Racism and the Dawn of ‘Sesame Street’
By Anne Harrington
How an African-American psychiatrist used an early TV show as a radical therapeutic tool to help minority preschoolers.
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Dr. Chester Pierce, the head of a black psychiatrists group in the 1960s, saw how children were growing up glued to TV screens, and helped design a new kind of show to help minority preschoolers counteract the racist messages prevalent in the media of his time. It was called “Sesame Street.” (Visual: )
