“D is for Diversity”

Brian Balogh: As we just heard, Rosita the bilingual Muppet has given voice to an often under represented demographic in America. In fact, the turquoise monster is a perfect example of one of the enduring themes of Sesame Street, diversity. The show itself was established to appeal to a diverse audience, and address deep seeded issues like poverty and racial injustice.

Kathryn O.: Being a historian of Sesame Street is really being a historian of all kinds of different things. It’s being a historian of social justice, it’s being a historian of race in America, it’s being a historian of media and popular culture. Sesame Street provides this wonderful lens through which we can examine all sorts of different trends that are happening in American history.

Brian Balogh: That’s Kathryn Ostrofsky. When Sesame Street first aired in 1969, she says it was an immediate hit. But while the show was experiencing early success, the country was grappling with civil rights and the Vietnam War. I asked Kathryn why Sesame Street chose to promote diversity during this turbulent time in American history.

Kathryn O.: Well, you’re right. There is a lot of things going on in 1969. They were actually planning the show for a couple of years prior to that. Through 1967 and ’68, they are talking about what can we do to fix some of the problems in society, what can we do to address some of these major issues that we have as a country. They were particularly interested in addressing poverty and racial intolerance. In 1967, you have all those urban uprising. In 1968, you have the assassination of Martin Luther King. These are things that are on everybody’s mind.

Kathryn O.: When they start the show, they planned the curriculum around cognitive goals, around things that you would think of as basically academic. Those, however, are just tools. They’re means to an end. They’re thinking about how are we going to help kids feel comfortable in school and feel comfortable learning, and particularly how we’re going to help inner city African-American kids.

Kathryn O.: Sesame Street consciously had a racially integrated cast. The first four cast members, the hosts of the show were Gordon and Susan, an African-American couple, and Bob and Mr. Hooper, two white guys who lived in the neighborhood too.

Brian Balogh: How did conceptions of diversity change over time? How were they reflected in the show?

Kathryn O.: Well, once you get to the 1970s, there are a lot of different groups who are looking at what happened with the African-American civil rights movement and saying, “We should learn some lessons from that and work towards social justice for our communities too.” You’ve got the women’s movement, you’ve got Latino civil rights and pride movements, you’ve got the American Indian movement, and you’ve got disability rights activists beginning to work toward laws helping their community.

Brian Balogh: How did that show up on the screen?

Kathryn O.: Sesame Street was a show on public broadcasting and it always conceived of itself as a show for the public. Because of that, the public understood this as their show, the public understood that this was a show that they could be a part of.

Kathryn O.: Audience members, people who were activists in other areas of society started looking at Sesame Street and started saying, “Well, why can’t somebody like us be on that show too?” Sesame Street listened to them. They looked to people on their staff, people in the cast, and audience members who are writing in to their suggestions about how to make the show more reflective of what American society really was and what American society really should be.

Brian Balogh: You’re working on a podcast with cohost Sherman Dorn about Sesame Street. I understand that we have a clip cued up here. I’d like you to set it up for us. What are we going to hear?

Kathryn O.: Our podcast is called Everything Happens Here, Half A Century of Sesame Street. We are exploring all the things that people have learned from Sesame Street over the years, beyond the alphabet and numbers. We’re going to talk to scholars who have studied Sesame Street, as well as the people who actually were involved in working on Sesame Street and creating it.

Brian Balogh: Tell me a little bit about Emily Perl Kingsley.

Kathryn O.: Emily Perl Kingsley was a writer on Sesame Street for 45 years. She started in Season Two, in 1970. Disability issues became very important to her personally outside of the show and she realized that working on a show like Sesame Street was an opportunity for her to bring these issues to a broad audience. We’re going to hear her talk about how she wrote for a deaf character, played by deaf actress Linda Bove, and how she wrote for her own son Jason, who had down syndrome and was featured on the show as well.

Emily Perl K.: In Season Two, I was assigned to go out and check out a thing called the Little Theater of the Deaf, had to go all the way out on Long Island to where they were performing. I was absolutely enchanted with them. They were imaginative and creative, and gave the audience a simultaneous experience that hearing people and non-hearing people would both be experiencing the same thing, was the signing and the not signing was going on at the same time. It was fascinating.

Emily Perl K.: I came back from checking these people out. I said, “They’re wonderful. We really need to have them on the show.” I started writing segments for them. They had a fabulous response, fabulous. In the process of writing the stuff for the Little Theater of the Deaf, I decided I should learn how to sign. So I started socializing with these people, and we would get together on Wednesday nights, and we would communicate, we would play games, we would just chat and so on.

Emily Perl K.: It was a very, very opening up experience for me because in addition to learning to sign and having all these new friends, I was getting a little politicized about disability issues. It was interesting to be able to see things from their point of view, which I had never been exposed to before. Then Linda Bove came and Linda was a character who became a regular. She lived on the street. She was deaf and not only were we learning some sign language with Linda, but we did segments with Linda on how do you wake up in the morning, what kind of an alarm clock do you use if you can’t hear, how do you know when somebody’s ringing your doorbell.

Emily Perl K.: We were answering kids’ real questions right there on the show. I don’t think there was any show up to that time that had dealt with that subject matter right straight head on, asking questions and answering them, plus showing that Linda was a full-fledge ordinary member of the community. She just lived there, she was the librarian, she had a dog. She was just a person who happened to live there. Then every once in a while, you would deal with a deaf issue.

Kathryn O.: When Emily started writing for the show in 1970, she said she wasn’t thinking about disability as a part of diversity. Would that have been normal in 1970?

Sherman Dorn: It would have been entirely normal for adults in 1970 who in most cases would not have grown up around peers and classmates, and gone to school with individuals who were labeled as having disabilities. It would have been a mostly new experience to see individuals with disabilities on television. Linda’s an example of an adult character who appeared on the show and represented people with disabilities. What about children with disabilities on the show?

Kathryn O.: Well, the first child with a disability to be featured on Sesame Street was Jason Kingsley, Emily’s son.

Emily Perl K.: In 1974, I had my son Jason, who was born with down syndrome. That was a very shocking experience to say the least. Personally, we were given very, very horrible advice from the obstetrician, but this was the advice of the day. You were told when a baby like this was born that you did not have to bring the baby home if you didn’t want to. Baby could be placed in a nice clean institution, and you could go home and tell your family that the baby had died in childbirth because the expectation was that this child would never accomplish anything.

Emily Perl K.: But when he was about three, he was starting to read. He was putting letters together, Scrabble tiles, he was putting together and making little words. It was blowing our minds. He was doing all this stuff that the doctors had said was impossible by definition. I realized I had this venue, this format, not really at my disposal but it was a possibility. I went to the producers and I said, “Look, I’ve got this three-year-old kid with down syndrome who’s starting to read. Can we put him on the show? Can we show people that kids with this kind of a disability can learn more than anybody thought?” They said, “Sure, let’s try it.”

Sherman Dorn: It wasn’t until 1975 that there was a federal law requiring that public schools accept all children, regardless of the nature or degree of disability that public schools around the country were required to consider and start planning for the education of children with learning disabilities, with down syndrome and other developmental disabilities.

Sherman Dorn: In many cases where children with disabilities were educated in public schools, they were segregated in separate classrooms, in separate schools. Starting in the late 1970s, schools, and parents, and classmates faced an entirely new world. The representation of individuals with disabilities on a television show was probably the first exposure on media to the concept of disability for young children.

Emily Perl K.: They put Jason on the show and we did a whole bunch of short little segments with him that are so fabulous. He was doing letter identification and he was making little words together. He was so cute. We put them on the show and the response was absolutely phenomenal. The mail that we got just blew us away. It was amazing. People would say, “I have a kid like that and I didn’t know that these kids were capable of learning anything. I’m going to work harder with my kid.” People said, “I’ve never even seen a child with this condition on any show ever. It’s so wonderful just to see him there, just having a regular life.”

Emily Perl K.: That’s what inspired me to start thinking about, “Well, if we could do down syndrome, why can’t we do other things? Why can’t we do wheelchair stuff? Why can’t we do cerebral palsy? Why can’t we do spina bifida? Why can’t we do helmets, and braces, and crutches and all kinds of stuff?” That’s what sent me off in my career of advocacy on the show.

Kathryn O.: If children with disabilities are really only being included in classrooms in the late 1970s, it’s really early for Sesame Street to be including those children in their televised classroom of the air nationwide in the early ’70s.

Sherman Dorn: My question for someone who wrote for the show for 45 years and shaped it in so many different ways, what in the end was her view of what the show was about?

Emily Perl K.: I did a show once called the Furry Little Red Monster Parade. The idea of that show is like a condensation of what Sesame Street is all about. Elmo wants to make a parade and he’s banging his drum, and he’s saying, “Come one, come all. Hurray, hurray, it’s the furry little red monster parade.” Then Zoe says, “Oh, can I watch with you?” “Sure. Here’s the song.” She says, “Wait a minute. I’m not red, I’m orange.” Elmo says, “Well, we’ll change the song. We’ll make it hurray for the furry little red and orange monster parade.” Then somebody else comes along, wants to join in the parade, who is not a monster, or who is not little. Each time the song changes to accommodate different people.

Emily Perl K.: At the end, it turns out that it’s just become unwieldy, it’s just ridiculous to be singing this stupid song that’s getting longer and longer. They finally, at the end, change it to, “Hurray for the anybody who likes to be in a parade, parade.” The idea being that the message that it’s okay to be whoever you are. It’s got to be okay to be whoever you are.

Brian Balogh: Kathryn Ostrofsky is a Sesame Street scholar and independent historian. Her forthcoming podcast is called Everything Happens Here, Half A Century of Sesame Street. To listen, you’ll find a link on our website at www.backstoryradio.org.

Brian Balogh: That’s going to do it for us today, but you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode or ask us your questions about history. You’ll find us at backstoryradio.org, or send us an email at BackStory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter, @BackStoryRadio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

Joanne Freeman: Special thanks this week to Kathryn Ostrofsky.

Ed Ayers: BackStory is produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, the Johns Hopkins University and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this podcast do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Additional support is provided by The Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, and humanities, and the environment.

Speaker 14: Brian Balogh is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is Professor the Humanities and President Emeritus at the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. BackStory was created Andrew Windham for Virginia Humanities.