American Experience: "The Harvest: Integrating Mississippi's Schools" (WGBH, PBS, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, September 12) my husband Charles and I watched an absolutely fascinating documentary on the PBS-TV series American Experience called “The Harvest: Integrating Mississippi’s Schools.” The show actually dealt with integrating schools in one Mississippi town – Leland, in the heart of the Mississippi Delta, a traditional community in which the Blacks were almost all sharecroppers living and working on cotton plantations, and whites lived off the surplus value the Blacks generated. Despite the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education decision declaring racial segregation in education unconstitutional, the Mississippi state government doggedly refused to integrate its schools until a 1969 Supreme Court case demanded an end to the delay and ordered Mississippi and other similarly recalcitrant states to integrate their schools “at once.” “The Harvest” was made by a man named Douglas Blackmon (who, despite what you might think from his name, was white) who grew up in Leland and happened to start first grade the year the order to integrate the schools immediately came down. He had already stuck himself on a limb by delivering a school paper on the so-called “Strike City” just outside of Leland, where a group of Black former sharecroppers lived. They had walked off the fields in the mid-1960’s and hoped to start a collective that would support itself by manufacturing bricks and would therefore be economically independent of the white establishment. Instead they barely hung on for decades, supporting themselves mostly by growing small community gardens and offering a share of the proceeds to anyone who helped work the land. Blackmon gave his report and after he was done a man in the audience confronted him and said, “"Who told you all those things, boy? Where did you get all that stuff, boy? Nothing like that happened. Did your momma and daddy tell you all that stuff? They fillin' your head with lies.” Then a teacher intervened and separated Blackmon from his adult heckler.

Blackmon ultimately grew up and left Leland to become a professional journalist, but he remembered the satisfaction with which he had greeted the relative success of school integration in Leland and assumed that it would continue. Then in 2014 he returned to Leland and found that white parents had virtually deserted the public schools and enrolled their kids in private “academies.” At least one such school, the Leland Academy, had existed during Blackmon’s childhood – and he showed some of the flyers promoting it, whose use of the Confederate flag as a logo made clear the racist purpose behind it. He went to Leland High School’s graduation ceremony and saw that only about 10 percent of the graduating class was white. “The Harvest” was an elegiac tale about the death of Dr. Martin Luther King’s dream – or at least part of it – fueled by, among other things, the increasing mechanization of the cotton industry (Tippo, Mississippi native Mose Allison said that one reason he stopped performing his most famous song, “Parchman Farm,” live was that "you go to the Mississippi Delta and there are no cotton sacks. It’s all machines and chemicals”) that vastly reduced the need for human labor on the plantations, as well as the so-called “War on Drugs” that decimated African-American populations in particular and gave the U.S. the dubious distinction of having the greatest proportion of its population in prison of any country in the world. Leland was also “tested,” as Douglas Blackmon put it, by a 1996 incident that was yet another example of the police-driven racial injustice that later sparked the Black Lives Matter movement: “A Black TV repairman named Aaron White crashed his truck on Deer Creek Drive and tried to flee the scene. He exchanged gunfire with a white policeman named Jackie Blaylock, a former Leland High School quarterback. White died from a gunshot wound to the head.” The official police investigation ruled that White had shot himself accidentally, but almost no one in Black Leland believed that.

At the same time one good result of integration that has survived was the increasing presence of African-Americans in positions of power and authority. Billy Barber, one of Blackmon’s Black classmates, returned to Leland and became chief of police – and in his spare time he runs an all-Black Missionary Baptist Church. “Being a police chief is actually not much different from being a pastor,” Barber told Blackmon. “You have the same love. And my love is for the citizens, to keep them safe, and just having the love of God, and to love people, and to treat people right and treat people with respect, and, and to try to make the community better.” Other Black Lelanders have come back to be educators, football coaches, and restaurant owners – a Black Leland couple recalled that they now own the restaurant that in the pre-integration days wouldn’t serve them at all, and the football coach now owns the Rex Theatre, where formerly white customers sat on the lower level while Blacks were relegated to the balcony. Some of the Black and white Lelanders from that first integrated class have gone on to success in other cities; one became assistant principal at Little Rock’s Central High School, infamous for one of the biggest clashes over school integration in 1957 when nine Black students dared to enroll, while another enlisted in the Air Force, served 22 years there and then became a military educator. A white female Lelander who was enrolled in the Leland Academy through grade six and then suddenly found herself plunged into an integrated public middle school ultimately rose to become a federal judge in Wisconsin.

If anything, “The Harvest” reveals the seeming intractability of American racism but also the progress that has been made, albeit slowly, haltingly and with the omnipresent threat that whatever progress African-Americans have made could be stripped away from them at any moment as was done in the late 19th century after the end of Reconstruction and again in the 1920’s when wanton white mobs destroyed the so-called “Black Wall Streets” in Tulsa, Oklahoma and other cities where African-Americans had slowly and laboriously built community cultures and become successful capitalists. Today, with Donald Trump bestride the Republican Party and seemingly unstoppable on his way to his third Presidential nomination despite the 91 federal and state indictments against him, and his openly racist appeals having made racism acceptable again in American political discourse, the spectre of every advance towards racial equality in the U.S. being systematically unraveled hangs over the heads of all Americans.