The desegregation of American schools took well over a decade – and then it was nearly instantaneous. “The Harvest: Integrating Mississippi’s Schools” is a new documentary for the PBS series “American Experience.”
The film intimately traces the story of one small town’s virtually overnight integration of schools after the 1969 Supreme Court’s final order to comply with Brown v. the Board of Education “immediately.”
The documentary was written and co-produced by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and GSU Professor of Practice, Douglas P. Blackmon. He was a student in the first fully integrated class in Leland, Mississippi.
In this interview, Professor Blackmon joined “City Lights” host Lois Reitzes to discuss the close-to-home history of his new documentary.
“The definition of successful school integration became simply whether a court order had finally been fulfilled and there was no one injured or killed in the process of it,” Blackmon said.
