To some viewers of the May 23, 1959, broadcast of WGR-TV’s Dance Party, two Toronto teenagers had travelled down the QEW to commit an offensive act live on Buffalo television. The show received at least eight calls complaining that a Black boy and white girl should not be dancing together. Host Pat Fagab chose to placate the callers. After all, the kids from up north should have known better — as Fagan later suggested, they should have followed the old adage “when in Rome, do as the Romans do.”
Student-council members at Toronto’s Malvern Collegiate, led by Don Schrank and Margo Taylor, who sensed that most school social events were geared toward senior grades, had organized a bus trip to Buffalo for younger students to appear on Dance Party. Among the 46 students who went was 15-year-old Clayton Johnston, who played trumpet in the school band and had won several track trophies. According to the Globe and Mail, Clayton and his sister, Carol, were the only Black students at Malvern at the time.
The trouble began during the “spotlight dance” segment. Clayton paired off with another 15-year-old, Patty Banks, and the phones lit up with complaints about the interracial couple. Fagan approached Schrank’s mother, Muriel, who was chaperoning the kids. He suggested that it “would be a good idea” if Clayton no longer appeared on camera.
Mrs. Schrank was flabbergasted.
The calls reflected racial tensions in Buffalo. Black migration into the city following the Second World War had been accompanied by white flight into the suburbs. Areas Black residents settled in, such as the Ellicott District east of downtown, were subjected to urban-renewal plans. In 1956, there was an interracial riot among Buffalo teens at the Crystal Beach amusement park, near Fort Erie. “In the midst of a growing civil rights movement and rising rates of juvenile delinquency,” historian Virginia Wolcott noted in her book Race, Riots and Roller Coasters, “community elites deemed that interracial subculture subversive. To them the Crystal Beach riot suggested that integration was not merely subversive but potentially destructive.” Those fears weren’t alleviated by the rise of rock n’ roll — popular white WKBW DJ George “Hound Dog” Lorenz built a following promoting Black acts to mixed audiences and broadcast live from Black clubs.
WGR-TV's Dance Party, Pat Fagan, 1960
Upon receiving the news, Clayton left the studio. The Toronto Daily Star noted that he walked for a mile in the rain to “cool off” before returning to watch the rest of the show in the lounge with a station employee. The other kids were stunned, though it took time to realize what had happened. “Hardly anyone knew about it until the program was three-quarters over,” Valerie Taw told the Star. “If we had known earlier, drastic measures would have been taken.”
Back in Toronto, Clayton’s parents watched their son and Banks dance and noticed something was amiss. “Then we didn’t see him again and we thought something like this had happened,” his father, Leonard, told the Globe and Mail. “Over there they don’t seem to realize that they have a responsibility to allow mixed dancing even if a few of their listeners call. Only a crackpot would complain.” Banks’s mother felt it was a “very unfortunate incident.”
Fagan, who had hosted the show for two years, claimed that this was the first time such an incident had occurred and that it had been handled satisfactorily. The coverage in the Toronto press was, in his view, “making a mountain out of a molehill.” He believed that, while Torontonians were more liberal-minded than Buffalonians, the fact was that “Negroes dance with Negroes and whites dance with whites.” Fagan mentioned that “as a matter of fact, I am going into the coloured section of Buffalo next week where I am to be honoured at a Pat Fagan Night by members of the Boys’ Club of the Urban League.” Station general manager Van Buren DeVries didn’t plan any further action, even though he believed Fagan had shown poor judgment by heeding the complaints: as the station didn’t have a policy against interracial dancing, the calls should have been ignored.
A headline and photos from the May 25, 1959, edition of the Toronto Daily Star.
The Star published an editorial titled “Jim Crow With a Beat,” which speculated on how the fiasco would affect Clayton: “Amid innocent teenage fun, his childhood world exploded. The boy became a man. He knew the searing touch of racial discrimination; the impotent anger of a young man who, unjustly and for no logical reason, has been shamed publicly because of his colour, told that he belongs to a caste of untouchables. It is too much to expect that a boy of 15 will escape without scars from this injustice. Certainly his days of wide-eyed innocence are over. In future, under the surface of campus camaraderie, Clayton Johnston would be superhuman if suspicion did not whisper sometimes: What do they really think? That is the fearsome thing about racial discrimination: It breaks down love and trust among human beings, suspends veils of suspicion between us which prevent us from knowing one another.”
The Telegram’s editorial (“Positive Good Will Needed”) criticized WGR for having yielded so quickly to blatant prejudice and scolded the other students for not showing solidarity by walking out of the studio. “To have demonstrated an indissoluble alliance at such a time,” it noted, “would have shown up intolerance for the puny and cowardly thing it is.”
Youths interviewed for CBC Radio’s Teen Tempo felt that, while it was easy in hindsight to believe they would have taken the noble route, they probably would have continued to dance as the Malvern students had. Yet, as host Doug Maxwell noted, “To say the high school population of Toronto is upset is putting it mildly.” Asked about her first reaction, a female guest said, “There goes some more prejudiced, bigoted old women complaining about something that they might have just happened to glimpse on their television and immediately pick up their phone and scream into it that they can’t stand seeing this type of thing.” Another girl felt that a similar situation was possible here, as she had witnessed adults demand that Black and white teens separate at social functions.
Leonard Johnston didn’t stay silent. A long-time community activist and active member of the Toronto CPR Section of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, he asked the group to protest WGR’s actions. Local Brotherhood president Stanley Grizzle said that the matter would be taken up with union leadership and that he also intended to bring it up at the city’s labour committee for human rights. Grizzle, who was busy running in a provincial election campaign as the CCF candidate for York East (making him the first Black candidate to seek a seat at Queen’s Park), observed that “we often wondered why we failed to see integrated dancing on the program. Many times my two teenage daughters discussed this. Now we know why.”
Agenda segment, February 15, 2019: Stanley Grizzle — Civil Rights Pioneer
Also supporting the Johnstons was Beaches MPP William Collings, who indicated he would talk to the labour ministry about investigating the incident. As the provincial liquor commissioner, Collings also vowed to speak to alcohol manufacturers that advertised on WGR.
The Johnston family received many supportive phone calls from friends and neighbours. “Everybody is on our side,” Leonard told the Globe and Mail. “The parents of the children Clayton was with say they are sorry the incident happened and many plan to write letters to the station.” Malvern students sent a petition to WGR. As letters flooded the station, DeVries hinted he might write an apology letter to Clayton once he had a fuller picture of what had happened, beyond what Fagan had told him. He felt the incident was unfortunate and hoped Clayton hadn’t been hurt.
Buffalo’s two major daily newspapers all but ignored the incident. The Evening News buried a tiny Associated Press wire report deep in the paper on May 25, while the Courier-Express ran an equally microscopic account the following day. They also refused to print a letter criticizing the incident from Reverend James Hemphill, the president of Buffalo’s branch of the NAACP; it was also ignored by Buffalo mayor Frank Sedita.
The city’s Black weekly, the Buffalo Criterion, agreed to publish it. “This is a slap in the face for democracy, not only in the city of Buffalo but for the whole nation because this is an incident involving two countries,” Hemphill wrote. “If this is the practice of the city of Buffalo, then the Negro people in Buffalo are no better off than those Negroes who live in the deep South. This incident has caused a groundswell of unrest among freedom loving people in Buffalo and unless this sort of practice is irradicated, race relations in Buffalo will not and cannot be improved.”
Over the next week, Toronto’s newspapers were filled with editorials and wire stories about segregation south of the border: Alabama state senator E.O. Eddins had called for the children’s book The Rabbits’ Wedding to be banned because it depicted the nuptials of black and white bunnies. (“If we are not careful,” Sally Furlong wrote in a letter to the Telegram, “a black and white kitten will soon find difficulty in finding a home because of its doubtful ancestry!”) On a hopeful note, three segregationist school-board members supported by Governor Orval Faubus had been ejected during a recall election in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Cartoon that appeared the week of the Dance Party incident poking fun at Arkansas governor Orval Faubus after three segregationists he supported were defeated in a school-board recall election in Little Rock. (The Telegram, May 28, 1959)
On June 1, the Johnstons received an apology from DeVries. "In connection with the incident of last Saturday on WGR-TV I have been informed of, and have read, certain statements made by one of our employees that are not in keeping with this station’s policy. I personally regret the hasty action on the part of this individual and want you to know that the action he took was on his own initiative and did not reflect the policy of management. We indeed regret this matter and you have our apology for any embarrassment caused by this treatment."
Leonard accepted the apology on behalf of his son and “all Canadians who believe in democracy.” While New York governor/future American vice-president Nelson Rockefeller ordered further investigation, Leonard rejected suggestions he sue WGR. “As far as an international situation is concerned,” he said, “I don’t want my son in the middle of it.”
Clayton Johnston became a professional drummer — his career highlights included performing in the legendary Toronto run of Godspell during the early 1970s and numerous jazz gigs around the city. In 1968, his parents opened Third World Books and Crafts, which served as an intellectual centre for Toronto’s Black community for more than three decades. Fagan continued to work at WGR (now WGRZ), serving for a time as late-night news anchor, until 1968, then moved to New York City and worked in the news divisions of ABC and NBC.
The Criterion ended its June 6, 1959, editorial with this condemnation of the incident: “This … smacks of the deepest dye of stratum of race bias found in the deepest sections of the South. Whether Mr. Fagan acted on orders or on his own initiative remains to be proved; but this one thing is certain: Pat Fagan moved Buffalo to Atlanta, Georgia — an open defiance of democratic New York, not incorrectly called the most liberal race-relations state in the Union, excepting, however, Mr. Fagan and his monitorship of WGR-TV programs. If the Fagan incident had happened in a Communist satellite country the incident would have been smeared all over the front pages of U.S. papers. But it happened right here in Buffalo; and, of course, the less we say, the papers reason, the better for U.S. democracy. “
Sources: Race, Riots, and Roller Coasters by Victoria W. Wolcott (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); the June 6, 1959, edition of the Buffalo Criterion; the May 25, 1959, May 26, 1959, and June 2, 1959, editions of the Globe and Mail; the May 25, 1959, May 28, 1959, June 2, 1959 and June 4, 1959, editions of the Toronto Daily Star; the February 14, 2021, edition of the Toronto Star, and the May 25, 1959, May 26, 1959, and June 2, 1959, editions of the Telegram.
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