Official Site: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/harvest/
After the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education found that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, little more than token efforts were made to desegregate schools in the South. That changed dramatically on October 29, 1969, when the high court ordered Mississippi schools to fully — and immediately — desegregate. As a result, a group of children, including six-year-old Doug Blackmon, entered school in the fall of 1970 as part of the first class of Black and white students to attend all 12 grades together in rural Leland, Mississippi. Set against vast historic and demographic changes unfolding across America, THE HARVEST: INTEGRATING MISSISSIPPI’S SCHOOLS steps back in time to explore Mississippi’s brutal history of racial intolerance and segregation — a world in which schools for Black children were not only separate but deeply underfunded, often inaccessible, and sometimes nonexistent.
THE HARVEST: INTEGRATING MISSISSIPPI’S SCHOOLS premieres Tuesday, September 12th at 9/8c on PBS stations nationwide and streaming on YouTube, PBS.org and the PBS App.
