You probably know that the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education, ruled that racial segregation in American public schools was unconstitutional. You may also know that the decree ordered states to desegregate “with all considered speed.”
Less discussed is the 1969 decision in Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education which, after years of opposition by many states in the 1950s and 1960s, ordered that racially segregated schools be immediately desegregated. In other words, you know what we said in 1954? We actually meant it.
Some of the fallout and subsequent events are captured in two complementary documentaries from the PBS series “American Experience.” Directed by Sharon Grimberg and Cyndee Readdean, “The Busing Battleground” explores the long lead-up to and catastrophic consequences of Boston’s busing, which saw students bussed to schools outside their neighborhoods in an effort to desegregate the public school system. Busing saw the city explode in violence, exposing the ferocity with which residents were willing to defend the neighborhood’s ethnic boundaries. It will premiere on September 11.
Produced by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Douglas A. Blackmon and Oscar-nominated filmmaker Sam Pollard, ‘The Harvest’ takes Blackmon back to the small Mississippi town where he grew up, where he was part of the first local class of integrated students to enroll from first grade to high school. It will premiere on September 12.
The films come at a time when many of the hard-won results of desegregation have been reversed and some schools, according to a report released in May by the US Department of Education, are more segregated than before the court intervened. Both underscore what has changed—and what hasn’t—in the nearly seventy years since Brown, while also questioning neat assumptions.
“These two stories are in conversation,” said Cameo George, the executive producer of “American Experience.” “In some ways they are almost counterintuitive, because we are all used to thinking that integration in the South was violent, and that communities in the North were much more open and progressive. Putting the films together puts your assumptions to the test in a really interesting way.”
Both films also wrestle with an inevitable question: why was the process so difficult?
Today, with segregation rife even in some of the country’s most ostensibly liberal enclaves, the reasons are not always clearly or openly acknowledged. In the decades after Brown, they were often quite open. Many white parents, both in the supposedly enlightened North and in the historically segregated South, were willing to go to great lengths to keep their children away from their black peers. And many politicians were happy to help them with that.
When many people think of segregated facilities – schools, water fountains, toilets – they think of Jim Crow South. But “The Busing Battleground” shows how determined many white citizens were to keep Boston’s schools segregated, especially in the largely Irish enclaves of South Boston and Charlestown.
These were self-contained neighborhoods that were not willing to change, nor for black people. “The Busing Battleground” shows how Black Bostonians, led by the tireless Ruth Batson, attempted to integrate the city’s schools through the ballot box, direct action, and the courts. The white people in power, led by Louise Day Hicks, then head of the Boston School Committee, held back and enlisted public support for the status quo.
“All the liberal, white ‘Oh, those things are happening in the South, we’re so progressive’ stuff just got thrown out the window,” Readdean said in a video this month. “No one was more progressive.”
Grimberg added during the same video call, “Our hope is that people see this as an important northern civil rights story. We’ve heard a lot of Southern stories, but this is the story of a very long, drawn-out fight for education rights for black children in the North.”
In 1974, when federal judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr. ordered the integration of Boston schools through buses, tension had long been building. Images from the early days of bus transportation, when black students came to South Boston High School from Roxbury, remain disorienting in their violence. Many teens and their parents threw rocks, bottles, and bricks at the buses — throwing the N-word with abandon. As you watch, keep reminding yourself that this is a Northern town in the 1970s.
One of the most powerful and memorable images of the period, a Pulitzer-winning photograph by Stanley Forman taken during a bicentennial protest of white high school students against bus traffic shows a black lawyer and civil rights activist, Ted Landsmark, being held by a couple of white protesters, while another tries to attack him with an American flag. Landsmark is interviewed in the film and describes how he feared for his life that day.
Also “The Harvest” features an image from the Bicentennial commemorations, this one from Blackmon’s small hometown of Leland, Miss. The home video shows a festive and peaceful parade through downtown, with black and white Cub Scouts performing together as a band, including a young Blackmon, marches along.
The integration of Leland’s public schools was not always so idyllic, as the film makes clear. But compared to what happened in Boston, described by one observer as “down south,” the Leland trial was indeed a walk away.
Blackmon, who is white, was part of Leland’s 1982 class, the first integrated group of students to enroll through the city’s public schools. (He did his senior year in a different city after his father got a new job.) He recalled an upbringing marked by interracial friendships at school, which generally didn’t last after the last bell rang—for example, when he wanted to play. GI Joe dolled up with his black friends, and parents on both sides of the racial divide discouraged this.
What he didn’t realize then was that the new private schools that sprung up after the 1969 Supreme Court ruling were largely organized by White Citizens’ Councils—essentially white-collar versions of the Ku Klux Klan—with secret agreements to expel black teachers and students. to close. . Beneath the calm surface, Leland’s schools were segregating.
“There really was an overt plan to create a whole new school system and try to get all white kids out of public schools if possible and then actively undermine those schools,” Blackmon said from a lakeside family home in South Africa. carolina. “But Leland was different because it avoided some of that incredibly rough stuff that happened in some other places in the South, which we definitely saw in Boston.”
Blackmon and his black co-producer Pollard previously collaborated on the 2012 documentary adaptation of Blackmon’s 2009 book “Slavery by Another Name,” an account of the Jim Crow-era convict rental system, for which he won a Pulitzer. . It made sense to have a racially integrated creative team for such a controversial story. The makers of ‘The Busing Battleground’ thought so too.
“Having the two of us on this project was valuable,” said Readdean, who is Black. “At times, especially because the subject is so raw for the people who lived through it, some white people may have been more willing to talk to Sharon than to me. We wanted interviews with truthful memories, not something where they all try to be PC
“I had the same feeling when we were talking to the black participants that they could just reveal what they wanted to reveal by talking to me.”
Both films come to the same unfortunate but inevitable conclusion: Boston and Leland schools have largely re-segregated since the 1970s, with many white families fleeing to private or parochial schools or to the suburbs. But Blackmon found some positives in the lives of his black former classmates, some of whom left and returned to fill important municipal positions.
One, Jessie King, is now superintendent of the school district, at a time when Mississippi public schools are booming. Another, Billy Barber, is chief of police.
They make up the bulk of the crop that gives the film its title: residents who have seized new opportunities and then given back to the communities where they grew up. They remind us that not all of the purpose and intent that accompanied the integration of Leland schools has faded.
“At a very fundamental level, the lesson and conclusion is that you reap what you sow,” said George, the executive producer. “If you want a better educated population, and you want children to graduate not only with academic skills, but also with personal skills so that they can become productive members of the workforce and productive members of society, you have to invest in that. It doesn’t just happen.”