In September 2023, AMERICAN EXPERIENCE will premiere two new documentaries that examine the deeply mixed legacy of America’s efforts to racially integrate public schools. 

On September 11, The Busing Battleground viscerally captures the class tensions and racial violence that ensued when Black and white students in Boston were bused for the first time between neighborhoods to comply with a federal desegregation order. It illuminates the volatile effort to end school segregation, and the decades-long struggle for educational equity that preceded the crisis. 

On September 12, The Harvest is a personal and powerful look at a coalition of Black and white students, parents and teachers who integrated a small Mississippi town's public schools in 1970.  When the Supreme Court issued an order to fully and immediately desegregate schools in October 1969, Leland Mississippi finally met the demand put forth in the 1954 Brown v Board of Education decision. In the fall of 1970, a group of children entered school as part of the first class of Black and white students who would attend all 12 grades together. 

“These two films — one taking place in the urban North, the other in a small Southern town and both nearly 20 years after Brown v. Board of Education made school segregation illegal — challenge our perception of how communities across the country dealt with the Supreme Court ruling,” said Cameo George, Executive Producer of AMERICAN EXPERIENCE. “They also remind us that this was one of the most complicated and fraught national experiments in American history. Both films are witness-driven and allow those who lived through the events on both sides of the color line to share their experiences, now with the hindsight of five decades.”

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