We don’t have to bop someone over the head to make drama

July 30, 2022 6:40 AM

After he learned that the Missouri chapter of the ku klux klan was impersonating him in order to spread racist messages to kids, Mr. Rogers took them on — and won.
posted by eotvos (27 comments total)

The messages varied, but they were all equally bigoted. In one message, the impersonator points out a Black child on the playground and then calls him a racial slur and “drug pusher.” The recording ended with the Klan lynching the child.

That's pretty mind boggling. The article says the number to the hotline was distributed to children. What I don't understand is how would that happen? How was such a number distributed, and why would people phone it?
posted by Zumbador at 7:16 AM on July 30, 2022 [3 favorites]

Animated cartoon about bopping people in white robes (content warning: head bops)
posted by brachiopod at 7:53 AM on July 30, 2022 [1 favorite]

and why would people phone it?

Lines that you could call up to hear entertaining or informative (eg. the weather) messages used to be a thing. It was a little before my time, but I did hear about the general idea growing up.
posted by eviemath at 9:12 AM on July 30, 2022 [16 favorites]

Note that while Fred Rogers was an awesome person, he was by no means perfect. Even while making progressive gestures on race with Francois Clemmons, Rogers was advising him behind the scenes to hide his homosexuality, even to go so far as marrying a woman. He softened later on, to a degree. We all have our blind spots, we all can grow. None of us are flawless saints, but Fred Rogers and Francois Clemmons played a really positive role in my life growing up. It was always a treat when they would put on one of their "operas."
posted by rikschell at 9:26 AM on July 30, 2022 [11 favorites]

What I don't understand is how would that happen? How was such a number distributed, and why would people phone it?

Back in the '80s and early '90s there was a craze for 1-900 numbers, many of them targeted (properly or improperly) at kids. I remember seeing TV ads (usually on local independent stations or basic cable) for phone lines where you could hear recorded messages from Freddy Krueger or the Super Mario Brothers when I was a kid, with some kind of usurious pay-per-minute fee that was obscured in fine print at the bottom of the screen. They were mainly understood as massive scams, but there were also tons of latchkey kids whose parents weren't paying terribly close attention to the phone bills, so...

It's also not too hard to imagine these numbers being distributed on the playground by the children of Klan members, given how readily other kinds of illicit memes (mean nicknames, dirty rhymes and song parodies) get passed around by grade school kids. I imagine the come-on was "hey, wanna hear Mister Rogers say some effed-up stuff?"
posted by Strange Interlude at 9:27 AM on July 30, 2022 [14 favorites]

Whenever we learn something new about Fred Rogers, it’s always “yes, he’s saint but… he’s also a saint in this new way you didn’t know about.”

Every single time.
posted by mhoye at 1:02 PM on July 30, 2022 [16 favorites]

900 numbers would have been largely inaccessible to children, so most likely these were 800 numbers, which were free to dial (even from a payphone).

The early 90s had an explosion in digital PBX systems, so that it was possible to get voice mailboxes set up on the cheap. There was a pretty lively community of kids abusing existing systems that had poor defaults (often a known admin account password, or a pattern of new VMBs having the password the same as the inbox number). They tended to be hosted from 800 numbers so that people could dial into a corporate voicemail system from the road and catch up on messages and forward on the ones they can't get to until they're back in the office.

So yeah, I can see this being a useful propaganda tool in around that era: pass out an 800 number to kids promising a titillating message, and let them share it with one another in a shocked "OMFG you won't believe this weird thing" kind of way.

Also by the 90s Mr. Rogers was a cultural icon. He had kind of already won, in terms of his face and voice being synonymous with wholesome family entertainment. People may not have been watching his newer episodes, but remembered the man they saw on TV in the 70s and 80s. Mockery in that era tended to impersonate him with a rough Jimmy Stewart impression, and the material often wouldn't make it past "He speaks slowly, and directly to the children in the audience."
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 2:40 PM on July 30, 2022 [4 favorites]

900 numbers would have been largely inaccessible to children, so most likely these were 800 numbers, which were free to dial (even from a payphone).

Inaccessible in what sense? 900 numbers were positively huge for a good chunk of the late 80’s/early 90’s, with nothing to block access to children aside from the ubiquitous “be sure to get your parents permission!”.
posted by a box and a stick and a string and a bear at 3:33 PM on July 30, 2022 [14 favorites]

There were local numbers around the country that played right wing messages going back to at least the 1960s. Critics called them "dial-a-hate" lines.

A lot of them were part of a network called Let Freedom Ring, and used scripts distributed by an ultraconservative Florida doctor who once called on Joan Baez to be hanged for treason, but there were independent ones as well.
posted by smelendez at 5:49 PM on July 30, 2022 [6 favorites]

900 numbers would have been largely inaccessible to children, so most likely these were 800 numbers, which were free to dial (even from a payphone).

This is incorrect, but for future reference “would have been” rather than “were” is the tell.
posted by mhoye at 5:52 PM on July 30, 2022 [2 favorites]

Mr. Rogers was born in Latrobe, Pennsylvania,* whence the "the glass lined-tanks of Old Latrobe" where Rolling Rock was brewed.

* Also, the banana split was invented there in 1904.
posted by kirkaracha at 6:58 PM on July 30, 2022 [1 favorite]

Even while making progressive gestures on race with Francois Clemmons, Rogers was advising him behind the scenes to hide his homosexuality, even to go so far as marrying a woman.

I'm a straight white dude who strives to be an ally. This seems like at least well-meaning , if not prudent,* advice to a closeted Black man and actor in the mid-'60s. Mr. Rogers and Mr. Clemmons put their feet in the same small, plastic wading pool in 1969, at a time when racist whites literally thought black could wash off and infect them if they shared the same swimming pool as black people.

* Not loving the get-married-to-a-woman part, but it's a classical part of the closet.
posted by kirkaracha at 7:11 PM on July 30, 2022 [7 favorites]

I'm old enough to remember Dial-a-Joke. David Letterman used to do parodies of it.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 7:19 PM on July 30, 2022

I'm a straight white dude who strives to be an ally. This seems like at least well-meaning , if not prudent,* advice to a closeted Black man and actor in the mid-'60s.

I'm curious why you feel your anti-credentials qualify you here.
posted by dusty potato at 10:52 PM on July 30, 2022

Sorry, to be a little clearer: what about the demographic information that you shared one sentence earlier makes you feel like you are well-positioned to evaluate the described behavior? And in what way do you imagine a straight white person's "advice" about racism and homophobia would be informative and useful to a gay Black person?
posted by dusty potato at 11:23 PM on July 30, 2022

<derail>As someone with similar anticredentials, if I put something like that at the beginning of a message, it's there as a disclaimer, a kind of "take with an appropriate grain of salt" sort-of warning.

So I don't think kirkaracha was meaning to say that Rogers's advice was appropriate or adequate.

The word used was well-meaning. I think for people like me (and I might be a person like kirkaracha in some ways), Rogers was a kind of ideal, a representation of a sort of white liberal masculinity that presented a wildly different set of values to what you would find elsewhere on TV. In that sense he was and remains a role model. All accounts we have suggest that what Rogers taught on the show matched the way he carried himself in real life. This is why recordings of him saying racist garbage would be shocking even today.

So what? It doesn't really matter --- we all have to try to ally as best we can. But: I'm sure that I'm not the man he was! Even though my feelings aren't what's important (and let me repeat this for emphasis: my feelings aren't important), I still have them, and sometimes they whisper: if despite it all Mister F**king Rogers of all people gets perpetual side-eye for well-intended very shitty (and let me repeat this for emphasis: very shitty) advice aimed earnestly towards prolonging the well-being of a close colleague he cared about a great deal, well then...
posted by Chef Flamboyardee at 1:51 AM on July 31, 2022 [9 favorites]

A bit of simple googling could tell you exactly how Clemmons himself claims to have experienced and interpreted the advice and how he feels people should interpret it now (in context).

Viewers who have seen director Morgan Neville’s heartening new documentary, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, know that much. In the film, now playing in major markets and expanding into more theaters in July, Clemmons speaks lovingly about Rogers, alongside the late performer’s closest family members and co-workers. But Clemmons also acknowledges the sacrifices he had to make for the show, a point Clemmons says has been scrutinized without proper historical context from media outlets since the movie’s release.

posted by srboisvert at 2:05 AM on July 31, 2022 [9 favorites]

I grew up in a "don't you dare touch that phone line, or we'll get a bill that will bankrupt us all" kind of household, so perhaps my perception of 900 numbers is based mostly on that.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 5:00 AM on July 31, 2022 [5 favorites]

900 numbers didn’t require the caller to provide any credit card number. The call was billed directly to your phone bill (this was still the age of landlines and Ma Bell) It would be very easy for a kid to rack-up a ridiculous charge calling a 900 number.
posted by Thorzdad at 6:34 AM on July 31, 2022

In the 80s my parents let a friend stay in the house and the friend wracked up $3000 calling 900-number psychic hotlines...
posted by subdee at 6:38 AM on July 31, 2022 [2 favorites]

Fred Rogers was a Saint, in the most mythological terms possible.
posted by hairless ape at 7:34 AM on July 31, 2022

This is a great FPP. After reading TFA, I wonder if Mr. Rogers truly had a "badass Navy Seal career." I was too lazy to click the link and find out.
posted by Bella Donna at 12:54 PM on July 31, 2022

This is a great FPP. After reading TFA, I wonder if Mr. Rogers truly had a "badass Navy Seal career." I was too lazy to click the link and find out.

I clicked. No military career (though he did sign up for the draft in the late 1940s). At some point, however, they classified him as a "4F", so, unfit for military duties.
posted by annieb at 5:58 PM on July 31, 2022

My comment was not meant to "side-eye" Mr. Rogers or to try to milkshake duck him. Only to point out that he was human, like the rest of us, and made mistakes. I think that's a good thing, because it means we can all aspire to the level of behavior he set. He wasn't some superhuman savior. He was just a guy who really tried to be good. If we all tried to do that and took it as seriously as he did, we'd for sure live in a better (but still not perfect) world.
posted by rikschell at 9:07 AM on August 1, 2022 [2 favorites]

This is from a little later (according to the copyright), but I thought blocking calls to 900 numbers was relatively easy.
posted by a non mouse, a cow herd at 10:33 AM on August 1, 2022

It didn’t have to be a 900 number. I remember growing up that there was a local number that told the time every 10 seconds. “At the beep, the time is 8:04pm and ten seconds. Beep”
posted by Monday at 2:20 PM on August 1, 2022

As someone with similar anticredentials, if I put something like that at the beginning of a message, it's there as a disclaimer, a kind of "take with an appropriate grain of salt" sort-of warning.

Thanks, Chef Flamboyardee, that's what I was trying to do.
posted by kirkaracha at 2:59 PM on August 1, 2022