"Negro Day" On The Buddy Deane Show (1957-1964 Baltimore, Maryland Teen Dance Show)

Rayner Lee, Mar 4, 2019

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Edited by Azizi Powell

This pancocojams post showcases a YouTube video about The Buddy Deane Show, a weekly televised teen dance show from Baltimore, Maryland that aired from 1957-1964. 

This post also presents information about that teen dance show and includes selected comments from the discussion thread of my 2016 pancocojams post about that show.

Addendum #1 to this post presents information about the population referent "Negro".

Addendum #2 to this post presents a compilation of comments from that 2016 pancocojams post about The Buddy Deane Show.

The content of that post is presented for historical and socio-cultural purposes.

All copyrights remain with their owners.

Thanks to Rayner Lee for this video and thanks to all those who are quoted in this post. Special thanks to Anonymous, September 19, 2024 for a comment that they published in the discussion thread for the 2016 pancocojams posts about the Buddy Deane Show. That comment which is given in the Addendum below prompted this pancocojams post.
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This well done video that is embedded in this pancocojams post appears to have been prepared as a student project. I want to mention that I noticed a few errors in some of the headings for dates that are shown in the video.

I also want to clarify that the clip that is included several times in this video which shows some Black Americans men and women performing a group circle dance predates the Buddy Deane Show by a number of decades. That clip appears in that video when the narrator mentions Black dancers on The Buddy Deane Show. However, unfortunately, I believe that there aren't any film clips of Black dancers on the Buddy Deane Show.

Also, it's unfortunate that this video doesn't have any captions and doesn't have an auto-generated transcript.

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INFORMATION ABOUT THE BUDDY DEANE SHOW
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Buddy_Deane_Show
"The Buddy Deane Show is an American teen dance television show, created by Zvi Shoubin, hosted by Winston "Buddy" Deane (1924–2003), and aired on WJZ-TV (Channel 13), the ABC affiliate station in Baltimore from 1957 until 1964. It is similar to Philadelphia's American Bandstand.

The Buddy Deane Show was taken off the air because of a feud Deane had with WJZ-TV regarding the integration of African-American dancers on the program; WJZ-TV wanted virulently to have said dancers booked for his program, but Deane felt that the city of Baltimore had Southern orientations and that its white population would be greatly resistant to the inclusion of those dancers as a result.[1]

Synopsis

Deane's dance party television show debuted in 1957 and was for a time the most popular local show in the United States. It aired for two and a half hours a day, six days a week. Teenagers who appeared on the show every day were known as "The Committee". Committee members included Jonas and Joanie Cash, Mike Miller, Charlie Bledsoe, Ron Osher, Mary Lou Raines, Pat(ricia) Tacey, and Cathy Schmink. Hundreds of thousands of teens learned the latest dances by watching Committee members on the show, copying their personal style, and following their life stories and interactions.[citation needed]

Many top acts of the day, both black and white, appeared on The Buddy Deane Show. Acts that appeared on the show first reportedly were barred from appearing on American Bandstand, but if they had been on Bandstand first they could still be on The Buddy Deane Show. The rivalry with Dick Clark meant that Deane urged all his performers not to mention American Bandstand or visits to Clark in Philadelphia. Although WJZ-TV, owned by Westinghouse Broadcasting (now CBS since January 2, 1995), was an ABC affiliate, the station "blacked out" the network broadcast of American Bandstand in Baltimore and instead broadcast the Deane program, reportedly because Bandstand showed black teenagers dancing on the show (but black and white teenagers were not allowed to dance together until the show was moved to California in 1964). The Deane program set aside every other Friday for a show featuring only black teenagers. For the rest of the time, the show's participants were all white. However, as the civil rights movement gained strength in the United States, WJZ-TV began insisting on the program having a regular lineup of racially-integrated dancers.[1] Deane complied briefly, featuring such a lineup for a few months until protests from segregationists prompted him to have a racially-segregated lineup of dancers again, prompting protests from integrationists. Deane, who believed his program fell victim to the debate over integrated dancing, remarked, on the subject of it being incorporated on his show, that "you're in trouble if you do and in trouble if you don't."[2] WJZ-TV denied that the debate over integration had played a role in the series' cancellation, arguing that the decision was instead brought about by changing musical tastes and declining ratings for the program.[3]"...

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ADDENDUM #1- INFORMATION ABOUT THE REFERENT "NEGRO"
From https://jimcrowmuseum.ferris.edu/question/2010/october.htm "When Did the Word Negro Become Socially Unacceptable? - October 2010"by Jim Crow Museum

..."It [the term "Negro"] started its decline in 1966 and was totally uncouth by the mid-1980s. The turning point came when Stokely Carmichael coined the phrase black power at a 1966 rally in Mississippi. Until then, Negro was how most black Americans described themselves. But in Carmichael's speeches and in his landmark 1967 book, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America, he persuasively argued that the term implied black inferiority. Among black activists, Negro soon became shorthand for a member of the establishment. Prominent black publications like Ebony switched from Negro to black at the end of the decade, and the masses soon followed. According to a 1968 Newsweek poll, more than two-thirds of black Americans still preferred Negro, but black had become the majority preference by 1974. Both the Associated Press and the New York Times abandoned Negro in the 1970s, and by the mid-1980s, even the most hidebound institutions, like the U.S. Supreme Court, had largely stopped using Negro.

Had Sen. Reid chosen to defend his word choice, he could have cited some formidable authorities. Colored was the preferred term for black Americans until W.E.B. Du Bois, following the lead of Booker T. Washington, advocated for a switch to Negro in the 1920s. (Du Bois also used black in his writings, but it wasn't his term of choice.) Despite claims that Negro was a white-coined word intended to marginalize black people, Du Bois argued that the term was "etymologically and phonetically" preferable to colored or "various hyphenated circumlocutions." Most importantly, the new terminology -- chosen by black leaders themselves-symbolized a rising tide of black intellectual, artistic, and political assertiveness. (After achieving the shift in vocabulary, Du Bois spearheaded a letter-writing campaign to capitalize his preferred term. In 1930 -- nine years before Harry Reid was born -- the New York Times Style Book made the change.) Black supplanted Negro when the energy of this movement waned.

In 1988, after the black power movement had itself faded, many leaders decided another semantic change was required. Jesse Jackson led the push toward African-American. But, so far, the change does not seem to have the same momentum that Negro and black once did. In recent polls, most black interviewees express no preference between black and African-American, and most publications don't recommend the use of one over the other."
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To add to the above quoted excerpt, I believe that the history of the use in the United States of term "Negro" should also include how that term was written i.e. whether the first letter in that referent was capitalized or not, and what connotations a lower case "n" or "upper case "n" meant in the late 1950s on. I also believe that the history of the use of the term "Negro" should include what African Americans mean to convey when we spell "Negro" with a small "n" in the 2000s to contemporaneously refer to certain Black people. An example of the contemporary use of "Negro" and negroes" to refer to group hating and self-hating Black people is this sentence (not a quote) "Look at Justice Clarence Thomas and Senator Byron Donalds acting like tap dancing negroes."

If I'm correct, it appears as though the referent "Negro" was written with a lower case "n".
This was in spite of the fact that it was customary to capitalize the first letter in the names of other races and nationalities. My guess is that most White people (and at least some Black people and other non-White people) didn't think anything of spelling "Negro" with a small "n". However, other Black people during that time were strongly opposed to "Negro" being spelled with a small "n". They advocated against that spelling because they believed that it was either intentionally or unintentionally demeaning because the first letter of other referents was always capitalized.

As a result of Black Americans' advocacy, by at least the early 1970s, the general rule in mainstream media and elsewhere was that the first letter in the referent "Negro" should be capitalized. By the end of the 1970s, the term "Negro" was almost completely retired from use by United States mainstream media and otherwise as an acceptable referent for that population.

There are still times when Black Americans in the 21st century purposely refer to another  Black person as a "Negro". If Black Americans do so, and especially if we use the lower case "n" spelling for that referent, we are purposely conferring negative connotations on that person or people i.e. We are calling them an "Uncle Tom" - a Black person who talks and/or acts in ways that are supportive of and admiring of White people and are contrary to the interests of other Black people.  ("Uncle Tom" can be used for females as well as males since it appears that the comparable female term "Aunt Jemima" has seldom been used since at least around the early 2000s.)
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ADDENDUM #2- SELECTED COMMENTS FROM THE DISCUSSION THREAD OF A CLOSELY RELATED PANCOCOJAMS POST
From https://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2016/03/black-teens-and-buddy-deane-show-1957.html "Black Teens And The Buddy Deane Show (Baltimore, Maryland) televised weekly teenage dance show 1957-1964)"

As of September 19, 2024 at 6:40 AM EDT there are only ten comments in this discussion thread. The comments that I'm quoting here exclude my "Thank you" replies.

These comments are quoted with as is with no corrections or additions.

Numbers are added for referencing purposes.

1. Azizi Powell, March 3, 2016 at 3:53 PM
"I focused on the 1957-1964 television series The Buddy Deane Show in part because I'm interested in documenting old school African American originated line dances, and the Buddy Deane Show's 1958 or 1959 clip of The Madison appears to be the earliest surviving film of that dance.

I believe that The Buddy Deane Show is important in part because it documents aspects of Americana such as the way the teenagers (or at least White teenagers] in the late 1950s and early 1960s dressed, danced, interacted, and also documented (through retrospective interviews such as the one quoted in Excerpt #2 of this post) attitudes and values of that time. For example, consider the comments of members of the "Committee" [the regularly featured White teenagers on that show] about boys having it worse than girls because boys weren't supposed to dance. I wonder if that applied to Black males as well as White males. Also, read the comments in that same excerpt about the series only wanting "attractive" teenagers as featured dancers. There are other socio-cultural comments in various YouTube comments threads about the Madison dance. I'll include some of those comments in an upcoming pancocojams series about that dance.

However, it seems to me that The Buddy Deane Show is more important because it exemplifies the need to go back and understand how the past has influenced the present with regard to systemic racism in Baltimore, Maryland and elsewhere in the United States.

That's one of the things that the Black Lives Matter movement is talking about. It's not just about police brutality."

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2. Unknown, October 18, 2016 at 12:56 AM
"It was very interesting to see my conversation quoted in this article. Thank you for including me as one of the Buddy Dean family. In my on-going search for African American footage I stumbled across this article in Google. I still believe that footage is out there somewhere. MPT did a segment which included interviews with former African American dancers who appeared on the show. The information used was obtained from WJZ. Checking back with the studio, no one had information concerning footage of African American dancers. It would be a treasure to pass down to my future generations. I am here and on FB as well as NOBLE BRUN in the event the footage can be located. I graduated from an HBCU, lived through racism, marched on Washington with Martin Luther King, and was active in fighting injustices in Baltimore County at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. Racism is passed down from one generation to the next. No matter how progressive we become, there will always be those who will still hang on to the tradition of hate. My parents didn't talk much about racism, and as a result I grew up learning to love everybody. When I became of age to understand it all I became motivated to make a difference.

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Reply
3. Unknown, October 19, 2016 at 10:15 AM
"As you can see from the December thread my question concerning African Americans was totally dismissed by the Committee member who was speaking. So there you have it. Some fifty years later, the mindset is STILL the same. I'm sure they could have reached out to me via these posts, but did not. GOD HELP US!"

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Reply
4. Anonymous, September 19, 2024 at 12:55 AM
"What was the name of the black group of girls, who won a contest on Buddy Deane Show."

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Reply
5. Azizi Powell, September 19, 2024 at 5:52 AM
"Hello, Anonymous. I don't know the answer to your question. Hopefully, someone reading this will respond with that information.

I google searched your question and the AI (Artificial Intelligence) response was that no information was known, but shared some info regarding the Buddy Deane Show itself.

Also, as a result of reading your question, the link to this 1985 article came up:

<a href="https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/section/artsentertainment/john-waters-on-keeping-the-memory-of-the-buddy-deane-show-alive/">https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/section/artsentertainment/john-waters-on-keeping-the-memory-of-the-buddy-deane-show-alive</a> "Ladies And Gentlemen...The Nicest Kids In Town: Keeping the memory of The Buddy Deane Show alive." by John Waters

[comment continued below]

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Reply
6. Azizi Powell,September 19, 2024 at 5:55 AM
"Here's the portion of that above cited article that focuses on integration and the Buddy Deane Show:

..."There was a change in the works.”

Part of that change was the racial inte­gration movement. ”I had a lot of black friends at the time, so for me this was an awkward thing,” says Marie. “To this day, I’m reluctant to tell some of my black friends I was on Buddy Deane be­cause they look at it as a terrible time.”

Integration ended The Buddy Deane Show. When the subject comes up today, most loyalists want to go off the record. But it went something like this: Buddy Deane was an exclusively white show. Once a month the show was all black; there was no black Committee. So the NAACP targeted the show for protests. Ironically, The Buddy Deane Show intro­duced black music and artists into the lives of white Baltimore teenagers, many of whom learned to dance from black friends and listened to black radio. Buddy offered to have three or even four days a week all black, but that wasn’t it. The protesters wanted the races to mix.

At frantic meetings of the Committee, many said, “My parents simply won’t let me come if it’s integrated,” and WJZ realized it just couldn’t be done. “It was the times,” most remember. “This town just wasn’t ready for that.” There were threats and bomb scares; integrationists smuggled whites into the all-black shows to dance cheek to cheek on camera with blacks, and that was it. The Buddy Deane Show was over. Buddy wanted it to end happily, but WJZ angered Deaners when it tried to blame the ratings.

On the last day of the show, January 4, 1964, all the most popular Committee members through the years came back for one last appearance."...

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7. Azizi Powell, September 19, 2024 at 6:04 AM
"Here's another excerpt from that above cited 1985 John Waters "Ladies And Gentlemen...The Nicest Kids In Town": article:

"You learned how to be a teenager from the show. Every day after school kids would run home, tune in, and dance with the bedpost or refrigerator door as they watched. If you couldn’t do the Buddy Dean jitterbug, (always identifiable by the girl’s ever-so-subtle dip of her head each time she was twirled around), you were a social outcast. And because a new dance was introduced practically every week, you had to watch every day to keep up. It was maddening: the Mashed Potatoes, the Stroll, the Pony, the Waddle, the Locomotion, the Bug, the Handjive, the New Continental, and, most important, the Madison, a complicated line dance that started here and later swept the country.".

end of quote

All those dance names that are mentioned are African American originated dances.

I'll repeat this sentence that I already quoted above from that article:

"The Buddy Deane Show intro­duced black music and artists into the lives of white Baltimore teenagers, many of whom learned to dance from black friends and listened to black radio".

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