• Three Dog Night had a No. 1 pop hit with a children’s song written by Alan Arkin’s dad.
David I. Arkin was a teacher in Los Angeles in the late 1940s and early ’50s. He lost that job in the Red Scare when he refused to cooperate with McCarthy’s investigation of “un-American activities.”* So Arkin made a living as a painter, writer, and lyricist. He wrote “Black and White” in 1954 and Pete Seeger recorded a version of it a few years later, but it didn’t hit the charts until Three Dog Night’s version in 1972.
(Warning: The video below is extremely 1972.)
That chart-topping version starts off with the line: “The ink is black, the page is white / Together we learn to read and write.” But this wasn’t how the song originally began.
Arkin’s original version started with this: “Their robes were black, their heads were white / The schoolhouse doors were closed so tight …” That was in 1954. The song was written to celebrate the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, which found that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional.
That context helps me understand some things I found off-putting when I first heard this song on the ’70s channel of the music piped into the Big Box store where I work. It struck me as a bit too kumbaya — too sappy and sentimental in its hippie-ish appeal for harmony and liberty and everybody just joining hands and singing together because that will fix everything. And it struck me as weirdly triumphalistic — framing equality as something that had already been achieved.
Learning about the song’s history explains those aspects of it. Its victorious enthusiasm made sense as a direct response to Brown in 1954. And its optimism about everybody joining hands and coming together in har-mo-nee-ee seems more appropriate in that moment, when it seemed like a fresh new possibility newly created and permitted after being legally prohibited for so long.
That context, alas, doesn’t make the song any less disheartening when we listen to it today. Whether we hear it as a time capsule from 1972 or a time capsule from 1954, the contrast between its giddy hopefulness about a post-Brown America and the reality of the ferocious backlash to that ruling over the ensuing seven decades can seem terribly depressing.
The clip in the link above is taken from the half-hour classroom documentary “Crisis in Levittown, PA” which you can watch on YouTube.
The filmmakers managed to find one guy in this all-white Bucks County community of 60,000 who would’ve been willing to sing along with Pete Seeger and Three Dog Night, but just the one. All the other residents interviewed were wholly unreluctant to state, on camera and in public, that a single family of Black professionals moving into their town was incomprehensibly terrifying.
A grievance of Karens (Levittown, Pa., 1957)
This is certainly “Black History.” If you want to understand life for Black Americans in the latter half of the 20th Century, you need to understand how nothing about that life was allowed to be simple or humdrum or normal. A school principal and her husband, an electrical engineer, bought a house in the suburbs. That should be unremarkable and boring. It shouldn’t be a pioneering moment in Black History or a courageous milestone. But their purchase of that home was greeted by a mass freakout of white people who vandalized their property and engaged in harassment and mob violence for weeks.
But perhaps we could make a stronger claim that the video above is an artifact of white history. It’s not really about Daisy and William Myers, but about their white neighbors. And it’s not possible to understand the courage of that one Black family without understanding the fearfulness of their thousands of hysterical white neighbors.
There’s a sense in which the same thing could be said about almost everything we categorize as “Black history.” Slavery, Reconstruction, lynching, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Movement, the ongoing and accelerating Reaganite backlash to the Civil Rights Movement … these are all essential aspects of white history in America.
Some Conroe ISD trustees want to crack down on displays of racial inclusivity and pride, saying they represent, “symbols of personal ideologies.”
One trustee says a child was traumatized by a poster showing different colored children holding hands and had to switch classrooms.
“Christian conservative”
School officials against this say a policy prohibiting political displays, not related to curriculum, already exists. The trustee who brought this forward didn’t realize that.
When it was brought to her attention, the trustee said she wants that policy to go further. Citing “a number of parents reaching out to her about supposed displays of personal ideologies in classrooms,” Melissa Dungan asked her fellow board members to crackdown on them.
“I wish I was shocked by each of the examples that were shared with me, however, I am aware these trends have been happening for many years,” Dungan said.
When pressed to share one of those examples, Dungan referred to a first grade student whose parent claimed they were so upset by a poster showing hands of people of different races, that they transferred classrooms.
“Just so I understand, you are seriously suggesting that you find objectionable, a poster indicating that all are included,” Stacey Chase, another trustee, said.
Dungan wouldn’t say whether she found that poster objectionable, just that she wants to avoid “situations like that” by having the board adopt stricter standards.
“Traumatized by a poster showing different colored children holding hands.”
“Traumatized.” By. That.
And so now, 51 years later, I am reassessing Three Dog Night’s last No. 1 song. Yes, its hippie-dippy, kumbaya vision of “different colored children holding hands” still seems inadequate and shallow and sentimental.
But given that even this fuzzily minimal idea is “traumatizing” for white Republicans and white “Christian conservatives” it starts to sound almost radical and necessary.
• Here’s another song by David Arkin — this one co-written with his Tony- and Oscar-winner son, Alan — performed by Richie Havens:
* The reports I could find on this all note that David Arkin was a “leftist,” but “not a communist,” and thus should not have been fired under the “anti-communist” rules of the time.
I think that mistakenly assumes McCarthyism was a good-faith effort whose self-characterization can be taken at face value. I don’t think David Arkin was fired because he was suspected of being a “communist,” I think he was fired because he was known to be Jewish. The purging of Jews from American public life was too undeniably massive a function and effect of McCarthyism for me to accept that it wasn’t an essential, deliberate part of its intent.
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