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Things Were Changing

1954

• Brown v. Board of Education (1954) • Baltimore becomes the first Southern city to integrate its schools after the

Brown decision • Harry Coles (Baltimore) elected as first black in the General Assembly • Public housing in Baltimore integrated • City dime-stores begin to open lunch counters to black customers • Lonesome v. Maxwell, 123 F. Supp. 193 (MD 1954) racial segregation

public beaches, bath houses and swimming pools by the State of Maryland and the City of Baltimore upheld.

1955 • 7% Black Baltimore students attend integrated schools • Baltimore department stores allow blacks to try on clothes • Baltimore Sun front page series The City We Live In, exposing injustices to

black Baltimoreans • Baltimore City Council authorized publication of A CITY IN TRANSITION

supporting civil rights efforts • Governor McKeldin ends segregation in the National Guard • Dawson v. Baltimore City, 220 F.2d 386 (4th Cir. Md. 1955) federal court

orders Baltimore to desegregate public swimming pools and the Supreme Court affirms (Baltimore City v. Dawson, 350 U.S. 877(1955))

• CORE pickets Gwynn Oak Amusement Park for the first time • Montgomery Bus Boycott

1956 • 14% Black Baltimore students attend integrated schools • Baltimore City Equal Employment Ordinance – no enforcement mechanism • Governor McKeldin ends separate listings for black and white applicants for

state jobs

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1957

• 26% Black Baltimore students attend integrated schools • Sheraton Belvedere becomes the first Baltimore hotel to admit black

customers • The Buddy Deane Show first airs on WJZ-TV in Baltimore • Congress enacts the 1957 Civil Rights Act, the first modern legislation

designed to enforce the right to vote in federal elections. • President Eisenhower sends federal troops to Little Rock Arkansas to

enforce desegregation of Central High School

1958 • Most Baltimore movie theaters open to black customers • Most Baltimore first-class hotels accommodate blacks

1960 • Sit-ins at Northwood Shopping Center lunch counters by students from

Morgan State College, Johns Hopkins University and Goucher College. • Sit-in at Hooper’s Restaurant in downtown Baltimore by Morgan State and

black high school students results in the arrest and conviction of demonstrators (Maryland v. Bell).

• Other sit-in demonstrations at area restaurants. • Congress enacts the 1960 Civil Rights Act reaching voting discrimination in

state elections.

1961 • Green v State, 225 Md 422 (1961) arrest and conviction of civil rights

protesters at Glen Echo Amusement Park affirmed by the Maryland Court of Appeals

• AFRO AMERICAN newspaper reporter George Collins dons African diplomatic garb to get service at a Fayette Street restaurant.

• Freedom rides along Route 40 to desegregate public accommodations. • NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall nominated by President John Kennedy

to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit

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1962 • Setting for Hairspray the musical [with 1963 just around the corner] • Bell v. Maryland, 227 Md 302 (1962) the Court of Appeals uphold the

conviction of high school and college students including the named plaintiff, Robert Bell, now chief judge of the Maryland Court of Appeals, for trying to integrate Hooper’s Restaurant.

• Dr. Martin Luther King speaks to 3,500 people at Willard W. Allen Masonic Temple urging continued non-violence demonstrations opposing segregation.

• President Kennedy orders federal marshals to escort James Meredith, the first black student to be permitted to enroll at the University of Mississippi.

1963

• Protest organized by white and black ministers against Gwynn Oak Amusement Park in Baltimore County for excluding blacks with mass arrests

• Northwood Movie Theatre admits black patrons after eight years of protest • General Assembly enacts an open accommodations law, outlawing race-

based segregation in restaurants, hotels, theaters, stores, beaches and recreational facilities – but the law only applies to Baltimore and twelve of the state’s twenty-three counties

• An estimated 250,000 people join in the March on Washington, where Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivers his famous "I Have a Dream" speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

1964 • The Buddy Deane show cancelled • Maryland General Assembly extends open accommodations law to the entire

state • U.S. Congress enacts the 1964 Civil Rights Act, prohibiting

discrimination in public accommodations and employment • Griffin v. Maryland, 378 U.S. 130 (1964) (arrests of Glen Echo Amusement

Park demonstrators reverses Green case)

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Race, Rock ‘n Roll and Teen Dance Shows of the 1950s and 1960s

Taunya Lovell Banks Jacob A. France Professor of Equality Jurisprudence

University of Maryland School of Law

The Buddy Deane Show, a local Baltimore teen dance show, is memorialized in John Waters’ film and musical, Hairspray. The story revolves around the successful attempt by white and black Baltimore teens in 1962 to integrate a teen dance show, The Corny Collins Show. The truth is starker. As one reviewer, writing about the film states:

“to … [John Water] who grew up in Baltimore with The Buddy Deane Show, … in an era of television as iconic god, [and] who viewed local teenage stars and … undoubtedly fantasized about becoming like them, an intimate and dreamlike mythology entered into his psyche. … [O]nce the adult, rational consciousness reviews the history of the show and its segregationist policy, the adult desire for the childlike memory does roam in the realm of the forbidden desire …. The way Waters decides to negotiate the racism and his ongoing fascination with the Show is to face the forbidden desire, to recapture what he in fact loved about the show and to make a dream-ending, a satisfactory ending.”1

The Buddy Deane Show aired live in Baltimore from 1957 until it was cancelled in early 1964. The show started a year after The Milt Grant Show, a Washington, D.C. teen dance show that aired seven days a week from 1956 to 1961 on WTTG-TV (Channel 5).2 Both shows were the most popular local program in each city, and both were all-white. In the 1960s succumbing to political pressures, black teens appeared periodically on all-black shows; and both shows were abruptly cancelled. 3 According to one source, “[i]n January 1964 Deane integrated his TV dance floor. WJZ, overwhelmed by an outpouring of white anger, canceled the show.”4 Maryland still prohibited marriages between whites and blacks,5 so interracial social dancing on television in the early 1960s would have been very controversial. [The actual date was June, 1962.] The cancellation of The Milt Grant Show probably had racial overtones as well.

1 Renne R. Curry, Hairspray: The Revolutionary Way to Restructure and Hold Your History, 24 LITERARY FILM Q. 165, 167-8 (1996) 2 Lois Romano, Washinton’s ‘50s Flashback: Dance Show Host Milt Grant Meets His Grown-Up Teen Fans, WASH. POST, July 28, 1990 at C1. 3 Romano, supra note 1. 4 Kenneth D. Durr, BEHIND THE BACKLASH: WHITE WORKING-CLASS POLITICS IN BALTIMORE, 1940-1980 152 (2003). 5 Maryland’s antimiscegenation statute was not repealed until 1967, just before the United States Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia, declared such laws unconstitutional. Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S.1, 6 n.5 (1967).

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There were other teen dance shows during this era. In New York City Allen Freed had a teen dance show entitled Big Beat. In Philadelphia, there was American Bandstand which first aired on WFIL-TV in 1952 hosted by a local disk jockey, Bob Horn. Dick Clark replaced Horn in 1956, and the rest is history. American Bandstand is the most well-known of the teen dance shows because it was broadcasted nationally from 1957 until 1987. Initially, Bandstand, the longest running, and one of the most popular shows in television, showcased white South Philly teens “as their African American neighbors a couple of blocks away watched the show from their televisions.”6 Rarely were blacks allowed in the audience.7 In the mid 1960s black and white dancers appeared together regularly on the show. In the 1960s teen dance shows aimed at black teens aired. In 1963 disc jockey Joseph “Tex” Gathings, produced Teenorama Dance Party, an all-black dance show for WOOK-TV (Channel 14), in Washington, D.C.8 Teenorama, a live broadcast, aired six days a week and ran for seven years.9 Nationally, Soul Train, was the black counter-part to American Bandstand. Like Bandstand, Soul Train started in 1970 as a local show in Chicago hosted and produced by Don Cornelius. It was syndicated in 1971 as a weekly series that continues today.10 The rise of teen dance shows in the late 50s and early 60s signaled a dramatic cultural shift in musical taste for teens from the big band sound of the 1940s so popular with their parents, to rock and roll. More importantly, these shows all introduced black music, musicians and singers to a white teen audience who were living in an increasingly racially integrated world. Modified forms of dances popular with black teens also slipped into these shows.11 Some die-hard segregationists were so distressed at this development that they circulated flyers warning parents about saving the white youth of American by not buying or even listening to race music –“negro” records. From an economic perspective the dance programs, first popularized on radio stations with live disk jockeys spinning records, “represent[] the transference of a successful radio format to [a] burgeoning area of American television…. [T]he programs were relatively inexpensive to produce….[and] the increased spending powers of American teenagers in the 1950s attracted advertisers…. For these same reasons, this format became highly lucrative for local television stations….”12

6 Maggie Hansing, “American Bandstand” and West Philadelphia: A Teaching Experience at West Philadelphia High School (Fall 1996) http://www.upenn.edu/ccp/Ford/WPhila_AmerBandstand.html (7-9-03) 7 Id. 8 Patrice Gaines, Dance Show Fans Bop Back in Time, WASH. POST, Aug. 2, 1998 at B1. 9 Linda Wheeler, Teens Dance the Years Away, WASH. POST, Feb. 19, 2001 at B1. 10 http://www.soultrain.com/st/story.html (7-11-03). 11 Two Bandstand regulars discuss how they would see black dances in school and then introduce them on the show, much like Tracey does in Hairspray. Given the racial mores of the day, however, the regulars were not “allowed to day [that] black people taught us.” Id. 12 American Bandstand, http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/A/htmlA/americanband/americanband.htm (7-9-03).

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Further Reading BALTIMORE AFRO-AMERICAN: Buddy Deane Show Dies January 4, Dec. 17, 1963 at 10; Buddy Deane Show (Letter to the Editor from Daniel Schechter), Dec. 28, 1963, at 4. Renne R. Curry, Hairspray: The Revolutionary Way to Restructure and Hold Your History, 24 LITERARY FILM Q. 165, 167-8 (1996). Kenneth D. Durr, BEHIND THE BACKLASH: WHITE WORKING-CLASS POLITICS IN BALTIMORE, 1940-1980 (2003) pages 151-156. John A. Jackson, AMERICAN BANDSTAND: DICK CLARK AND THE MAKING OF A ROCK ‘N’ ROLL EMPIRE (1997) pages 141-42, 213-14, 230-54, 257 Jacques Kelly and Fred Rasmussen, Buddy Deane: 1924-2003: An Earth Force for a Generation of Baltimore Teens, BALT. SUN, July 17, 2003, at A1. Barbara Mills, “GOT MY MIND SET ON FREEDOM”: MARYLAND’S STORY OF BLACK AND WHITE ACTIVISM 1663-2000 (2002) pages 159-181. David Milobsky, Power from the Pulpit: Baltimore’s African-American Clergy, 1950-1970, 89 MARYLAND HISTORICAL MAGAZINE 274-289 (1994). Sandy M. Shoemaker, “We Shall Overcome, Someday”: The Equal Rights Movement in Baltimore 1935-1942, 89 MARYLAND HISTORICAL MAGAZINE 260-273 (1994). Linnell Smith, Justice At Gwynn Oak, BALT. SUN, Aug. 24, 1998 at 1E (feature on the integration of Gywnn Oak Amusement Park). Julie Sutton, The Buddy Dean Show (1990) student paper on file at the University of Baltimore’s Langsdale Library. John Waters, “Ladies and Gentlemen…the Nicest Kids in Town!,” BALT. MAG. (April 1985) at 90.