9pm Thursday AMERICAN EXPERIENCE – The Harvest Documentary
The Harvest, is a deeply personal depiction of one Southern town’s painful struggle to integrate its public schools and the continuing repercussions still felt more than 50 years later.
Set against vast historic and demographic changes unfolding across America, The Harvest steps back in time to explore Mississippi’s brutal history of racial intolerance and segregation — a world in which schools for Black children were not only separate but deeply underfunded, often inaccessible, and sometimes nonexistent.
The Harvest then follows the brave coalition of Black and white citizens who worked to create racially integrated public schools in the most unlikely place: a 1960s 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 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.
WATCH WLRN ANYWHERE AT ANY TIME WITH THE PBS VIDEO APP.
Stream your favorite PBS shows, create the perfect watchlist, watch the WLRN live stream and so much more. Plus, WLRN TV members can access an extended on-demand library of incredible programming with WLRN Passport, available through the PBS Video App. Download the PBS Video App for free now!
