The Robert Russa Moton Museum invites the community to a special screening and discussion of The Harvest, presented as part of our Black History Month programming.

From PBS American Experience: In The Harvest, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Douglas A. Blackmon looks back at how school integration transformed his hometown of Leland, Mississippi. After the 1954 Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, little more than token efforts were made to desegregate Southern schools. That changed dramatically on October 29, 1969, when the high court ordered that Mississippi schools to fully and immediately desegregate. As a result, a group of children, including six-year-old Blackmon, became part of the first class of Black and white children who would attend all 12 grades together in Leland.

Set against vast historic and demographic changes unfolding across America, The Harvest follows a coalition of Black and white citizens working to create racially integrated public schools in a cotton town in the middle of the Mississippi Delta, the most rigidly segregated area in America. It tells the extraordinary story of how that first class became possible, then traces the lives of Blackmon and his classmates, teachers, and parents from the first day through high school graduation in 1982. It is a riveting portrait of how those children’s lives were transformed and how the town — and America — were changed. But as the film follows the lives of those children into the present, it is also a portrait of what our society has lost in its failure to finish the work begun a generation ago.

About the Author

Douglas A. Blackmon is a Pulitzer-Prize-winning author, journalist, and filmmaker. His first book, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for its searing revelation of a largely forgotten system that continued to hold African-Americans in forced labor after the Civil War and persisted deep into the 20th century. He was also co-executive producer of the acclaimed documentary film based on Slavery by Another Name, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2012, attracted more than five million viewers in its first broadcasts on PBS, and continues to be regularly rebroadcast on public television across the U.S.

Sponsor Information

This screening of The Harvest is supported by Georgia Humanities with funding from the Wilbur and Hilda Glenn Family Foundation, in collaboration with Virginia Humanities and the Robert Russa Moton Museum.