You’re probably aware of the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 decision Brown v. Board of Education ruled that racial segregation in US public schools was unconstitutional. You may also know that the decision ordered states to desegregate “with deliberate speed.”
Less talked about is the 1969 decision in Alexander v. Board of Education. Holmes County, which, after years of blocking by many states through the 1950s and 60s, mandated that racially segregated schools must be immediately desegregated. In other words: You know what we said in 1954? We really meant it.
Some of the impact and subsequent events are captured in two companion documentaries from PBS’s “American Experience” series. “The Busing Battleground,” directed by Sharon Grimberg and Cyndee Readdean, explores the long build-up and catastrophic consequences of busing in Boston, where students are transported to schools outside their neighborhoods. in an effort to desegregate the public school system. Busing saw the city erupt in violence and exposed the ferocity with which residents were prepared to defend ethnic neighborhood boundaries. It will release on September 11.
“The Harvest,” produced by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Douglas A. Blackmon and Oscar-nominated filmmaker Sam Pollard, takes Blackmon back to the small Mississippi town where he grew up, if where he was part of the first local class of integrated students in matriculation from first grade to high school. It will be released on September 12.
The films came at a time when many of the hard-earned gains of desegregation were being reversed and when some schools, according to a report released in May by the United States Department of Education, are more isolated than they were before the courts intervened. Both highlight what has changed — and what hasn’t — in the nearly 70 years since Brown while also questioning sound assumptions.
“These two stories speak to each other,” said Cameo George, the executive producer of “American Experience.” “In some ways, they’re almost unintentional, because we’re all used to thinking that integration in the South is violent, and that communities in the North are more open and progressive. Through the integration of the films, it’s challenged it just tests your assumptions in a really interesting way.”
Both films also wrestle with an inevitable question: Why was the process so difficult?
Today, when segregation is rampant in even some of the most ostensibly liberal enclaves in the country, the reasons are not always clear or openly acknowledged. In the decades following Brown, they were often quite outspoken. Many white parents, in the supposedly enlightened North as well as 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 do it.
When many people think of segregated facilities — schools, water fountains, restrooms — they think of the Jim Crow South. But “The Busing Battleground” shows how determined many white citizens are to keep Boston’s schools segregated, especially in the predominantly Irish enclaves of South Boston and Charlestown.
These are self-enclosed neighborhoods that are not cotton to change, or to Black people. “The Busing Battleground” shows how Black Bostonians, led by the tireless Ruth Batson, tried to integrate the city’s schools through the ballot box, direct action and the courts. White people in power, led by Louise Day Hicks, then head of the Boston School Committee, stonewalled and undermined public support for the status quo.
“All the liberal, white, ‘Oh, that stuff happens in the South, we’re so progressive’ stuff was just thrown out the window,” Readdean said in a video this month. “Nothing has ever been progressive.”
Grimberg, in the same video call, added: “Our hope is that people see this as an important civil rights story in the North. We’ve heard many stories in the South, but this is a story of a very long, long struggle for educational rights for Black children in the North.”
By 1974, when Federal judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr. ordered the consolidation of Boston schools through busing, tensions have long been building. Images captured from the early days of busing, when Black students from Roxbury came to South Boston High School, remain disturbing in their violence. Many youths and their parents threw bricks, bottles and rocks at the buses — and hurled the N-word with abandon. As you watch, you have to keep reminding yourself that this is a Northern city in the 1970s.
One of the most powerful and memorable images of the era, a Pulitzer winning picture by Stanley Forman, taken during a Bicentennial protest by white high schoolers against busing, shows a Black attorney and civil rights activist, Ted Landsmark, being held by two white protesters as one moves to attack he used an American flag. Landsmark was interviewed in the film, describing how he feared for his life that day.
“The Harvest,” also features an image from Bicentennial commemorations, this one from the small town of Blackmon, Leland, Miss. The home movie shows a happy and peaceful parade downtown, with Black and white Cub Scouts marching in unison while a band, which includes a young Blackmon, marches along.
The integration of public schools in Leland was not always so beautiful, as the film makes clear. But compared to what’s happening in Boston, which one observer describes as “up South,” the Leland process is really a walk down the street.
Blackmon, who is white, was part of Leland’s class of 1982, the first integrated group of students to matriculate in the town’s public schools. (He spent his senior year in another town after his father got a new job.) He recalls an upbringing defined by interracial friendships at school that usually didn’t last after the final bell rang — when, for example, he wanted play GI Joe dolls with his Black friends, and it was discouraged by parents on both sides of the racial divide.
What he didn’t realize then was that the new private schools that emerged after the Supreme Court’s 1969 decision were largely organized by White Citizens’ Councils — essentially white-collar versions of the Ku Klux Klan — with secret covenants. to exclude Black teachers and students. . Beneath the quiet surface, Leland’s schools are once again segregated.
“There really was this blatant plan to create a whole new system of schools, and try to take, if possible, all the white kids out of the public schools and then actively undermine those schools,” Blackmon said. from a family lake house in South Carolina. “But Leland is unique because it avoids some of the incredibly rough things that happened in some other places in the South, and we certainly saw in Boston.”
Blackmon and his co-producer, Pollard, who is Black, previously collaborated on the 2012 documentary adaptation of Blackmon’s 2009 book “Slavery by Another Name,” an account of the Jim Crow-era convict leasing system, for which he won Pulitzer. It makes sense to have a racially mixed creative team for such a contentious story. The makers of “The Busing Battleground” also found this to be the case.
“It was important to have both of us on this project,” said Readdean, who is Black. “Sometimes, especially because the subject is too raw for people who have lived through it, some of the white people are probably closer to talking to Sharon than they are to me. We want interviews with realism. recall, not where they are trying to be PC
“I felt the same way when we were talking to the Black participants, that they could only reveal what they wanted to reveal in the conversation with me.”
Both films come to the same unfortunate if inevitable conclusion: Boston and Leland schools have largely resegregated since the ’70s, with many white families fleeing to private or parochial schools, or in the suburbs. But Blackmon found some silver linings in the lives of his Black former classmates, some of whom left and returned to fill key municipal positions.
One, Jessie King, is now the superintendent of the school district, at a time when Mississippi’s public schools are flourishing. Another, Billy Barber, is the police chief.
They are the better part of the crop that gives the film its title, residents who seize new opportunities and then give back to the community in which they were raised. They are a reminder that not all of the goals and objectives that came with integrating the schools in Leland have faded.
“On a very basic level, the lesson and the takeaway is that you reap what you sow,” says George, the executive producer. “If you want a better educated population, and you want kids to graduate with not just academic skills, but personal skills, so they can be productive members of the work force and productive members of society, you have to invest in that . It doesn’t just happen.”