Film screening: The Harvest with historian Douglas A. Blackmon

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Join us for a film screening of the PBS documentary, The Harvest: Integrating Mississippi’s Schools, and a conversation with the film’s director, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Douglas Avery Blackmon.

Blackmon will discuss his experiences as part of Leland, Mississippi’s first integrated public school class in 1970. The film is a deeply personal depiction of one Southern town’s painful struggle to integrate its public schools and the continuing repercussions still felt today.

The Harvest follows a coalition of Black and white citizens who worked to create racially integrated public schools in the most unlikely place: a 1960s cotton town in the middle of the Mississippi Delta, the most rigidly segregated area in America. It tells the story of how that first class became possible, then traces the lives of Blackmon and his classmates, teachers and parents through high school graduation in 1982.

Narrated by Blackmon and featuring candid interviews with his fellow pupils and others, the film follows the experiences of Blackmon’s class through school integration, deep friendships and awkward separations, in classrooms and on playgrounds, in plays and athletics, at homecoming and graduation. The film reveals that while many interracial friendships were formed in school, racial divisions often still existed outside the classroom.

Free and open to the public. This program is in partnership with NC Humanities and the UNC Greensboro Department of History.