The Mitch Thomas Show- The Wilmington, Delaware Teen Dance Show That First Televised "The Stroll" Line Dance? Hint: It Wasn't American Bandstand

Edited by Azizi Powell

Latest revision - title change

This is Part II of a three part pancocojams series on the Stroll, a late 1950s/early 1960s Rock & Roll line dance.

Part II presents excerpts from 2012 book by Matthew F. Delmont entitled "The Nicest Kids In Town, American Bandstand, Rock 'n' Roll, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in 1950s Philadelphia"*. Mathew F. Delmont's book focuses onThe Mitch Thomas Show, a 1950s Wilmington, Delaware Black teen dance show.  That book quotes various sources which document that White dancers on American Bandstand watched The Mitch Thomas Show to learn the latest Rock & Roll dances, including "the Stroll".  

In this pancocojams post, Excerpt #1 from Matthew F. Delmont's book The Nicest Kids In Town... provides some introductory information about The Mitch Thomas Show, and Excerpt #2 discusses the practice if not the policy of the American Bandstand television show of disallowing non-White dancers on that Philadelphia based show. Excerpt #3 of that book    documents how performances of the Stroll on The Mitch Thomas Show was how the American Bandstand dancers learned that dance. Unfortunately, there are no film clips of The Mitch Thomas Show.

* "The Nicest Kids In Town" is a song in the 2002 Broadway musical romantic comedy Hairspray and the 2007 American film with that same title.  In those productions, that song introduces people to "The Corny Collins Show", a fictitious television series that was based on The Buddy Deane Show, a 1950s Baltimore, Maryland teen dance show.

Hairspray features a brief scene of the 1957 Rock & Roll line dance "The Madison". Several pancocojams posts about that dance will be published ASAP and a link to the pancocojams post that showcases some video examples  of those dances will be added here. 

Click https://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2022/04/the-real-originators-of-late-1950s-line.html for Part I of this pancocojams series. Part I presents general information about The Stroll along with selected comments about that dance from a YouTube video discussion thread.

Click https://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2022/04/videos-of-rock-roll-line-dance-stroll.html for Part III of this pancocojams series. Part III showcases three YouTube videos (film clips) of "The Stroll" and two videos of the Soul Train Line which was modeled after "The Stroll" line dance. The Soul Train Line was a signature feature of the nationally syndicated Black teen dance show Soul Train.  

Part III of this pancocojams series also includes a bonus film clip of Black teens or young adults performing a somewhat related 1957 Rock & Roll dance called "The Walk". That film clip is from the 1957 movie entitled Let's Rock.  

The content of this post is presented for historical and cultural purposes.

All copyrights remain with their owners.

Thanks to Matthew F. Delmont and thanks to all others who are quoted in this post.  

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This post is part of an ongoing pancocojams series on 1950s and 1960s Rock and Roll dances. Click the tags below for previous pancocojams post and for subsequent pancocojams posts on this subject.   

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BOOK EXCERPTS FROM THE NICEST KIDS IN TOWN, AMERICAN BANDSTAND, ROCK 'N' ROLL, AND THE STRUGGLE FOR CIVIL RIGHTS IN 1950s PHILADELPHIA
Excerpt #1:
From http://nicestkids.com/nehvectors/nicest-kids/mitch-thomas-television-pioneer

from the book The Nicest Kids In Town by Mathew L. Delmont
"America's Bandstand: 1957-1964, page 3 of 9

Mitch Thomas, Television Pioneer

If Georgie Woods became the most prominent rock and roll personality in Philadelphia and teenage singing groups and their fans provided the energy that fueled the music’s growth in the city’s neighborhoods, Mitch Thomas brought black rock and roll performers and teenage fans to television. Born in West Palm Beach, Florida, in 1922, Thomas’s family moved to New Brunswick, New Jersey, in the 1930s. Thomas graduated from Delaware State College and served in the army before becoming the first black disc jockey in Wilmington, Delaware in 1949. In 1952, Thomas moved to a larger station (WILM) that played music by black R&B artists. By early 1955, Thomas also had a radio show on Philadelphia’s WDAS, where he worked with Woods and Jocko Henderson. When a television opportunity opened up in Thomas’s home market of Wilmington, Thomas got the call over these better-known Philadelphia-based radio hosts.[xxiv]

The Mitch Thomas Show debuted on August 13, 1955, on WPFH, an unaffiliated television station that broadcast to Philadelphia and the Delaware Valley from Wilmington.[xxv] The show, which broadcast every Saturday, featured musical guests and teens dancing to records. In its basic production the show resembled Bandstand (which at the time was still a local program hosted by Bob Horn) and other locally broadcast teenage dance programs in other cities. The Mitch Thomas Show stood out from these other shows, however, because it was hosted by a black deejay and featured a studio audience of black teenagers. Otis Givens, who lived in South Philadelphia and attended Ben Franklin High School remembered that he watched the show every weekend for a year before he finally made the trip to Wilmington and danced on the show. “When I got back to Philly, and everyone had seen me on TV, I was big time,” Givens recalled. “We weren’t able to get into Bandstand, [but] The Mitch Thomas Show gave me a little fame. I was sort of a celebrity at local dances.”[xxvi] Similarly, South Philadelphia teen Donna Brown recalled in a 1995 interview: “I remember at the same time that Bandstand used to come on, there used to be a black dance thing that came on, and it was The Mitch Thomas Show…And that was something for the black kids to really identify with. Because you would look at Bandstand and we thought it was a joke.”[xxvii] The Mitch Thomas Show also became a frequent topic for the black teenagers who wrote the Philadelphia Tribune’s “Teen-Talk” columns. Much in the same way that national teen magazines followed American Bandstand, the Tribune’s teen writers kept tabs on the performers featured on Thomas’ show, and described the teenagers who formed fan clubs to support their favorite musical artists and deejays.[xxviii] The fan gossip shared in these columns documented the growth of a youth culture among the black teenagers whom Bandstand excluded. It was one of these fan clubs, moreover, that in 1957 made the most forceful challenge to Bandstand’s discriminatory admissions policies.[xxix] Although many of these teens watched both Bandstand and Thomas’s program, as Bandstand grew in popularity and expanded into a national program, The Mitch Thomas Show was the only television program that represented Philadelphia’s black rock and roll fans.

[…]

Drawing on his Thomas'scontacts as a radio host and the talents of the teenagers who appeared on his show, the program helped shape the music tastes and dance styles of young people in Philadelphia. In a 1998 interview for the documentary Black Philadelphia Memories, Thomas recalled that “the show was so strong that I could play a record one time and break it wide open.”[xxxii] Indeed, Thomas’s show hosted some of the biggest names in rock and roll, including Ray Charles, Little Richard, the Moonglows, and Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers. Thomas’s show also featured several vocal harmony groups from the Philadelphia area.[xxxiii] Like Woods, Thomas promoted large stage shows in the Philadelphia area as well as small record hops at skating rinks.[xxxiv] In a 1986 interview with the Wilmington News Journal, Thomas remembered that these events were often racially integrated: “The whites that came, they just said, ‘Well I’m gonna see the artist and that’s it.’ I brought Ray Charles in there on a Sunday night, and it was just beautiful to look out there and see everything just nice.”[xxxv] The music and dance styles on his show also appealed to the white teenagers who danced on American Bandstand.[xxxvi] Because the show influenced American Bandstand during its first year as a national program, teenagers across the country learned dances popularized by The Mitch Thomas Show.

Despite its popularity among black and white teenagers, Thomas’s show remained on television for only three years, from 1955 to 1958

[….]

WVUE cancelled The Mitch Thomas Show in June 1958, citing the program’s lack of sponsorship and low ratings compared to the network shows in Thomas’ Saturday timeslot.[xl] Shortly after firing Thomas, Storer announced plans to sell WVUE in order to buy a station in Milwaukee (FCC regulations required multiple broadcast owners to divest from one license in order to buy another). Unable to find a buyer for WVUE, Storer turned the station license back to the government, and the station went dark in September 1958.[xli] The manager of WVUE later told broadcasting historian Gerry Wilkerson: “No one can make a profit with a TV station unless affiliated with NBC, CBS or ABC.”[xlii] As Clark and American Bandstand celebrated the one-year anniversary of the show’s national debut, local broadcast competition brought The Mitch Thomas Show’s groundbreaking three-year run to an unceremonious end. Mitch Thomas continued to work as a radio disc jockey through the 1960s, until he left broadcasting in 1969 to work as a counselor to gang members in Wilmington.[xliii]

[…]

Two other local dance programs featuring black teens proved more successful than The Mitch Thomas Show. Teenage Frolics, hosted by Raleigh, North Carolina deejay J.D. Lewis, aired on Saturdays from 1958 to 1983, and Washington D.C.’s Teenarama Dance Party, hosted by Bob King, aired from 1963 to 1970. Most famously, Soul Train started broadcasting locally from Chicago in 1970 before being picked up for national syndication from 1971 to 2006. Fifteen years before Soul Train, however, Mitch Thomas brought the creative talents of black teenagers to television.[xliv]

[…]

On the eve of Bandstand’s national debut in 1957 the television show was part of the local development of rock and roll in Philadelphia, but the most influential performances took place outside of Bandstand’s television studio."

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Excerpt #2
From http://nicestkids.com/nehvectors/nicest-kids/remembering-american-bandstand-forgetting-segregation
…"black newspapers in Chicago, New York, Atlanta, and Philadelphia noted when black artists appeared on American Bandstand.[v] While black viewers saw many of the top black recording artists on American Bandstand, they almost never saw any black teenagers among the show’s dancers or studio audience.

As noted earlier, while several black teenagers attended Bandstand in the show’s first two years as a local program (1952-53), the program soon adopted admission policies that, while not explicitly whites only, had the effect of discriminating against black teenagers.[vi] Among the black teenagers who protested this discrimination, Walter Palmer engineered a plan to get membership cards for black teens by giving the applications Irish, Polish, and Italian last names, and teens from William Penn high school in North Philadelphia wrote to the Commission on Human Relations asking the city’s discrimination watchdog group to investigate Bandstand’s segregation.[vii] None of these efforts changed the show’s admission policies, and, by the time Clark took over the show in 1956, it was primarily a space for white teenagers. Shortly after Clark became the host of the show, the Philadelphia Tribune ran its first front-page story on Bandstand. Citing a “flood” of “complaints of racial segregation” by black teenagers who sought admission to the show, the front page story declared “No Negroes on Bandstand Show, TV Boss Says They’re Welcome.”[viii] In response to the Tribune reporter’s questions, James Felix, a WFIL program manger, insisted that the show admitted teens on a “first-come, first-served basis.” Felix also said he suspected that few black teens “showed up at the station because they didn’t ‘feel welcome.’ But…that does not mean that we (the station) do not want them to participate on bandstand.”[ix]

[...]

In addition to these teenagers, several contemporary press accounts outside of Philadelphia questioned the policy of racial segregation at American Bandstand. In September 1958, the New York Post ran a series of articles about the program and quoted an anonymous veteran of the show who claimed that it was WFIL-TV’s “practice [to admit] only eight or nine” black teenagers per day, “and not to focus the camera on them.” When asked about the lack of representation of black teenagers, Ted Fetter, an ABC executive, said the network’s decision was influenced by the controversy that erupted over deejay Alan Freed’s television program showing black teenage R&B singer Frankie Lymon dancing with a white teenage girl a year earlier.[xii] Clark refused to comment about the camera shots of the studio audience, but held that the show’s “doors are open to anyone who wants to attend.”[xiii] In the midst of the payola scandal in 1959, the black newspaper New York Age also raised the question of segregation on American Bandstand. “[W]e are concerned about another matter which has never seemed to bother many people,” the article offered. “This is the question of Negro participation on the various TV bandstand programs.” After praising the “quiet, but effective” efforts of Alan Freed to address racial prejudice in the music business and to welcome black teenagers in his concert audiences, the article asked, “Have you ever seen Negro kids on Dick Clark’s program? Perhaps, a few times, but the unspoken rule operates—Negro kids simply have been quietly barred from the ‘American Bandstand.’[xiv]

[...]

Several of the white teenagers who danced on American Bandstand in the late 1950s support the contention that participation of black teenagers did not increase substantially after Clark took over the program. Arlene Sullivan, a regular on the show from 1957 to 1959, remembered that black teens “had their own show [The Mitch Thomas Show],” and that while “nobody ever kept anybody out,” only a few black teens ever came to the show.[xvi] When asked about the racial or ethnic composition of the audience, Joe Fusco, who attended South Philadelphia High School and danced on the show every day from 1957 through 1959, was more suspicious:

It was very, very white, that’s what it was. At that time, I would watch people who were black, or not white, Puerto Rican, I don’t care what they were, they wouldn’t let them in….To this day, Dick Clark takes credit for the few times black kids got in there, but he never wanted them in there. And that was very disgusting to me. I had no control over something like that. That was about the most disgusting thing, to see that is very heartbreaking, as a kid and knowing what they’re actually doing and doing it in a sneaky way. Because no matter how long those kids waited in that line, somehow someway they didn’t get in, because I used to look to see if they got in later. And in my time going to that show, I only saw two black kids that got in and sat in the bleachers, and he [Dick Clark] paid no attention to them.…Not many [black teens] even tried to get in there. That I really want to stress. You’d never see that many try to get in there, but when you did, and you knew that they were not going to get in, it bothered you.[xvii]"...

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Excerpt #3
From http://nicestkids.com/nehvectors/nicest-kids/imagining-and-selling-national-youth-culture?path=national

…"American Bandstand established Philadelphia as the locus of this national youth culture, and it drew extensively from the creative abilities of the city’s youth. Some of these contributions were well documented, others obscured. On the one hand, Italian-American teens figured prominently in the show’s image of youth culture. Many of the show’s regular dancers and local fans hailed from working-class Italian-American neighborhoods, and they later remembered American Bandstand as providing them with unique exposure. On the other hand, the program’s racially discriminatory admissions policies remained in place. With the program broadcasting nationally, black teens were erased not just from the “WFIL-adelphia” regional market, but also from the national youth culture American Bandstand worked to build. While the next chapter examines the struggles over segregation surrounding the program, this chapter shows how American Bandstand became established as the afternoon site of the nation’s youth.

[...]

The 1958 American Bandstand Yearbook emphasized this point on a page titled “a new dance every day”: “‘The Chalypso,’ ‘The Walk,’ ‘The Stroll’—the list of new dances you’ve seen first on ‘American Bandstand’ just seems to grow each day. How do they get started? Well, if you ask some of the guests at the program, ‘They just happen.’”[v] Despite the suggestion that “new dances have ‘just grown’ on the program,” most of these dances did not originate on American Bandstand. Rather, many of the dances originated at local teen dances or were performed by the black teenagers on The Mitch Thomas Show."

Ray Smith, who attended American Bandstand frequently and has done research for one of Clark’s histories of the show, remembers that he and other white teenagers watched The Mitch Thomas Show to learn new dance steps. Describing the “black Bandstand,” Smith recalled:

First of all, black kids had their own dance show, I think it was on channel 12, but one of the reasons I remember it is because I watched it. And I remember that there was a dance that [American Bandstand regulars] Joan Buck and Jimmy Peatross did called "The Strand" and it was a slow version of the jitterbug done to slow records. And it was fantastic. There were two black dancers on this show, the “black Bandstand,” or whatever you want to call it. The guy’s name was Otis and I don’t remember the girl’s name. And I always was like "wow." And then I saw Jimmy Peatross and Joan Buck do it, who were probably the best dancers who were ever on Bandstand. I was talking about it to Jimmy Peatross one day, when I was putting together the book, and he said, "oh, I watched this black couple do it." And that was the black couple that he watched.[vi]

These white teenagers were not alone in watching The Mitch Thomas Show. Smith’s experience of watching the show supports Mitch Thomas’ belief that “[American Bandstand teens] were looking to see what dance steps we were putting out. All you had to do was look at ‘Bandstand’ the next Monday, and you’d say, ‘Oh yeah, they were watching.’”[vii] They were watching, for example, when dancers on The Mitch Thomas Show started dancing The Stroll, a group dance where boys and girls faced each other in two parallel lines, while couples took turns strutting down the aisle. Thomas remembers that the teens on his show “created a dance called the Stroll. I was standing there watching them dancing in a line, and after a while I asked them, ‘what are y’all doing out there?’ They said, ‘that’s The Stroll.’ And The Stroll became a big thing.”[viii] The Stroll was actually a new take on swing-era line dances, and while the teens on The Mitch Thomas Show did not invent The Stroll, they, along with young fans of black R&B in other cities, were among the first young people in the country to perform the new version of the dance.[ix] The Stroll was inspired by R&B artist Chuck Willis’s song “C.C. Rider,” itself a remake of the popular blues song “See See Rider Blues,” which was first recorded and copyrighted by Ma Rainey in the 1920s and was subsequently recorded by dozens of others artists. Following Willis, a string of other R&B songs were produced based on the dance. By late 1957, the Diamonds, a white vocal group that frequently recorded cover versions of black R&B songs, released “The Stroll,” a song made specifically for the dance. Dick Clark was a friend of the Diamonds’s manager, Nat Goodman, and told him: “if we could have another stroll-type record, you’d have yourself an automatic hit.”[x] The Diamonds version outsold the others largely because American Bandstand played the song repeatedly. In addition to helping move the Diamonds’s version of the song up the charts, the frequent spins also falsely established American Bandstand as the originator of the dance. The show offered viewers instruction on how to do the Stroll by showing close-ups on the dancers’ feet during the dance.[xi] The show’s yearbook offered fans of more explicit instruction on the dance.

All this emphasis on American Bandstand as the birthplace of The Stroll upset some of the teenagers on The Mitch Thomas Show. Thomas later recalled that Clark was gracious when he complained to him about American Bandstand taking credit for the dance. “I called Dick Clark and told him my kids were a little upset because they were hearing that the Stroll started on ‘Bandstand’” Thomas remembered. “He said no problem. He went on the show that day and said, ‘Hey man, I want you all to know The Stroll originated on the Mitch Thomas dance show.’”[xii] While Clark was courteous in this instance in acknowledging the creative influence of The Mitch Thomas Show on American Bandstand, the television programs remained in a vastly inequitable relationship. The Mitch Thomas Show broadcast to the Delaware Valley on an independent station that was not affiliated with one of the three major networks. American Bandstand, on the other hand, reached a national audience of millions with the financial backing of advertisers, ABC, and Walter Annenberg’s media assets. The question of the Stroll’s origins remained contentious because such “new” dances were one of the many products that American Bandstand sold to viewers. The appropriation of these creative energies contributed to the frustration felt by black teens who were denied admission to the show. The dance styles perfected by the black teenagers on The Mitch Thomas Show did reach a national audience, but the teens themselves were not depicted as part of the national youth culture American Bandstand broadcast to viewers.”….

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This concludes Part II of this pancocojams series.

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