1950s dance theme shot down by Harvard student committee because it’s racist

The College Fix ^ | 7/14/2016 | Greg Piper

[little jeremiah]

ROTFLOL!

[Bigg Red]

Uh, no, most girls in the 1950s were not sluts.

[Will88]

The 1950s mean one thing and one thing only for a subset of Harvard students: RACISM.

What a bunch of ignoramuses and nitwits. How could a '50s party be racist? There were plenty of black entertainers making hit records in '50s: Bo Diddley, Little Richard, Fats Domino and, of course, Chuck Berry and others.

Political Correctness has rendered about half our population as just plain stupid.

[LadyDoc]

Check youtube. The dancers were often of both races, but only danced with each other. Only a few couples were black, but people noticed.

I don’t remember there bein special days for blacks only, although they might not have been televised.

and remember in those days the south still had segregation.

[Tolerance Sucks Rocks]

What, no Happy Days?

 

[Albion Wilde]

and remember in those days the south still had segregation.

The show was on from 1952 to 1989, but we're talking about the 50s. According to Wikipedia,

With American Bandstand being originally located in Philadelphia, segregation easily affected the concentrated area. "With Bandstand, WFIL resolved this tension by drawing on Philadelphia’s interracial music scene to create an entertaining and profitable television show, while refusing to allow the city’s black teenagers into the studio audience for fear of alienating viewers and advertisers. Like the white homeowners associations’ concerns about property values, WFIL’s version of defensive localism built on a belief that integration would hurt the station’s investment in Bandstand." WFIL defended these local associations in order to maintain support.

Once the program went national in Los Angeles, new host Dick Clark decided that integration was the most responsible move. History goes back and forth with the timing and motives of the integration, but nevertheless, American Bandstand socially impacted teenagers' opinions regarding race.

Bandstand moved from Philly to the West Coast in 1964, which is when, per the above paragraph, the integration took place.

So they're saying the musicians were integrated, but the kids were not as long as the show was in its original location, Philadelphia. I remember that studio at 46th and Market Streets, in the West part of the city that actually was surrounded by black neighborhoods.

Here's a video about the Philadelphia years, the segregation issue, how the white kids learned dances from black DJs' broadcasts of black kids, etc:

Despite Rep for Integration, TV's Iconic "American Bandstand" Kept Black Teens Off Its Stage

So what is faulty here is my memory that Dick Clark had the black kids on the show one day a week. That might have been the Baltimore rock'n'roll show, or it might have been a reconstructed memory from the movie Hairspray.

[LadyDoc]

Hollywood reporter.http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/dick-clark-death-5-ways-revolutionized-tv-music-314225