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Centennial Moments

1969

Big Bird's Debut

Sesame Street debuted on PBS. Based on the results of a Carnegie Corporation-funded study she had conducted to determine whether television could be used to educate young children, Joan Ganz Cooney, then a producer of public affairs programs for National Educational Television, proposed a new kind of children's program and formed the Children's Television Workshop to produce it, with further Corporation support. Within two months, more than six million children were watching.

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1965: Head Start
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1969: Black Lawyers in the South