Fifty Years of Civic Engagement: How Sesame Street Mobilized Broadcasting and Children’s Culture for Social Change

Sesame Street’s founders understood that television could be a powerful tool. They proposed using broadcasting as a financially efficient distribution mechanism and audiovisual media as a means of conveying information. Inspired by 1960s efforts at antipoverty and racial equality, they envisioned Sesame Street as a freely accessible preschool to offer more families early education, itself a tool for tolerance and uplift. They also understood that television’s transformative potential could not be reached by focusing on content alone. Because television’s texts permeated and profoundly shaped family and community interactions, guiding audience use of television could enhance its social impact. Throughout the 1970s, they tapped into the localized neighborhood improvement efforts that replaced the national movement culture of the 1960s, using media as a tool of grassroots community activism by providing training and materials for volunteer caregivers to incorporate the show’s lessons into children’s daily activities.

Cultural and artistic aspects of Sesame Street, its creators soon learned, proved even more powerful tools. Sesame Street’s immense popularity came from its iconic music, imagery, celebrity performances, and lovable characters, through which the program curated a canon of 20^th-century American arts and entertainment traditions and brought viewers together through a common experience of American culture. This nationwide viewing community enabled new service initiatives ranging from encouraging vaccination to transforming the carceral space of penitentiary waiting rooms into places of mutual learning for inmates and children of incarcerated parents. As cultural communities and entertainment audiences fragmented in the 1980s forward, broadcasting lost its utility as a social tool, but the power of Sesame Street’s creative elements to address social issues from autism to homelessness endured.

This paper stems from my decade of conducting archival research and interviews for a book on Sesame Street’s history, and it demonstrates the need to preserve and analyze audiovisual sources historically.