New documentary “The Harvest” tells story of Mississippi’s first integrated class

By Hannah E. Jones

What began as a 7th-grade speech about Mississippi’s Strike City has now, 47 years later, blossomed into a much larger story told through a documentary titled “The Harvest.” The film focuses on desegregation in Leland, Miss., highlighting the first class in the state that was integrated from first grade to high school graduation. 

Atlanta’s Douglas Blackmon was one of those students. The film uses Leland as an example of our larger society, with great progress that’s been made but, still, considerable hurdles left to overcome.

“We have made so much progress over the past 50 years toward genuine human equity, yet still our society is tortured by racial injustice and the danger it poses to us all,” Blackmon wrote as part of the film’s description.

Blackmon is a Pulitzer Prize-Winning author, producer and Georgia State University professor who’s well known for his book and documentary entitled “Slavery by Another Name,” which focuses on the dark past of Atlanta’s former Chattahoochee Brick Company. He co-produced “The Harvest” with Samuel Pollard, an Academy Award-nominated documentary filmmaker and producer.

Blackmon’s hometown of Leland, Miss. is a small community and, like many places in the South, integration was vehemently contested. As such, the town didn’t desegregate its schools until 1970 — 16 years after the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in the Brown v. Board of Education case.

Throughout the documentary, the students describe great unity within the school’s walls but in other facets of life — like parties and trips to the swimming pool — were still deeply fractioned. As Blackmon puts it in the film, “Somehow, all those millions of kids were expected to heal America’s racial divide.”

Following integration, private schools began popping up, signaling white flight from the local public school system. While these schools claimed that they didn’t discriminate, documentation shows that this association of private schools secretly required schools to deny Black students and teachers. 

The proof was found by a University of Mississippi Ph.D. student, and the film is the first time this information has been shared in a public format. Blackmon called this the “smoking gun.”

The documentary is also a love letter to public schools. Blackmon believes that they play a crucial role in reinforcing positive ideals for our youth and society as a whole.

“We need to focus back on public schools as the one place where we can all together emphasize the American ideals that are most important,” Blackmon told SaportaReport. “Where citizenship is learned and what it means to live in an egalitarian society.”

This film has been in the works for many years. Decades, even. In the seventh grade, Blackmon wrote a speech about Strike City, a settlement outside of town that was created in the ‘60s after a group of Black tenant farmers went on strike. They were thrown out of their homes, attacked by the KKK and barred from employment. And still, Strike City became a hub of civil rights activism. 

After giving his speech, a man in the crowd became angry with Blackmon and scolded him. Young Blackmon was stunned by his response, giving insight into the prejudice that his Black classmates faced and the hatred that was rooted in his community years after integration.

“From a very early age, I was curious about why things were the way they were,” Blackmon said. “Why were the Black people, with a tiny number of exceptions, all incredibly poor? Why was it that the Black kids I grew up with clearly had obstacles in their path that were not in my path, even though I was coming from a pretty modest background myself?”

He returned to Leland 10 years after graduating and found “resegregation was well underway.” This was even more apparent at the 2012 graduation ceremony, with a largely Black graduating class. He was shocked by the changes within his hometown. So, that year, he embarked on the journey to create “The Harvest.” 

But Leland’s future is increasingly bright, with an uptick in student performance and several of Blackmon’s classmates joining the school board and local government. They also point to Strike City as a success story, planting the seed for a better life for Leland’s residents.

Near the end of the film, a former student named Donald Richardson in the Class of ‘82 drives home the importance of those who fought for equality, despite the dangers that came with the advocacy.

“Integration, in its purest form, dispels stereotypes,” Richardson said. “We are all prejudiced, we just have to find a way to move forward together. To make sure everyone has a piece of the pie and a level playing field to set our tables on to eat our pie.”

The documentary has already been named a finalist for the Library of Congress Lavine / Ken Burns Prize for Film. “The Harvest” will premiere on Sept. 12 and can be streamed on the PBS website.