On Christmas Eve in 1970, a network sitcom placed two little girls inside a race story. In “Sisters at Heart,” Lisa Wilson, a Black girl, visits her white friend Tabitha Stephens, and Tabitha’s magic goes wrong after the children encounter bigotry, leaving both girls appearing racially mixed.[1]
The Bewitched episode “Sisters at Heart” aired on ABC on December 24, 1970, and its story was written by 26 African-American tenth graders from Jefferson High School in Los Angeles. Elizabeth Montgomery later called it her favorite episode of the series.
Darrin Stephens, played by Dick Sargent, is trying to win a million-dollar advertising account from a toy company owner named Mr. Brockway, played by Parley Baer.[1] The account collapses because Brockway is racist and wrongly believes Darrin is married to Dorothy Wilson, Lisa’s mother.[1]
Samantha Stephens, played by Elizabeth Montgomery, answers Brockway’s prejudice with the instrument the show had given her for years. She casts a spell so that he sees everyone, including himself, as having Black skin.[1] For a series built on nose twitches, household misunderstandings, and domestic reversals, the device was blunt. The fantasy stayed close to ordinary rooms: the Stephens home, Darrin’s workplace, a business deal poisoned by a man’s assumptions.
The Class Behind the Story
The most striking credit was not a famous television writer’s name. The story was credited to 26 African-American students from a tenth grade English class at Jefferson High School in Los Angeles.[1] Montgomery and her husband William Asher, who directed the episode, had the students visit the Bewitched set before the class became part of the episode’s creation.[1]
Jefferson High School was not described in soft Hollywood terms. Most students there were unable to read, write, or comprehend at a high school level, with 44 percent reading at a third grade level and very few reading much higher than that.[1] Sargent later said the students “loved Bewitched,” and that with “just a little approval and motivation” they “came alive on the set.”[1]
That makes the credit more than a novelty. The students were part of a school population often measured by what it lacked, reading levels, writing levels, comprehension levels. In this case, a prime-time sitcom put their class in the story credit. The episode did not simply use children as symbols of innocence. It let students help shape the situation that adults on screen had to face.
Montgomery’s Favorite Episode
ABC aired “Sisters at Heart” as the thirteenth episode of Bewitched’s seventh season and the 213th episode overall.[1] It ran as a Christmas episode on December 24, 1970, then aired again the following December.[1] The holiday slot gave the half hour an obvious moral frame, but Montgomery’s own description was more personal.
Montgomery called “Sisters at Heart” her favorite episode of Bewitched.[1] She said it “was created in the true spirit of Christmas,” and described it as “conceived in the image of innocence and filled with truth.”[1] For the star of a long-running fantasy sitcom, the remembered favorite was not simply the strangest spell or the flashiest magical mishap. It was the episode in which a classroom of tenth graders placed racism inside the machinery of a family comedy.
The pieces still feel oddly small for the subject: a toy-company account, a father’s job, a witch’s spell, two children trying to be friends. But that is where the episode puts its pressure. In a show famous for a twitch of the nose, the lasting image is Lisa and Tabitha side by side, written there by students who had been invited onto the set and handed the story.
