Hairspray in Context: Race, Rock 'n Roll and Baltimore
Introduction | Videos | Timeline | Additional Reading
Introduction
The Buddy Dean Show, a local Baltimore teen dance show, is memorialized in the John Water's film and musical, Hairspray. The story revolves around the successful attempt by white and black Baltimore teens in 1962 to integrate a teen dance show, The Corny Collins Show. The truth is starker....The rise of teen dance shows in the late 50s and early 60s signaled a dramatic cultural shift in musical taste for teens from the big band sound of the 1940s so popular with their parent, to rock and roll. More importantly, teen dance shows introduced black music, musicians and singers to a white audience who were living in an increasingly racially integrated world. Modified forms of dances popular with black teens also slipped into these shows. Some die-hard segregationists were so distressed at this development that they circulated flyers warning parents about saving the white youth of America by not buying or even listening to race music - negro records. - Professor Taunya Banks.
Videos
The videos presented here were originally recorded in 2003 as part of the University of Maryland School of Law's Linking Arts and the Law Series.
Introduction : University of Maryland School of Law Dean, Karen Rothenberg. (about)
Hairspray in Context: Race, Rock 'n Roll and Baltimore: Professor Taunya Banks. (about)
Hairspray in Context: Questions and Answers with Professor Banks and Ms. Marie Fischer Cooke, Class of 1985 (and former Buddy Deane Show Committee Member).
Things Were Changing: A Time Line of Baltimore and National Civil Rights Events
1954
Brown v. Board of Education (1954).
Baltimore becomes the first Southern city to integrate its schools after the
Brown decision.
Harry Coles (Baltimore) elected as first black in the General Assembly.
Public housing in Baltimore integrated.
City dime-stores begin to open lunch counters to black customers.
Lonesome v. Maxwell, 123 F. Supp. 193 (MD 1954) racial segregation public beaches,
bath houses and swimming pools by the State of Maryland and the City of Baltimore
upheld.
1955
7% Black Baltimore students attend integrated schools.
Baltimore department stores allow blacks to try on clothes.
Baltimore Sun front page series The City We Live In, exposing injustices to
black Baltimoreans.
Baltimore City Council authorized publication of A CITY IN TRANSITION supporting
civil rights efforts.
Governor McKeldin ends segregation in the National Guard.
Dawson v. Baltimore City, 220 F.2d 386 (4th Cir. Md. 1955) federal court orders
Baltimore to desegregate public swimming pools and the Supreme Court affirms
(Baltimore City v. Dawson, 350 U.S. 877(1955)).
CORE pickets Gwynn Oak Amusement Park for the first time.
Montgomery Bus Boycott.
1956
14% Black Baltimore students attend integrated schools.
Baltimore City Equal Employment Ordinance - no enforcement mechanism.
Governor McKeldin ends separate listings for black and white applicants for
state jobs.
1957
26% Black Baltimore students attend integrated schools.
Sheraton Belvedere becomes the first Baltimore hotel to admit black customers.
The Buddy Deane Show first airs on WJZ-TV in Baltimore.
Congress enacts the 1957 Civil Rights Act, the first modern legislation
designed to enforce the right to vote in federal elections.
President Eisenhower send federal troops to Little Rock Arkansas to enforce
desegregation of Central High School.
1958
Most Baltimore movie theaters open to black customers.
Most Baltimore first-class hotels accommodate blacks.
1960
Sit-ins at Northwood Shopping Center lunch counters by students from Morgan
State College, Johns Hopkins University and Goucher College.
Sit-in at Hooper's Restaurant in downtown Baltimore by Morgan State and black
high school students results in the arrest conviction of demonstrators (Maryland
v. Bell). ("Legal History of the
Great Sit-in Case" by Prof. William Reynolds)
Other sit-in demonstrations at area restaurants.
Congress enacts the 1960 Civil Rights Act reaching voting discrimination in
state elections.
1961
Green v State, 225 Md 422 (1961) arrest and conviction of civil rights protesters
at Glen Echo Amusement Park affirmed by the Maryland Court of Appeals.
AFRO AMERICAN newspaper reporter George Collins dons African diplomatic garb
to get service at a Fayette Street restaurant.
Freedom rides along Route 40 to desegregate public accommodations.
NAACP lawyer Thurgood
Marshall nominated by President John Kennedy to the U.S. Court of appeals
for the Second Circuit.
1962
Setting for Hairspray the musical [with 1963 just around the corner].
Bell v. Maryland, 227 Md 302 (1962) the Court of Appeals uphold the conviction
of high school and college students including the named plaintiff Robert Bell,
now chief judge of the Maryland Court of Appeals, for trying to integrate Hooper's
Restaurant.
Dr. Martin Luther King speaks to 3,5000 people at Willard W. Allen Masonic
Temple urging continued non-violence demonstrations opposing segregation.
President Kennedy orders federal marshals to escort James Meredith, the
first black student to be permitted to enroll at the University of Mississippi.
1963
Protest organized by white and black ministers against Gwynn Oak Amusement Park
in Baltimore County for excluding blacks with mass arrests.
Northwood Movie Theatre admits black patrons after eight years of protest.
General Assembly enacts an open accommodations law, outlawing race-based segregation
in restaurants, hotels, theaters, stores, beaches and recreational facilities
- but the law only applies to Baltimore and twelve of the state's twenty-three
counties.
An estimated 250,000 people join in the March on Washington, where Rev.
Martin Luther King, Jr. delivers his famous I Have a Dream speech
on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
1964
The Buddy Deane show cancelled.
Maryland General Assembly extends open accommodations law to
the entire state.
U.S. Congress enacts the 1964 Civil Rights Act, prohibiting
discrimination in public accommodations and employment.
Griffin v. Maryland , 378
U.S. 130 (1964) (arrests of Glen Echo Amusement Park demonstrators
reverses Green case).
Additional Reading
BALTIMORE-AFRO-AMERICAN: Buddy Deane Show Dies January 4, Dec. 17, 1963 at 10;
Renne R. Curry, Hairspray: The Revolutionary Way to Restructure and Hold Your History, 24 LITERARY FILM Q. 165, 167-8 (1996).
Kenneth D. Durr, BEHIND THE BACKLASH: WHITE WORKING-CLASS POLITICS IN BALTIMORE, 1940-1980 (2003) pages 151-156.
John A. Jackson, AMERICAN BANDSTAND: DICK CLARK AND THE MAKING OF A ROCK 'N' ROLL EMPIRE (1997) pages 141-42, 213-14, 230-54, 257
Jacques Kelly and Fred Rasmussen, Buddy Deane: 1924- 2003: An Earth Force for a Generation of Baltimore Teens, BALT. SUN, July 17, 2003, at A1.
Barbara Mills, GOT MY MIND SET ON FREEDOM: MARYLAND'S STORY OF BLACK AND WHITE ACTIVITISM 1663-2000 (2002) pages 159-181.
David Milobsky, Power from the Pulpit: Baltimore's African-American Clergy, 1950-1970, 89 MARYLAND HISTORICAL MAGAZINE 274-289 (1994).
Sandy M. Shoemaker, We Shall Overcome, Someday: The Equal Rights Movement in Baltimore 1935-1942, 89 MARYLAND HISTORICAL MAGAZINE 260-273 (1994).
Linnell Smith, Justice At Gwynn Oak, BALT. SUN, Aug. 24, 1998 at 1E (feature on the integration of Gywnn Oak Amusement Park).
Julie Sutton, The Buddy Dean Show (1990) student paper on file at the University of Baltimore's Langsdale Library.
John Waters, Ladies and Gentlemen…the Nicest Kids in Town!, BALT. MAG. (April 1985) at 90.
Laura Wexler, The Last Dance. SMART LIVING, BALT. MAG. (September/October
2003) at 130.
