On May 17, 1954, the United States Supreme Court ruled segregation in schools to be unconstitutional with Brown v. Board of Education. But for many public schools in the south, it would be many years before integration truly occurred.
The case that moved integration further along than Brown was the 1969 case Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education, which caused the Supreme Court to rule that schools must desegregate “immediately” instead of its previous turn of phrase, “with all deliberate speed.”
“The Harvest: Integrating Mississippi’s Schools,” a film from director Sam Pollard and Atlanta-based journalist and author Douglas A. Blackmon, explores the experiences of the first class of Black and white children to attend all 12 grades together in Leland, Miss. – a class that for a time, included Blackmon.
In the fall of 1970, Blackmon – who wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Slavery by Another Name” – began first grade. His family moved away from Leland during his highschool years. But decades after the fact, he began thinking about his classmates and wondering how much public education had changed in the intervening years. He found that even after all this time, in a way segregation still persists in public schools in America, despite the fact that he and his classmates were meant to be “the seeds of a great harvest of racial harmony.”
In the documentary, classmates talk about what they remember from that time about their classmates and the reactions of the adults around them. Students of different races remember playing together without a care, but also the growing pains. Leland Academy began as a way to circumvent integration. Two students remember how a Black boy’s parents would not let him attend the cast part for the school play at a white girl’s house. Blackmon even interviews his own parents about what they remember and how they reacted to the prospect of integration at the time.
Rough Draft Atlanta spoke with Blackmon ahead of the Sept. 7 Atlanta premiere of the film at the Rialto Center for the Arts. The film will premiere on PBS on Sept. 12 at 9 p.m.
“This is a film that is a micro story of this one place, but the idea is that this was something that was experienced by really millions of children in a really short period of time in many, many places – including all over Georgia,” Blackmon said.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
When did you decide you wanted to make this movie and what was that process like?
Douglas A. Blackmon: There are kind of two answers to that. I wrote a story, actually, in the Atlanta [Journal] Constitution when I was a reporter there in 1992. It had been 10 years since the class graduated – of course, I left during high school, so it had been even longer since I was really plugged in. But now these 10 years have gone by, I kind of lost touch with a lot of those classmates, because my family had moved to a town in Arkansas.
I was driving from Atlanta over to the town where my family lived … as I passed through Leland, [Miss.], I noticed that the Leland Academy building was no longer a school. It had closed, apparently. My first thought then was that the natural sequence of events had occurred, that people had started going back to the public schools, and that unfortunate thing had withered. And when I got back to Atlanta, I suggested to an editor that maybe it would be interesting for me to write a perspective piece for what used to be an opinion section of the AJC in those days. I wanted to write a perspective essay about that 10th anniversary. So, I did. I went back and talked to my classmates then, but of course discovered that the opposite had happened – that instead of the public schools getting stronger, they were growing weaker.
I wrote that essay, [and] another version of that appeared in Harper’s Magazine in September of 1992. That attracted a lot of readers and attention. Then I decided to try to write a book – a memoir sort of, about all that. I started working on that and wrote a pretty substantial manuscript, but it was just too early. I was still a little too young, in some respects. I put that aside, and it wasn’t too long after that that I wrote the story for the Wall Street Journal that started the whole “Slavery by Another Name” era of my life.
The tightest answer to your question is that after the “Slavery by Another Name” film came out, that was the 30th anniversary of that class – 2012. I had always been thinking about that story and how to go back to that story. So I decided to go to that graduation event in 2012, and then to several more after that. It was at the graduation ceremony in 2023 that I decided okay – there’s a film here. There’s a documentary. I even had a tiny little camera in my pocket that I pulled out and shot a little bit of video at that ceremony. Now that I think about it, three of the people who were in the film, ultimately, were in the room at the time.
I called up Sam Pollard, my creative partner on the “Slavery by Another Name” film and this, and I said, Sam – I think we could make a film out of this. He agreed, and that was the beginning. We never imagined it would be 10 years of off-and-on shooting, but that’s how it turned out. And now here we are.
Is that normal? That sounds like a long time, but I don’t have a lot of experience with this kind of thing.
Blackmon: No, I think it’s a very long time. And it was for a couple of reasons. For instance – actually this is a good comparison – the film based on “Slavery by Another Name” … We made that film in about a year and a half. About 18 months and all of the shooting was in a span of six months, probably. The difference is that “Slavery by Another Name,” and most projects like that, you know the whole story when you begin. In this case, we roughly knew what the looking backward part was going to be, the historical stuff. But then exactly what we were going to learn from the classmates once we started interviewing them, and how they perceived those years, we didn’t really know where that was going to go.
Then even as we were doing it, the story began to – you know, it did what living people do. People changed, and people started doing different things, and folks started showing back up and Leland in interesting ways. Brandon Taylor, the school board president, was somebody I totally lost track of, and then after we started shooting one day, it pops up in the newspaper that he declares he is running for school board and then becomes president. As we were working through it, it became, in a way, a sort of very serious reality television. We had to follow the events through a number of things – some of which is in the film, some of which is not.
There was one time, before COVID, where I thought we were at the end, I thought we were approaching the end of the story. But then events changed, and the events then were what led to Jessie King, that classmate, being hired as superintendent. Of course then, the trajectory of the story changed very greatly, after Jessie came into the picture.
How did the trajectory change?
Blackmon: When we first started shooting, the public schools were really in crisis. They had been declared a failing district. It was at a time when the No Child Left Behind Act, and Mississippi’s version of that, were still in place. Those were really Draconian things, where if a school’s test scores fell below a [certain] level, the bizarre concept of No Child Left Behind was that low performing schools will get their funding cut as punishment for not doing a good enough job. So that meant things typically got worse, after that. Leland Schools were sort of in that situation, and they had had a couple of superintendents who had not worked out. Then one departed as we were shooting. It looked pretty bleak, really. Things were really not going well. Then, much to my surprise, up pops Jessie King.
In all education-related things, it’s really hard to know …. You know, one year’s test scores don’t mean anything, and maybe two year’s don’t. It’s hard to really get confident what direction a school or a system is going. So it took a while for me to really believe that things were getting markedly better under Jessie. But they were, and that’s clear now. He’s a pastor as well, and that was a part of his ability to reach out to people in different ways. There are still all the problems and divisions and separation that the film makes clear, but that much more optimistic moment began after Jessie arrived.
Speaking of Jessie and the rest of your classmates, you mentioned that you had reached out to them decades before for that original story. Was anyone reluctant to participate, or have any reservations about participating? Was there anyone you wished you could have spoken with who you weren’t able to?
Blackmon: There certainly were other students in the class that I would have liked to have talked to, partly just to have seen where that might have gone. [There were a] number of both African American and white students who in my memory of things were distinctive, important members of the class that, mostly for just geography and logistics reasons, we never fully connected.
Some people go to their high school reunions, and some people don’t. You know, people have different feelings about that. I think there were some classmates who, when I first approached them or tried to track them down, they were more in that category of folks who have just sort of moved on, and don’t really want to think about [or] talk about high school years. But for the most part, particularly among those classmates who still have any active connection to the town – the people who are living there, or for some reason, are still going back there – they were very open. In particular, African American students were open.
I came to better understand, even in the last few days, as they now have seen the film in screenings we’ve done in Leland and another one in Jackson, Miss. – most of the people in the film have now seen it – I’ve really been struck by, particularly with African American classmates, how important it is to them that they have the sense that their story is being told and affirmed and respected. Even after all this time, I have been struck by how important that is and how important that has felt. In a somewhat hard to explain kind of way, it also has something to do with just how much trauma there still is from everything that happened, and all of the larger conditions that we describe in the film. But in the end, they were for the most part all very open and honest. The intimacy of the film, the relationships in the film, and the obvious candor, I think are the things that are most powerful about it.
You’ve been writing about America’s racial history for some time now. This is similar, but it’s also a more personal story. Did that personal aspect make the reporting process different for you, or were there any other challenges that came with that?
Blackmon: For sure. In fact, when Sam and I first started talking seriously about, okay, let’s do this film, one of the conversations we had was – should we do this film in my hometown? Because this same story, a version of it, could be told in 100 or 1,000 other places. Essentially the same thing happened all over Mississippi and Alabama and Georgia, you know, all through the south. We debated a little bit of would it be more journalistically clinical in a way to try to doa film like this, but in a place that none of us had a connection to?
We thought about that … But then, my pretty strong feeling ultimately was no, because this does delve into such personal things. It is hard at times – even with people who are very cooperative on a conscious level … getting to that place that is deeper and more honest and more revelatory, is something that does require a lot of trust. The subject really has to believe that they’re not going to be brutalized, somehow, by being honest. So I became very convinced that we need to do this [in Leland].
This is also sort of a complicated idea, but even the people who made wrong choices, what I would say were the wrong choices, back in that time – some of them, it’s easy to condemn. Some of them did make the wrong choice for the absolute wrong reasons, and there’s really no defense of it. But there are other people who made an unfortunate decision or went the wrong way, but were misguided. It becomes easy in this sort of story to condemn everybody over here and make heroes out of everybody over there, and that’s not the reality of these situations. The people doing the right thing made mistakes.
You know, my mother, she talks about her own racism and how she finally realized it, became aware of it, and then made these other decisions. But my parents, even though they were on the right side of things, they weren’t one hundred percent certain that it was the right thing at the time. There were mistakes made by those folks on that side of the equation too. I said at one of the events last week, that it was a film that needed to be told through a lens of love, if that makes sense.
I’m glad you brought up the section with your mom, just because I thought it was interesting to hear her talk about the idea of people not knowing if integration would work, which seems like such a foreign idea now. I think the documentary really shows that education is always a more fraught area of our society than others. What do you think the reasons are behind that? That even today, segregation still persists without an explicit law keeping it in place?
Blackmon: It goes back to the core, terrible ideas that undergirded segregation to begin with. Why we had a form of apartheid in America were these fundamental, terrible racial attitudes and ideologies that were less about hatred. I think these days, we too often conflate racism and hatred, or we assume that those are always together. There is hatred with some racism, and some racists have hatred, but the much more common thing is a less hateful set of worries and assumptions and stereotypes that people carry around.
Public education, it’s the one place we have, traditionally in American society … where we instill values and common values in our children. This is where there is no difference between the rich kid and the poor kid. Of course, most of those kinds of Norman Rockwell ideas were from a time when it was pretty much just all white kids together, and Black kids and other kinds of kids over there. Public schools were the great equalizer of the group of people who were dominant in the society.
When it came time to try to apply that to everyone, I think that – and I think this is still the case – a lot of people, whether they know it or not, are just anxious, worried about the intimacy of school. You’re sending your child, your vulnerable little child, off to this situation [where] there may be people that you’re not sure about. I think a lot of people still have a tremendous amount of anxiety about that, and we see that in Atlanta. Even there, people have a pattern of resisting public schools, primarily because they – in most places in Atlanta – they are so substantially African American. Even with all the growth of the middle class in Atlanta, among all races in recent years, it’s still very difficult for most white people – even very progressive-minded folks – it’s still extremely difficult for them to plug back into traditional public schools in a place like Atlanta.
I think it really just boils down to what is still a difficult fear of different people … That’s the paradox of our society. We’ve made all this progress in so many ways. We, in some respects, have created the most racially egalitarian society in human history. We had an African American president. All of these things are now possible, and yet there are still these deep, deep divisions that threaten the society. They come into play around public schools as well.
You’ve worked with Sam Pollard before. Why do you continue to return to work with him and what do you think he brings to stories like this as a filmmaker?
Blackmon: Sam is one, just an extraordinarily talented and experienced filmmaker, both as a storyteller and in a more abstract sense, but also just in the craft of filmmaking. I mean, I don’t know that there’s anybody who has made more documentary films over the last 40 years than Sam Pollard. It’s extraordinary, really. We’re also just incredibly good friends.
Another dimension of this with Sam is that he was born and raised in New York, and until very recently, he lived his whole life in New York. He now lives in Baltimore. But his father and his father’s brothers were all born in MIssissippi. There’s a long MIssissippi connection there. His father and his four uncles, so these five brothers, were all part of the Great Migration who departed the south after World War II. His father went to New York City, and that’s how Sam grew up there.
Sam and I are different kinds of storytellers, I would say. If he were here, he might disagree with me, but he’s what I would say is a kind of emotional storyteller. The human emotions and how they drive one another are his focus. I’m a more journalistic storyteller, just from my own experience … so the two of us together, I think brought a very interesting combination of things to the way the film came together.
One thing I enjoyed about the movie is that it’s kind of through the eyes of children, but not because those children have now grown up and can look back and think about what happened. I think that tension gives you a sense of how much pressure was on that generation, but they weren’t aware of it at the time, and how that generation was sort of failed in a specific way by the adults around them. Were you thinking about that tension?
Blackmon: Yeah absolutely. Donald Richardson talks more, maybe most directly about that in the film. He expresses it as not knowing what was happening, but that it was good of his parents not to have put all that pressure on his shoulders. But by saying that, in a way he’s acknowledging that we felt that pressure. We didn’t know exactly why it was there, or what that was about, but we certainly were aware that something was going on. Something very dramatic was happening. We just didn’t realize what it was. Frankly, even if our parents had told us, as first graders or second graders, we wouldn’t have understood what they meant. But it was obvious then, and in hindsight, we can see in a more understandable way what that was.
Interestingly, I think that in the interviews – and some of this comes through, like John McCandlish … says something in the film about, I think it was the adults who were still struggling – that came up, the idea that you expressed, more often in the interviews than I had expected. Because of the career I’ve followed and just my personal obsessions, I’ve been thinking about all this stuff for years and years and years, and exploring it in different ways. I sort of expected that my classmates maybe wouldn’t have been. They certainly haven’t been obsessed with it in the way that I have, but it was interesting to me how many of them did have an awareness after the fact of all of this.
John McCandlish – this is not in the film – but at one point, he talked about a Black family coming to his church and being aware of these people coming to his all-white church asking for some sort of assistance, and being turned away. And that registered to him, even then, as well this really isn’t right. It was interesting to me, how much of that bubbled up. Just like Van Poindexter and Pam Pepper talking about the cast party. It was so powerful that both of them started talking about that event separately, without me guiding them to it. Just in the course of an interview, that surfaced for both of them as this very powerful illustration of those kinds of situations. And in both cases, it had to do with a myopia of their parents with different outcomes. But all across the interviews, over and over again, it would surface – a sense that the adults in our world could have or should have done more, or done differently. And not just the adults who tried to preserve segregation, and ran away with their children, and set up their own school, but that our own parents, and the people who were trying very hard to do the right things, still turned out to be human beings. That’s what human beings do, is turn out to be human beings, who make mistakes even when they’re trying to do their best.