When Dick Clark died in April 2012, the myth-making machinery cranked into overdrive. From much of the media coverage of the TV personality's death, it appeared that Clark, in his role as the longstanding host of American Bandstand, had not merely wielded influence over popular culture, but had also played a key role in advancing the Civil Rights Movement. No less authoritative a source than the New York Times lauded Clark as a risk-taker who “began integrating the dance floor on American Bandstand early on,” despite fears “of a backlash of Southern television affiliates.” The obituary cites an interview in which Clark affirmed this story, noting, “We didn't [integrate American Bandstand] because we were do-gooders, or liberals. It was just a thing we thought we ought to do. It was naive.”Footnote ¹

If only Clark's version of events were true. As Matthew Delmont writes at the outset of his valuable new study, the integration of American Bandstand in 1957—the year Clark became host—“would have been a bold and powerful symbol” (1), particularly in the context of African American struggles for fair housing and education in the show's home city of Philadelphia. But integration was not an objective of Clark and his producer, Tony Mammarella. Rather, as Delmont documents, they engaged in practices both surreptitious and overt to ensure that black youth would not make it onto the show's dance floor. Not unlike New York's Cotton Club, Bandstand hinged on a paradox: the show depended on the talents of black musical performers and yet it largely barred them as in-studio audience members or dancers, all but erasing the agency of black kids as consumers, tastemakers, and creative interpreters of the youth cultures they had helped to shape (6).

Although the story of Bandstand has been told before,Footnote ² it is Delmont's documentation of Bandstand's resistance to integration, and black Philadelphians’ subsequent counter-resistance to Bandstand, that distinguishes his account. As Delmont explains, he initially believed Clark's repeated claims of having blazed a trail for the representation of black youth on TV. But his interviews and archival research told a story in which black Philadelphians loudly and repeatedly protested the show's exclusions, all the more egregious given the studio's location in multiracial West Philadelphia neighborhood and in the vicinity of several majority-black high schools.

In endeavoring to explain the show's racial politics, The Nicest Kids in Town situates American Bandstand within a broader narrative of Walter Annenberg's burgeoning post–World War II media empire. WFIL, the network over which Bandstand was originally broadcast, was prime Annenberg real estate, reigning over a lucrative Delaware Valley market that included southeastern Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey, and northern Delaware. Delmont concludes that economic interests drove decisions about whether to allow black youth on the show. “While the producers’ racial attitudes may have contributed to” Bandstand's racially exclusionary policies, he writes, “their desire to create a noncontroversial advertiser-friendly show” was a more important factor in the segregation of the dance floor (42). In pitching the show to ABC executives for national broadcast, Clark and his colleagues shrewdly emphasized the show's “wholesome” (read: white) image, abetted to no small degree by Clark's own perpetual Boy Scout image.

Nevertheless, segregation on American Bandstand was far from inevitable. One of Delmont's most valuable contributions is his presentation of evidence that in the show's first years, from 1952 to 1954, black youth made regular appearances on the show. A turning-point came in 1954—significantly, about the time the show started regularly featuring black musicians—when twelve white Bandstand regulars were selected to serve as a “committee” to enforce the show's dress code; this “committee” subsequently instituted a policy requiring kids who wanted to be on the show to acquire advance passes by writing to WFIL. Delmont cites one informant who said black teens who lived close to the Bandstand studio successfully applied for passes using Irish, Polish, and Italian last names. At one point, the Council on Human Relations, a local anti-segregation group, investigated, but it ran up against Bandstand's producers, who insisted that its admissions policy was color-blind.

The parallel to Philadelphia schools in the era is striking. Responding to criticism from black parents and students, school board officials in the early 1950s wrote off racial segregation in the city's high schools as an unintended consequence of residential segregation—a problem ostensibly outside the board's purview—and pointed to the district's liberal curriculum on race. In both cases, an official embrace of “antidiscrimination rhetoric” replaced a commitment to “affirmative steps toward integration” (70). The similarity was further borne out in the look of the Bandstand studio, designed by Mammarella to resemble a record store and a high school gymnasium.

The Nicest Kids in Town counters the (false) mythology of American Bandstand with valuable descriptions of “forgotten” cultural productions. We learn about They Shall Be Heard— an independent TV show that featured black and white teenagers in frank conversation about issues of the day—and about black deejays such as Georgie Woods and Mitch Thomas, the latter of whom hosted his own eponymous televised teen music-and-dance show between 1955 and 1958. Before The Mitch Thomas Show was canceled, white Bandstand regulars relied on it for some of the moves they subsequently “introduced” on Clark's show.

The national broadcast of American Bandstand gave the show a powerful platform, which it used to construct a racialized (white) image of the American teenager. The show was particularly important in granting working-class white ethnic teenagers—many of them Italian American students at local Philadelphia Catholic high schools—a vaunted place in its representation of wholesome “rock-and-roll youth.” Although black teens would seldom be figured in this national narrative, they would of course surface as its castaways—as delinquents, troublemakers, and dropouts.

Clark's audacity in putting forward his own self-serving “selective memory” of American Bandstand (to riff on a phrase of historian Jacqueline Dowd Hall) is fairly breathtaking. “I don't think of myself as a hero or civil rights activist for integrating the show . . . it was simply the right thing to do,” he once said (1). Yet what is perhaps more noteworthy for scholars of U.S. music culture is the fact that many of the sources that counter such untruths have been hiding in plain sight. For example, Delmont cites an article from the Philadelphia Tribune, the city's leading black newspaper—hardly an obscure source—noting that back parents had “sought in vain” to get their children on the show (47). One is led to wonder why it has taken cultural historians so long to consult such sources, and thus to confront the “racial innocence” of the popular narrative.

Some of the sources that Delmont uses in this regard are available in a free online companion to The Nicest Kids in Town, constructed using innovative Scalar software developed by the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture. Scalar allows content producers to author projects, or “books,” that combine text and media, without subordinating the former to the latter. As users navigate the text of the Scalar-based Nicest Kids in Town, images and video clips scroll into view, accompanied by useful links to information about their provenance and content. A “stripe,” or index, running down the left-hand side of the page provides the user with an index to the material, making it easy to navigate among the three “paths,” in addition to an introduction, which constitute the main body of the project.

The dozens of images on the digital Nicest Kids in Town are of far higher quality than the illustrations in the book, with its grainy black-and-white reproductions. Users will also appreciate what amount to visual “footnotes”—images of the newspaper clippings from which Delmont quotes. It's easy to imagine the digital Nicest Kids as a nice tool for helping undergraduates understand the significance and use of primary sources and other archival materials in the production of knowledge.

The Scalar Nicest Kids is valuable in this regard, but because it lacks a significant sonic archive beyond a few seconds of video clips, it can't take full advantage of software functions that allow content producers to annotate sound clips and to cue these annotations to playback.Footnote ³ This limitation is likely attributable to copyright issues. (A quick search of YouTube reveals that American Bandstand footage is closely guarded.) Here, both the book and the digital companion would have benefited from discussion of Dick Clark's ownership of the archives and of the cultural politics of access to the show. By taking on the issue of the visual and sonic archive, Delmont might have anticipated my own curiosity about whether early footage of the show belies Clark's memory of an integrated dance floor. It would be useful to know more, too, about musicians’ rights to the images and sounds of their performances, as well as about the implications of ownership of the archives for future study.