "Clark'due south retention runs counter to the historical tape." Although Clark did indeed place blackness performers in the spotlight of his nationally-televised programme, based in Philadelphia from 1957 to 1964, the show systematically avoided having black teenagers in the audience, much less as dancers, as information technology helped construct a media-based "national youth civilization." Perhaps daunted by the uproar that erupted when the black vocalizer Frankie Lymon was shown dancing with a white daughter on Alan Freed's television show, Clark's producers at WFIL (building a media empire every bit part of Walter Annenberg's Triangle Publications, which included TV Guide) made sure that local black teens rarely fabricated information technology into the studio and fifty-fifty more rarely fabricated it on camera. And Clark went along amiably.
Although Delmont's well-researched, tightly-written volume may initially concenter attending primarily because of its revelations about Clark, information technology is in fact well-nigh valuable for the mode information technology shows how even a teenage dance show could become i of the sinews of segregation in what was arguably the most segregated city in the North. The Nicest Kids in Boondocks is equally much about real estate every bit rock 'n' roll, about how neighborhoods and schools were increasingly locked into systematic, discriminatory patterns, even as segregation imposed by police force in the Due south was crumbling under pressures signaled past Brown v. Board of Education and federal troops enforcing desegregation in Little Stone, Arkansas. Delmont delineates how "defensive localism," exemplified by organizations such as the Angora Civic Association, worked to draw the color line more than and more indelibly. "In Philadelphia's private housing market," he points out, "less than 1 percent of new construction was bachelor to blackness home buyers in the 1950s."
Delmont besides shows how local civil rights leaders -- including activists such as Maurice Fagan and Floyd Logan, and radio deejays such every bit Mitch Thomas and Georgie Woods -- organized to protest segregation and build interracial agreement. Unfortunately, activities and programs -- such every bit a hopefully uplifting Sunday offer called "They Shall Be Heard," which featured word past black and white teenagers virtually racism and other significant topics -- never actually had a chance. "'Bandstand,'" says Delmont, "addressed its audience as consumers and asked them to buy products, while 'They Shall Be Heard' addressed its audition as citizens and asked them to reject prejudice." Guess which one had staying power. Year afterwards twelvemonth, "Bandstand" invited students to trip the light fantastic toe every weekday afternoon every bit they arrived home from school. "They Shall Be Heard" lasted 27 episodes in 1952-1953.
Loftier school "Fellowship Clubs" were similarly ineffective. As Philadelphia'southward schools became more and more segregated, white students and black students increasingly lacked counterparts to talk to, even when they wanted to initiate conversation. The school board manipulated construction plans, curricula, and the like to reinforce the racial separate. Delmont's most vivid example of how the races were pulled apart is the fate of Northeast High School, once "the second most prestigious public school for young men in Philadelphia." Equally "the racial demographics of the neighborhood changed from majority white to a mix of white ethnic groups and blackness residents," the school section made a dramatic change: in the middle of the 1956-1957 school twelvemonth, "two-thirds of the teachers and a number of students left the school ... for a new Northeast High in the fast-growing suburban neighborhoods at the edge of the city. ... Virtually overnight, the school's name, nearly experienced teachers, and alumni network disappeared." The trophies from Northeast'southward trophy instance were moved to the new school. Disillusioned students left backside at the former school, renamed Thomas Edison High School, selected "Hiatus" equally the theme for their 1957 yearbook.
In sum, Delmont shows that modernizing trends -- the growth of national media, eye-class prosperity, and consumerism -- accept not been unequivocal forces for social enlightenment. Given the surround in which he operated, Dick Clark would have been assuming indeed to push for integrating his testify's audience. Racially unenlightened viewers bought his sponsors' candy bars and soda pop, too, and the e'er-ambitious Clark was not about to sacrifice a burgeoning career for a cause, no matter how righteous, and cease up like Georgie Woods, far abroad from the large time. Nevertheless, it was Wood, not Clark, who, at a 1967 convention of radio and television broadcasters, was hailed by Martin Luther Male monarch for "[paving] the fashion for social and political alter by creating a powerful cultural bridge between blackness and white."
Delmont speculates -- accurately, I recall -- that Clark'southward desire years later to be on the right side of history led him to exaggerate and misrepresent what he had done back in the day. Memory, as nosotros all should know past now, is not history, just it'south often much stronger for existence more consoling. Delmont analyzes the curt-lived television serial "American Dreams" (2002-2005), one of whose producers was (who else?) Dick Clark, and the several versions of the movie/musical Hairspray to show the dangers of history refracted through the warped lens of popular culture. (A song from the latter provides the book's title.)
This affiliate and his conclusion, which places his book alongside those by other historians such equally Thomas Sugrue, Robert Avila, and others who take written most racism's persistence and pervasiveness in the Due north, get a bit tendentious. Delmont uses his extended treatment of the two shows as a stick to whack the contention that America today has entered a "post-racial" era. Only such a contention is something of a harbinger human being -- no serious analyst that I am aware of insists that racism has entirely disappeared, and people of skillful volition can disagree over exactly how influential it however is and what would be the all-time means to combat it. And are we really surprised that its history gets more than a piddling warped when refracted through the lens of pop civilization?
The primary role of Delmont's story, withal, is grounded in a rich trove of testify and reinforces -- sometimes eloquently -- the argument that racism indeed must be understood equally more than a matter of individual attitudes. By bringing together "topics that, while closely related, are typically dealt with separately in urban history, ceremonious rights history, media studies, and youth history," Delmont paints an impressively vivid, clear, and comprehensive picture of the institutional and structural factors that made segregation what it was in Philadelphia: a vast, tangled web of rules and habits, expectations and practices, threats and promises -- formal and informal, acknowledged and unacknowledged -- whose visible and invisible threads bound up the lives of thousands through the years.
*Delmont'south book evidently began as a Ph.D. dissertation in American Civilization at Brown University, but our paths have never crossed.
Source: https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/146618
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