The Production of a Beloved Community: Sesame Street's Answer to America's Inequalities

The children's public television program Sesame Street strived to exemplify and create an egalitarian and more tolerant community both on screen and in actuality. Sesame Street's aim to educate disadvantaged urban preschool children and put them on an equal intellectual level as their middle-class peers when they entered grade school was central to the development and direction of the show. To appeal to their audience, the producers designed a reproduction of a working-class, urban city block for a television studio set and directed a multiethnic and multilingual cast of human and puppet characters that taught fundamental skills for reading, writing, and mathematics as well as social practices of open-mindedness, tolerance, and goodwill. The diverse cast commingled and solved problems together in their neighborhood setting. With the debut on November 10, 1969, and at least three years prior of preparation and research, Sesame Street grew out of the era's milieu of the civil rights struggle and the effort of social reform. The vision and principles of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s beloved community signified the central commitment of the show. The idea for a beloved community developed long before King espoused his message to the civil rights movement, but the concept became popular as a result of his leadership and appeal. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century thinkers Walter Rauschenbusch, Reinhold Niebhur, and Josiah Royce combined Christian doctrine and the practice of moral compassion to define their ideal vision of a beloved community (Zepp). By the mid-1950s, recognized as the beginning of the civil rights movement, King pronounced in speeches and published writings his primary goal as the fulfillment of such a society. The roots of King's philosophy and the beliefs he carried throughout the movement remain in contention as scholars debate King's major influences and primary goals. Zepp situates King's influences in the history of American liberal theology, while James Cone and Richard Lischer find the source of King's position in the Southern Baptist Church and African American religious tradition. Throughout the movement, King's thinking proved anything but static, but his goals expressed in his publications and major speeches, designed for a mostly "white audience, emphasized nonviolence and the realization of a beloved community. In a beloved community, the diverse peoples of the United States and ultimately the world reconciled their differences, integrated, cooperated, and coexisted with one another. "I have a dream," King called out at the March 1963 on Washington that "... the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood" (qtd. in Carson and Shepard 85). He asked for peoples of all nationalities and religions to "join hands" and respect one another (Carson and Shepard 87). Childhood is not simply a time of innocence - free from the social and cultural pressures of the adult world -but defined by historical trends and political agendas. Joel Spring argues that, throughout its history, the behaviors and goals of the public school system have sustained the goal of cultural domination. Public schools particularly have become one form of what Spring calls "ideological management" (4), or the act of creating and dispersing knowledge throughout a society. From its incipience, the public education system sought "to manage the distribution of ideas m society" (3) in order to preserve and uphold democracy. Sesame Street became an example of such a school; originally financed by the federal government and nonprofit organizations, the program educated children through the medium of television before they entered the school system. Spring argues that the Children's Television Workshop (CTW), the production company behind Sesame Street, attempted to "shape public morality" and present "a standard as to what the world should be like" (384). …