EVICTED FROM “SESAME STREET?” A NEW, FREE ONLINE NOVEL ON MEDIUM TELLS THE HIDDEN STORY OF AMERICA’S FIRST BLACK MUPPET IN HIS OWN WORDS.
February 1, 2024
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Todd Steven Burroughs (toddpanther@gmail.com/ Twitter: @ToddStevenBurr1)
A NEW, FREE ONLINE NOVEL ON MEDIUM.COM TELLS THE HIDDEN STORY OF AMERICA’S FIRST BLACK MUPPET IN HIS OWN WORDS.
Roosevelt Franklin, one of the first breakout stars of “Sesame Street,” has been called “The Black Elmo” but he’s really a Black Power pioneer. It’s why author Todd Steven Burroughs decided to take the plunge and further fictionalize the life of a network TV puppet.
“The more I read about Roosevelt the more I was shocked to realize that a Muppet actually went through the Black Power experience,” said Burroughs, who, at 56 (born in 1968), was part of the first generation of American toddlers to watch the then-brand-new “Sesame Street” on PBS. So it was clear to him that Roosevelt’s “life” had to be explored in-depth.
“I originally was going to write a journalistic article, but that had been done to death already,” said Burroughs, a freelance writer and public historian. “I was going to make it a little different by doing one of those long magazine pieces that would have allowed Roosevelt his first-person segment — a mini-platform to tell his own story. That idea expanded into this attempt at fan fiction.”
Roosevelt Franklin was created by Matt Robinson, “Sesame Street”’s first “Gordon” (pictured, along with Loretta Long, still the show’s “Susan” in 2024). Decades before “Elmo’s World,” he was the first character to get his own segment named after him — “Roosevelt Franklin Elementary School,” a series of skits that had Franklin as a young teacher at a vibrant, noisy, inner-city school.
Roosevelt was a pioneer in another way: he was the first “Sesame Street” character to get an album. It was released in 1971 and re-released in 1974.
A mainstay from 1970, the year after “Sesame Street” began, to 1975, he was even one of the show’s first toys.
So what happened?
“Roosevelt — a character who was unapologetically working-class and from the Black ghetto, and regularly shown in that milieu — was a victim, ultimately, of newly-desegregated Black middle-class respectability politics,” said Burroughs. “Once I saw his arc and how it intersected, and even mirrored, the Black Power Movement and the problems and paradoxes of racial integration and cultural nationalism, I knew I had to tell the story I began to see in my own mind — that this was a missing, and possibly last, Black-Power-era autobiography about a youngblood who, pun intended, wasn’t going to be The Man’s puppet.”
Published in full and for free on Medium.com, “At The Dark End of Sesame Street” fills in significant gaps in Roosevelt’s self-discovery story, giving him friends and mentors — some of whom were very well-known in New York’s Black communities in the early 1970s and are legends today — and, by doing that, tells fun and interesting tales about television, music, and finding a sense of purpose. Along the way, it exposes the internal tensions that are inevitable when a young Black man tries to balance the demands of white liberalism and Black radicalism during the Black Power era.
“The weirdest part for me was writing a story that mentioned both pioneering New York congresspeople Shirley Chisolm and Adam Clayton Powell alongside Big Bird and Oscar The Grouch,” said Burroughs, a lifetime student of New York’s Black public-affairs television programming and Black radio history. “But TV has always created strange bedfellows, and ‘At The Dark End of Sesame Street’ is no different.”
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KEYWORDS:
Black Power Movement, “My Name Is Roosevelt Franklin” album, “Soul Train,” “Soul!”, “The Electric Company”, “The Year of Roosevelt Franklin” album, 1190 WLIB-AM, 1600 WWRL-AM, 1971 albums, 1974 albums, Black fiction, Black fictional biography, Black fictional memoir, Black historical fiction, Black memoir, Black music, Black Panther Party, Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, Black parody, Black Power, Black Power autobiography, Black Power fiction, Black Power history, Black Power memoir, Black public affairs television, Black satire, Black television programming, WCBS-TV’s “Black Heritage”, children’s programming, children’s television programming, Children’s Television Workshop, Easy Reader, Ellis Haizlip, Fan Fiction, fiction about television, fictional autobiography, fictional biography, fictional memoir, Gary Byrd, Gil Noble, Gordon on “Sesame Street”, Harlem, HBO, historical fiction, Jim Henson, Joan Ganz Cooney, Lewis H. Michaux, Loretta Long, Luther Vandross, Matt Robinson, Melba Tolliver, Morgan Freeman, PBS, public broadcasting, Public Broadcasting Service, Roosevelt Franklin, Sesame Street, Sesame Workshop, Soul music, Susan on “Sesame Street”, The House of Common Sense and Proper Propaganda, The Muppets, WNET, WNET’s “Black Journal” WNET’s “Soul!” WNEW-TV’s “Inside Bedford-Stuyvesant”
DISCLAIMER: A PEOPLE’S NOVEL: At The Dark End of Sesame Street: The Autobiography of Roosevelt Franklin (OR Coup Tube: The Prose Ballad of Roosevelt Franklin) is a nonprofit work of fanfiction written and posted for free online consumption, and hopefully enjoyment, under Fair Use. Roosevelt Franklin is a fantasy puppet character created by a real Black man, Matt Robinson, for use as a Muppet by the Children’s Television Workshop (CTW), now known as the Sesame Workshop. Sesame Street is a creation of the Children’s Television Workshop for the Public Broadcasting Service and HBO and is trademarked by Sesame Workshop. The Muppets were created by Jim Henson and the CTW. All Muppet characters featured on Sesame Street are trademarked and copyrighted by the Sesame Workshop. All images, names and likenesses of Sesame Street characters, puppets and PBS actors and performers used in this promotional material and in the novel are done under Fair Use. No copyright nor trademark infringement is intended.