Contemporary Authors

• The Nicest Kids in Town: American Bandstand, Rock ’n’ Roll, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in 1950s Philadelphia University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 2012
• Why Busing Failed: Conservative Politics, TV News, and the Backlash to Integration University of California Press (Oakland, CA), 2016
• Making Roots: A Nation Captivated University of California Press (Oakland, CA), 2016

1. Making Roots : a nation captivated https://lccn.loc.gov/2016002212 Delmont, Matthew F., author. Making Roots : a nation captivated / Matthew F. Delmont. Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2016]©2016 pages cm E185.97.H24 D45 2016 ISBN: 9780520291324 (cloth : alk. paper) 2. Why busing failed : conservative politics, TV news, and the backlash to integration https://lccn.loc.gov/2015031885 Delmont, Matthew F., author. Why busing failed : conservative politics, TV news, and the backlash to integration / Matthew F. Delmont. Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2016] xii, 281 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm. LC214.52 .D45 2016 ISBN: 9780520284241 (cloth : alk. paper)9780520284258 (pbk. : alk. paper) 3. The nicest kids in town : American bandstand, rock 'n' roll, and the struggle for civil rights in 1950s Philadelphia https://lccn.loc.gov/2011038775 Delmont, Matthew F. The nicest kids in town : American bandstand, rock 'n' roll, and the struggle for civil rights in 1950s Philadelphia / Matthew F. Delmont. Berkeley : University of California Press, c2012. xi, 294 p. : ill. ; 24 cm. F158.9.N4 D45 2012 ISBN: 9780520272071 (cloth : acid-free paper)0520272072 (cloth : acid-free paper)9780520272088 (pbk. : acid-free paper)0520272080 (pbk. : acid-free paper)

• Matt Delmont - https://mattdelmont.com/2015/08/29/bio/

  Dr. Matthew Delmont is a professor of History at Arizona State University. He is the author of three books: Why Busing Failed: Race, Media, and the National Resistance to School Desegregation (University of California Press, 2016); Making Roots: A Nation Captivated (University of California Press, 2016); and The Nicest Kids in Town: American Bandstand, Rock ‘n’ Roll, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in 1950s Philadelphia (University of California Press, 2012). His work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, the Washington Post, and several academic journals. Originally from Minneapolis, Minnesota, Delmont earned his B.A from Harvard University and his Ph.D. from Brown University.

• The Huffington Post - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/matthew-delmont

  Matthew Delmont
  Associate Professor of History at Arizona State University
  Matthew F. Delmont is Associate Professor of History at Arizona State University and author of the forthcoming Making Roots: A Nation Captivated (August 2016) Why Busing Failed: Race, Media and the National Resistance to School Desegregation; and The Nicest Kids in Town: American Bandstand, Rock ‘n’ Roll, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in 1950s Philadelphia.

• Southern Spaces - https://southernspaces.org/author/matthew-f-delmont

  Matthew F. Delmont
  ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY
  Matthew F. Delmont is Associate Professor of History at Arizona State University, teaching courses on popular culture, media studies, urban studies, and the histories of race and ethnicity in the United States. He is author of The Nicest Kids in Town: American Bandstand, Rock 'n' Roll, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in 1950s Philadelphia (University of California Press, 2012). His current research project on television coverage of busing for school desegregation is under contract with the University of California Press.

• Slate - http://www.slate.com/articles/business/metropolis/2016/04/an_interview_with_matt_delmont_author_of_why_busing_failed_on_why_segregated.html

  QUOTED: "They had a very limited understanding of what was going on with civil rights in the North. Looking back at their coverage and how reporters talked about history afterward, they consistently thought of civil rights as a Southern story. They just couldn’t believe that school and neighborhood segregation could be intentional in cities like Chicago and Boston."
  "One of the goals in my book is to get people to think about the fact that schools are still segregated many decades after Brown v. Board because of intentional choices that politicians and parents and school officials made. In regards to school zoning, school financing, and student assignment, those were intentional things that happened. If we want to have a different set of outcomes in the future and have meaningful school integration in terms of race and socioeconomic status we have to make different choices."
  "It wasn’t inevitable that Brown was going fail as it did and it wasn’t inevitable that schools were going to be segregated the way they are now. Those were choices that people made and continue to make. To have different outcomes, we need to have different choices."

  There Is Nothing Accidental About School Segregation
  383
  226
  183
  In his new book, Matt Delmont shows how controversies over “forced busing” allowed racist school policies in the North to persist.

  By Jake Blumgart
  Busing in Massachusetts
  Some rioted, some marched, and some quietly altered their suburban zoning codes. Above, students in Massachusetts board an elementary school-bound bus in 1965.
  Hal Sweeney/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

  More than 60 years after Brown v. Board of Education, most of America’s schools remain segregated. This condition afflicts educational systems in the North and the South, in the Southwestern border states, and the Northeast Corridor. In the decades after the famed 1957 standoff over school integration in Little Rock, Arkansas, affirmative steps were taken to integrate public schools across America. But these reforms faced massive resistance, and not only from segregationist demagogues like George Wallace. White Americans in cities and suburbs across the Northern states fought to keep their children out of schools with black students, often by denouncing what they called “forced busing.” Some rioted, some marched, and some quietly altered their suburban zoning codes.

  In his new book Why Busing Failed: Race, Media, and the National Resistance to School Desegregation, Arizona State University history professor Matt Delmont looks at the politics of confrontations over school desegregation and how the media covered these stories from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s. Unlike the coverage of the campaigns against the South’s Jim Crow policies, Delmont writes that journalists “did not present civil rights activity in the north with such moral clarity.” Instead, white reactionary protesters opposed to “forced busing” won the majority of camera time and newspaper ink.

  Delmont argues persuasively that “busing”—a term he always employs in quotation marks—was a false issue. The number of children transported to school by bus had been increasing steadily for decades before Brown vs. Board of Education, often as a means to enforce segregation. (The plaintiff in Brown was bused 20 miles to a majority-black school despite the majority-white school four blocks from her home.) In Boston, 85 percent of high school students were bused before school integration efforts began. Only when the form of transportation became associated with desegregation did some parents object to it and heap praise on “neighborhood schools.”

  The substance of anti-busing arguments often hinged on the idea that the students in a particular community shouldn’t be driven “into very strange neighborhoods” to attend school, as the prominent anti-busing politician Louise Day Hicks put it. It is her home city of Boston where the clash over school desegregation outside the South received the most attention, resulting in months of intensive coverage.

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  I recently spoke with Delmont, whose book provides needed insight into a controversy that is still being misread. It’s especially valuable as school districts like North Carolina’s Charlotte–Mecklenburg are contemplating desegregation strategies of their own. Perhaps with the aid of Delmont and others who have been examining the history and future of school desegregation, we can better understand the issue and its moral consequences this time around. The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

  Jake Blumgart: Throughout the book you quote black activists or politicians who argue that busing is just a nice term for opposition to integrating our public schools. Why did the media fall so hard for the rhetoric of anti-integration activists in the 1960s and 1970s?

  Matt Delmont: For two reasons. They had a very limited understanding of what was going on with civil rights in the North. Looking back at their coverage and how reporters talked about history afterward, they consistently thought of civil rights as a Southern story. They just couldn’t believe that school and neighborhood segregation could be intentional in cities like Chicago and Boston.

  Desegregation is also really complex to get a handle on. To really get into the nitty-gritty reality of how these schools came to be segregated took a lot of research, more than most reporters or television journalists could do. Most places, especially television, would drop in for a day or two for the story and then fly back out. They were compelled by these anti-busing activists who were able to make really persuasive sound bites and visible protests that resonated powerfully. Anti-busing activists were really savvy in how they framed they story. The pro-busing side, the case they were trying to make, was much more complicated.

  When we think of the relationship between TV and civil rights, almost everyone thinks of the 1950s and 1960s and the really positive role television played in bringing Little Rock, Selma, and Montgomery to a national audience. I think that’s largely a true story. Television news really forced Americans to confront what was going on in the Jim Crow South. But that same medium played almost the exact opposite role when it came to school segregation. It framed those anti-busing activists in a very positive light.

  “The way racism functioned in the North was much subtler. In the South it’s easy to picture how racism operated.”
  Matt Delmont
  It wasn’t only the media that fell for the busing narrative. You name a who’s who of liberal luminaries that denounced busing, from old-guard stalwarts like Hubert Humphrey and Bobby Kennedy to contemporary icons like Joe Biden.

  Most of these Northern white liberal politicians were reflecting what they understood as the sentiments of their constituents. For them, they thought of civil rights and integration as being a Southern story. They took seriously the idea that these Northern schools just couldn’t be intentionally segregated. Therefore, when they started hearing about these schools from their constituents, hearing that language of neighborhood schools and protecting the homeowners’ rights, that really resonated with them.

  It was a fault lime for a lot of these liberal politicians. It was safer to condemn school segregation in Little Rock, much less so to condemn that in Chicago or New York when you knew your white constituents were going to be furious at you when you came home. They didn’t have the same sense of moral urgency when it was in their own backyard.

  160412_METRO_Why-Busing-Failed
  Do you think part of the reason Northern racism was harder to expose was that it was subtler and less dramatic? There’s this whole edifice of tightly drawn school district lines where residents are able to pull down the portcullis behind them with zoning regulations. Segregation in the North relies on incredibly complex policies that were just harder to make interesting and accessible.

  The way racism functioned in the North was much subtler. In the South it’s easy to picture how racism operated—colored drinking fountains and white drinking fountains. The system of Jim Crow segregation was so visible. It was still incredibly difficult to overturn that system, but it was easier to visualize. For Northern white citizens and white politicians, the way their schools and neighborhoods were structured was just normal, they didn’t know or chose not to understand that it wasn’t just a matter of white families choosing to live in white neighborhoods and black families in black neighborhoods. There was a whole history of mortgage redlining, zoning decisions, public housing discrimination, and real estate discrimination that created those separate neighborhoods. But the subtlety of that allowed white people to just see it as common sense, just how our neighborhood and schools should be.

  It’s easier for them to say, and mean, well, these are our neighborhood schools, this is our property, and we want to protect those things and lobby for zoning restrictions that reflect that. It made it easier because it they believed it to be an innocent thing that just happened and it gave them a language to be able to argue against school desegregation that resonated powerfully and didn’t seem racist.

  Let’s zoom out. You mention presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, LBJ, Ford, and Reagan in passing. But you devote a whole chapter to Nixon. What is his legacy on school desegregation? Was he the most influential president in terms of this issue?

  I would make that argument. His legacy for the South is fairly positive one. It was finally under his presidency that schools in the South finally started to integrate many years after Brown v. Board of Education. And that was partly his decision to take seriously the charges against de jure segregation—segregation by law—and ask his lawyers to prosecute those cases to make meaningful progress in that area. So his record is actually stronger on that than the presidents before or after him.

  But his legacy on the Northern side makes him the most important president for school desegregation is that he really did draw a sharp distinction between de jure and de facto segregation, and that made it a lot easier for Northern schools to be let off the hook. Then he appointed record numbers of judges at the district and Supreme Court levels, and the decisions they made subsequently really changed dynamics of what was constitutionally possible with regards to school desegregation.

  What was the nadir of school desegregation after Brown v. Board?

  The 1964–1974 period is really what casts the die in terms of what’s possible for school desegregation. The reason I titled the book Why Busing Failed is because when I would tell people I was working on a book about the history of busing, most would shake their heads and say, “It’s too bad that policy failed.” I think after Boston it became very difficult to get people to think seriously about this as a politics that could succeed on a large-scale level. There were a number of school districts that had success with it, in part because they received less attention and things worked on a local level without it exploding the way that Boston did.

  Why did Boston resonate so? Is it because South Boston and Charlestown are easier to other, and it’s easier to draw a distinction between them and the rest of white America in the North?

  Yeah, the short answer of why Boston resonates so powerfully is that it’s easy to blame things on Irish people. It was easier to pretend that South Boston wasn’t representative of the city. Those were working-class enclaves that had some unique ethnic particularities, but they were in no way unique in their feelings about school desegregation.

  The other reason it resonated so powerfully is that there was violence and the media covered it as a crisis story. Something I’d never really thought about before is that television news had to get their camera crews on the scene in advance, so once Boston became identified as a continuing story they had a camera crew there to report on whatever transpired. Once the crisis coverage begins, and the protesters begin harassing Teddy Kennedy and breaking glass, once that happens, television cameras really don’t leave for two years. They saw violence and it really became the emblematic, iconic image of what busing looked like.

  It’s a problem because it makes us begin the story of busing in the 1970s when really, even in Boston, it began at least two decades earlier. But it also forces us to pay attention and focus our energy on the anger and frustration of white parents as opposed to the constitutional rights of black students. When we think of Boston we think of white South Boston people throwing rocks and at buses, but the whole reason those buses were there is that Boston had intentionally segregated their schools for decades.

  Top Comment

  The problem with this whole issue is that each individual parent is trying to make the right decisions for their child and isn't really interested in making a slightly worse choice for their child just to try and make a... More...

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  Do you think there are signs of forward movement on school desegregation again?

  I’ve been surprised in the last couple years how much the issue of school integration has come back to the forefront. I think a lot of that had to do with Nikole Hannah-Jones on This American Life, that seems to be the one everyone mentions when it comes to school integration. [Ed. Note: In her story, Hannah-Jones describes the reams of research that prove that desegregation improves educational outcomes, but then shows the immense racial and political hurdles that face attempts to enact integration—using the case study of a school district on the border of Ferguson, Missouri.] It’s great work and it’s made a lot of people think seriously again about school integration.

  One of the goals in my book is to get people to think about the fact that schools are still segregated many decades after Brown v. Board because of intentional choices that politicians and parents and school officials made. In regards to school zoning, school financing, and student assignment, those were intentional things that happened. If we want to have a different set of outcomes in the future and have meaningful school integration in terms of race and socioeconomic status we have to make different choices. It wasn’t inevitable that Brown was going fail as it did and it wasn’t inevitable that schools were going to be segregated the way they are now. Those were choices that people made and continue to make. To have different outcomes, we need to have different choices.

QUOTED: "Delmont adds depth and complexity to the popular understanding of Roots through his critical exploration."

Making Roots: A Nation Captivated
Publishers Weekly.
263.26 (June 27, 2016): p76.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text: 
Making Roots: A Nation Captivated
Matthew F. Delmont. Univ. of California, $26.95 (264p) ISBN 978-0-520-
29132-4
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Delmont (Why Busing Failed), an associate history professor at Arizona State University, presents the first book-length study of Roots, Alex
Haley's bestselling 1976 novel. After a brief biographical sketch of Haley's life and career, Delmont focuses on the book's evolution over more
than 10 years, from Haley's initial conception of a story of African-American life in the 1930s South to the final century-spanning epic and its
adaptation into a record-breaking TV miniseries. This is followed by the popular and critical success of both book and show, and finally by
plagiarism lawsuits and claims of fabrication that marred Haley's achievement. Drawing on his scholarly background, Delmont builds his
narrative from extensive archival research. His ability to describe these findings in an engaging style keeps the pages turning. Dramatic episodes
come alive, such as the rush to finish the book to meet the TV program's filming schedule, and excerpts from letters written in response to the
book and movie are expertly chosen. Delmont adds depth and complexity to the popular understanding of Roots through his critical exploration
of all aspects of the book and original miniseries (a second version released in 2016 isn't covered here), engaging with both its successes and
controversies. {Aug.)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Making Roots: A Nation Captivated." Publishers Weekly, 27 June 2016, p. 76+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA456900954&it=r&asid=7857f412a7347bda552be2d9740974c0. Accessed 19 Feb.
2/19/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1487548914202 2/3
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A456900954

---
QUOTED: "This recommended narrative ... offers an entirely new way of seeing how recent history was written."

2/19/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1487548914202 3/3
Delmont, Matthew F.: Why Busing Failed: Race, Media, and
the National Resistance to School Desegregation
John Rodzvilla
Library Journal.
141.5 (Mar. 15, 2016): p121.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text: 
Delmont, Matthew F. Why Busing Failed: Race, Media, and the National Resistance to School Desegregation. Univ. of California. Mar.
2016.304p. illus. notes. index. ISBN 9780520284241. $65; pap. ISBN 9780520284258. $29.95. HIST
Busing students as a way to promote school desegregation was among the most divisive civil rights issues in the decades following Brown v.
Board of Education (1954). In this work, Delmont (history, Arizona State Univ., The Nicest Kids in Town) applies oral histories, governmental
reports, and news coverage to demonstrate how this response to the Supreme Court decision was destined not only to fail but was also used to
change Americans' understanding of desegregation. Delmont argues that forced busing allowed politicians, school districts, and white
communities to alter the discussion of educational inequality, as busing allowed them to transfer the burden of racial integration from the local to
the state level. While Delmont covers some of the more infamous busing protests, including those in Chicago, New York, and Boston, as well as
rallies in Pontiac, MI, he further describes how white communities created the first media campaigns focusing the issue of school desegregation
as one specifically about busing. VERDICT By looking at the antibusing uprisings that were presented in mainstream media, this recommended
narrative presents civil rights through the lens of media studies and offers an entirely new way of seeing how recent history was written.--John
Rodzvilla, Emerson Coll., Boston
Rodzvilla, John
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Rodzvilla, John. "Delmont, Matthew F.: Why Busing Failed: Race, Media, and the National Resistance to School Desegregation." Library
Journal, 15 Mar. 2016, p. 121+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA446521185&it=r&asid=02aa17e610ce3b744648c35c90fe0490. Accessed 19 Feb.
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A446521185

"Making Roots: A Nation Captivated." Publishers Weekly, 27 June 2016, p. 76+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA456900954&it=r. Accessed 19 Feb. 2017. Rodzvilla, John. "Delmont, Matthew F.: Why Busing Failed: Race, Media, and the National Resistance to School Desegregation." Library Journal, 15 Mar. 2016, p. 121+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA446521185&it=r. Accessed 19 Feb. 2017.

• https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article/118/3/883/43860/Matthew-F-Delmont-The-Nicest-Kids-in-Town-American
  The American Historical Review
  Word count: 1013

  QUOTED: "Delmont exposes the show's systematic marginalization of local African American fans, even as black artists and African American-derived music and dance became central to the show's interracial popularity. A local history at heart, Delmont's book offers a subtle, refreshingly interdisciplinary reading of Bandstand as a site of the civil rights struggles in Philadelphia and as a battleground for ongoing attempts to control public memories of the movement. Although the main focus is on the years of Bandstand's greatest national influence from 1957 to 1964, Delmont describes its origins."

  Issue Cover
  Volume 118 Issue 3
  June 2013
  Article Contents
  < Previous Next >
  Matthew F. Delmont. The Nicest Kids in Town: American Bandstand, Rock 'n' Roll, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in 1950s Philadelphia.
  Matthew F. Delmont. The Nicest Kids in Town: American Bandstand, Rock 'n' Roll, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in 1950s Philadelphia. (American Crossroads, number 32 ; A George Gund Foundation Book in African American Studies.) Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2012. Pp. xi, 294. Cloth $65.00, paper $27.95.
  Brian Ward
  Am Hist Rev (2013) 118 (3): 883-884. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/118.3.883
  Published: 24 May 2013
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  Matthew F. Delmont's fine study of the connections between American Bandstand and the struggle for civil rights in Philadelphia appeared shortly before the death of Dick Clark, the show's co-architect and erstwhile presenter, in April 2012. Perhaps that was a blessing, as one of the book's main achievements is to discredit Clark's attempts to cast himself as a pioneer of on-air integration and Bandstand as a vehicle for progressive racial politics in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Instead, Delmont exposes the show's systematic marginalization of local African American fans, even as black artists and African American-derived music and dance became central to the show's interracial popularity.

  A local history at heart, Delmont's book offers a subtle, refreshingly interdisciplinary reading of Bandstand as a site of the civil rights struggles in Philadelphia and as a battleground for ongoing attempts to control public memories of the movement. Although the main focus is on the years of Bandstand's greatest national influence from 1957 to 1964, Delmont describes its origins under the aegis of Bob Horn on WFIL-TV in 1952, noting that initially there was no segregated admissions policy. In 1954, however, the emergence of a committee of twelve white teens who held enormous sway over who could attend, together with the introduction of a strict dress code and a requirement that fans hoping to attend the show must first submit a written letter of application, combined to exclude local poorer, mainly African American fans from the show. Delmont argues that this informal discrimination reflected the agenda of the show's producers and sponsors, who coveted a white suburban teen market and were wary of offending white sensibilities with on-screen integration. Far from disappearing in 1957 when Dick Clark took over and the show went national via daily ABC broadcasts, these policies endured until the show moved to Los Angeles in 1964.

  One of the strengths of Delmont's book is his account of how Bandstand and the media more generally became important targets for local civil rights activism, alongside schools and housing. Television and housing patterns, he explains, offered “overlapping and reinforcing sites of struggle over segregation” (p. 2), while Bandstand's producers and Philadelphia's school authorities adopted strikingly similar tactics to avoid meaningful integration, even while publicly professing their commitment to desegregation. Delmont also offers useful analyses of pioneering local broadcaster activists Floyd Logan and Georgie Woods and Jewish civil rights leader Maurice Fagan, whose short-lived show They Shall Be Heard he presents as a progressive “road-not-taken” alternative to Bandstand's racial conservatism. In fact, Delmont provides plenty of evidence as to why it was always unlikely that Bandstand would follow suit. Fagan's show was organized by the local biracial Fellowship Commission and aired as part of WCAU-TV's commitment to devote a portion of its schedule to non-profit community programming. By contrast, Bandstand was fundamentally shaped by the perceived commercial priorities of its sponsors and producers as they sought to create a national and biddable youth consumer market that they initially envisaged as white.

  That said, Delmont may underestimate the debates among Bandstand's producers and sponsors over whether continued discrimination, ostensibly to cater to the sensibilities of a white teen market, might actually be counterproductive. Advertisers also hoped to reach a burgeoning black consumer market if they could do so without jeopardizing white customers—and by 1964, this may have been less of an issue, certainly among white teens, than Delmont implies. This period witnessed one of the most integrated popular music markets in history, with many white and black teens buying much the same records by much the same artists. By the end of 1963 Billboard temporarily suspended its black singles chart, unable to distinguish between black and white purchasing patterns. Racism and discrimination remained rife, to be sure, and there was certainly no necessary correlation between white love of black music and progressive racial attitudes. Nevertheless, Bandstand, with its integrated playlists—if seldom studio audiences—was crucial to a fleeting moment of musical integration that was as much a function of consumer choice as of producer policy.

  Delmont tends to underplay this symbolic, unplanned, and unanticipated dimension of Bandstand's contribution to the biracial pop scene of the late 1950s and early 1960s. He focuses on correcting the historic record regarding Bandstand's retrogressive racial politics, reinserting the show into the story of Philadelphia's freedom struggle, and counteracting what he sees as a distortive ahistoric nostalgia surrounding popular memories of the show. Promoted in part by Clark's self-serving recollections and to varying degrees by the movie and stage versions of Hairspray and the hit television series American Dreams (2002–2005), Bandstand and its ilk continue to be remembered primarily as bastions of racial enlightenment and harmony, where segregation and racial prejudice were miraculously erased to the sound of “The Twist.” In this lively and perceptive book, Delmont reminds us that the reality was far more complex.

• Cities, Suburbs & Schools Project at Trinity College
  http://commons.trincoll.edu/cssp/2016/12/04/book-review-of-delmont-why-busing-failed/
  Word count: 1243

  QUOTED: "Delmont exemplifies historical scholarship in the digital age by sharing selected video, photo, and documentary evidence, along with extensive excerpts from his book, on a companion website (http://whybusingfailed.com). Pairing multimedia evidence with the narrative makes a more compelling argument than the book alone, for both scholars and students, and the book’s companion site is ideal for educational use."
  "Why Busing Failed is a must-read for historians and policy analysts of civil rights and school desegregation."

  Book review of Delmont, Why Busing Failed

  Posted on December 4, 2016Author Jack Dougherty
  Book review manuscript accepted for publication:

  Robert Cotto Jr. and Jack Dougherty, “Review of ‘Why Busing Failed’ by Matthew Delmont,” History of Education Quarterly 57, no. 1 (January 2017). Text copyrighted by History of Education Society and shared here under terms of the contributor agreement.

  Matthew F. Delmont. Why Busing Failed: Race, Media, and the National Resistance to School Desegregation. Oakland: University of California Press, 2016. 304 pp. Paperback, $29.95. Companion website with multimedia sources, http://whybusingfailed.com.

  Book cover from UC Press
  Book cover from UC Press
  Matthew Delmont’s insightful book challenges us to rethink the history of “busing,” a word he intentionally places in quotation marks to emphasize its rise as a rhetorical strategy. Prior to the 1954 Brown decision, riding the school bus had been a white privilege in the rural South, particularly as it passed by (and sometimes splashed mud on) black children who walked the road to segregated schools. But as the school integration movement headed to the North and West in the 1960s and 1970s, white parents and politicians resisted by reframing their objections as a crisis over “busing” and “neighborhood schools.” In this way, whites advanced their own agendas and pushed black students’ moral and legal claims off the political stage, while avoiding explicitly racist language. The national news media was complicit in this rhetorical shift, he argues. As school desegregation battles moved from the Jim Crow South to northern and western states, big-city newspapers and television networks covered these events with less moral clarity, and sometimes open hostility, in their own backyards. Trained in American Studies, Delmont argues that we cannot comprehend this period solely through policy debates and courtroom proceedings. In addition, we must focus on local anti-integration protests, and the national politics and televised nightly news broadcasts that elevated their cause, to understand the rise of the busing narrative and its broader consequences.

  In this wide-ranging study, chapters flow back and forth between two levels of analysis. The book opens with local battles over school integration (in New York City and Chicago, and later in Boston and Pontiac, Michigan) and expands to incorporate national politics and media coverage (primarily in Washington, DC, big-city newspapers, and the three major television news networks at that time: NBC, CBS, and ABC). The first chapter, on New York City, begins with the 1964 black and Puerto Rican school boycott for a desegregation plan, followed by the white parent protest against busing. Delmont skillfully demonstrates how this school boycott and counterprotest led to a dilemma for northern politicians just as Congress began debate on the Civil Rights Act. Northern members of Congress were content with desegregation in the South, but explicitly sought to protect their states from any required busing to correct racial imbalance. Delmont keenly points out that the southern members of Congress highlighted white resistance to busing in New York City to make their point against desegregation in the South and northern hypocrisy on racial segregation in general. In this chapter, New York City, whose school districts contained the largest black student population in the country, is centered in the national discourse on desegregation. Nevertheless, as Delmont reminds the reader, the media minimized the mass demands of black and Puerto Rican activists for school desegregation, while a minor white parent protest was elevated and used as evidence that busing was simply unreasonable.

  The second chapter revisits Chicago’s pivotal clash with federal officials over desegregation in 1965. Activists filed a complaint with the US Office of Education claiming that Chicago Public Schools was in violation of the Civil Rights Act with regard to racial discrimination and segregation. For a brief time, the federal government agreed with the complaint and withheld $30 million in funding from the district. But, under pressure from Chicago’s Mayor Daley, President Johnson’s administration relented and eventually released the funds. The clash was pivotal because it signaled the collapse of any possible federal enforcement of desegregation outside of the southern states—news that circulated nationally.

  The third city, Boston, is the culminating northern location where substantial black civil rights activism became overshadowed by white resistance to busing. Black protest against segregation and grassroots actions such as Operation Exodus led to the passage of the Massachusetts Racial Imbalance Act in 1965. In response, the media elevated white resistance to busing and transformed Boston school committee member Louise Day Hicks into an antibusing icon. For years, Hicks “led a committee which for years had prioritized the preferences and expectations of white parents over the rights of black students” (pp. 84–85). Why Busing Failed stands in sharp contrast to J. Anthony Lukas’s well-known book on Boston, Common Ground (1985), which Delmont critiques for featuring three families who disliked busing and ignoring the local history of black activism for integrated schools.

  Delmont spends the remainder of the book’s chapters examining the national discussion on desegregation, now framed as “busing.” Chapter 4 documents the bipartisan and national political opposition to school desegregation. Chapter 5 chronicles Richard Nixon’s “antibusing” presidency, particularly his television appearances on the subject. Chapter 6 analyzes how national television news covered antibusing activist Irene McCabe and her grassroots movement in Pontiac, Michigan. Chapter 7 focuses on the complexity of black opinions about school desegregation and common understanding of the busing frame as antiblack racial code. The book concludes with a review of television coverage of Boston’s busing crisis in 1974. Throughout these chapters, Delmont consistently reminds the reader how the media framed desegregation as busing and the importance of northern urban politics to this national discourse.

  Delmont’s most significant contribution is his creative interpretation of how national television and print media framed busing “as the common-sense way to describe, debate, and oppose school desegregation” (p. 6). In addition to conventional archival and legal sources, he analyzed over ten thousand reports from white daily and black weekly newspapers, along with dozens of hours of television news archives, to explain how media economics and technology shaped news coverage. Moreover, Delmont exemplifies historical scholarship in the digital age by sharing selected video, photo, and documentary evidence, along with extensive excerpts from his book, on a companion website (http://whybusingfailed.com). Pairing multimedia evidence with the narrative makes a more compelling argument than the book alone, for both scholars and students, and the book’s companion site is ideal for educational use, organized around the theme of “12 Ways to Teach ‘Busing’ Differently.” Educational historians also may be interested in Delmont’s companion site for his previous book, The Nicest Kids in Town (2012), which features video and images on civil rights struggles and youth culture regarding the 1950s American Bandstand television program (http://nicestkids.com). Overall, Why Busing Failed is a must-read for historians and policy analysts of civil rights and school desegregation.

  Robert Cotto Jr. and Jack Dougherty, Trinity College

• History Network News
  http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/146618
  Word count: 1393

  QUOTED: "The main part of Delmont’s story, however, is grounded in a rich trove of evidence and reinforces–sometimes eloquently–the argument that racism indeed must be understood as more than a matter of individual attitudes."
  "By bringing together 'topics that, while closely related, are typically dealt with separately in urban history, civil rights history, media studies, and youth history,' Delmont paints an impressively bright, 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."

  Luther Spoehr: Review of Matthew F. Delmont's “The Nicest Kids in Town: American Bandstand, Rock ‘n’ Roll, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in 1950s Philadelphia” (University of California Press, 2012)

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  Luther Spoehr, an HNN Book Editor, is Senior Lecturer in the Education Department at Brown University.

  “[I]n 1957, we were charting new territory,” said “American Bandstand” icon Dick Clark, forty years later. “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.”

  Unfortunately, there’s a problem with Clark’s apparently self-effacing claim to a place in civil rights history: it’s not true. Or, in the somewhat more diplomatic words of Scripps College historian Matthew Delmont, “Clark’s memory runs counter to the historical record.” Although Clark did indeed place black performers in the spotlight of his nationally-televised program, based in Philadelphia from 1957 to 1964, the show systematically avoided having black teenagers in the audience, much less as dancers, as it helped construct a media-based “national youth culture.” Perhaps daunted by the uproar that erupted when the black singer Frankie Lymon was shown dancing with a white girl on Alan Freed’s television show, Clark’s producers at WFIL (building a media empire as part of Walter Annenberg’s Triangle Publications, which included TV Guide) made sure that local black teens rarely made it into the studio and even more rarely made it on camera. And Clark went along amiably.

  Although Delmont’s well-researched, tightly-written book may initially attract attention primarily because of its revelations about Clark, it is in fact most valuable for the way it shows how even a teenage dance show could become one of the sinews of segregation in what was arguably the most segregated city in the North. The Nicest Kids in Town is as much about real estate as rock ‘n’ roll, about how neighborhoods and schools were increasingly locked into systematic, discriminatory patterns, even as segregation imposed by law in the South was crumbling under pressures signaled by Brown v. Board of Education and federal troops enforcing desegregation in Little Rock, Arkansas. Delmont delineates how “defensive localism,” exemplified by organizations such as the Angora Civic Association, worked to draw the color line more and more indelibly. “In Philadelphia’s private housing market,” he points out, “less than 1 percent of new construction was available to black home buyers in the 1950s.”

  Delmont also shows how local civil rights leaders -- including activists such as Maurice Fagan and Floyd Logan, and radio deejays such as Mitch Thomas and Georgie Woods -- organized to protest segregation and build interracial understanding. Unfortunately, activities and programs -- such as a hopefully uplifting Sunday offering called “They Shall Be Heard,” which featured discussion by black and white teenagers about racism and other significant topics -- never really had a chance. “’Bandstand,’” says Delmont, “addressed its audience as consumers and asked them to buy products, while ‘They Shall Be Heard’ addressed its audience as citizens and asked them to reject prejudice.” Guess which one had staying power. Year after year, “Bandstand” invited students to dance every weekday afternoon as they arrived home from school. “They Shall Be Heard” lasted 27 episodes in 1952-1953.

  High school “Fellowship Clubs” were similarly ineffective. As Philadelphia’s 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 divide. 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.” As “the racial demographics of the neighborhood changed from majority white to a mix of white ethnic groups and black residents,” the school department made a dramatic change: in the middle of the 1956-1957 school year, “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. ... Almost overnight, the school’s name, most experienced teachers, and alumni network disappeared.” The trophies from Northeast’s trophy case were moved to the new school. Disillusioned students left behind at the old school, renamed Thomas Edison High School, selected “Hiatus” as the theme for their 1957 yearbook.

  In sum, Delmont shows that modernizing trends -- the growth of national media, middle-class prosperity, and consumerism -- have not been unequivocal forces for social enlightenment. Given the environment in which he operated, Dick Clark would have been bold indeed to push for integrating his show’s audience. Racially unenlightened viewers bought his sponsors’ candy bars and soda pop, too, and the always-ambitious Clark was not about to sacrifice a burgeoning career for a cause, no matter how righteous, and end up like Georgie Woods, far away from the big time. Still, it was Woods, not Clark, who, at a 1967 convention of radio and television broadcasters, was hailed by Martin Luther King for “[paving] the way for social and political change by creating a powerful cultural bridge between black and white.”

  Delmont speculates -- accurately, I think -- that Clark’s 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 we all should know by now, is not history, but it’s often much stronger for being more consoling. Delmont analyzes the short-lived television series “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 chapter and his conclusion, which places his book alongside those by other historians such as Thomas Sugrue, Robert Avila, and others who have written about racism’s persistence and pervasiveness in the 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. But such a contention is something of a straw man -- no serious analyst that I am aware of insists that racism has entirely disappeared, and people of good will can disagree over exactly how influential it still is and what would be the best ways to combat it. And are we really surprised that its history gets more than a little warped when refracted through the lens of popular culture?

  The main part of Delmont’s story, however, is grounded in a rich trove of evidence and reinforces -- sometimes eloquently -- the argument that racism indeed must be understood as more than a matter of individual attitudes. By bringing together “topics that, while closely related, are typically dealt with separately in urban history, civil rights history, media studies, and youth history,” Delmont paints an impressively bright, 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’s book evidently began as a Ph.D. dissertation in American Civilization at Brown University, but our paths have never crossed.

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