Fight for equality: 'Busing Battleground' and "The Harvest' delve into segregation battle in schools

Sep. 9—As an executive producer for American Experience, Cameo George knows that heavy topics are the name of the game.

Yet, George, along with the team of filmmakers, push through to make a difference.

American Experience's latest documentaries — "The Busing Battleground" and "The Harvest" will air on back-to-back nights at 8 p.m. Monday, Sept. 11, and on Tuesday, Sept. 12, on New Mexico PBS, channel 5.1. Both documentaries will be available to stream on the PBS app.

"I didn't want to shy away from them just because they are heavy subjects," George says. "Regardless of where you live and what your socioeconomics are, school is the great unifier. I myself went to public school. I realize now as an adult, I took for granted that I was able to attend a public school. It was well resourced in New York City. Not everyone shares that enthusiasm."

George and the crew told two stories from two very different areas of the United States — Boston and the Deep South.

"The Busing Battleground" tells the story of the struggle to integrate Boston's schools.

The film begins on September 12, 1974, when police were stationed outside schools across Boston as Black and white students were bused for the first time between neighborhoods to comply with a federal court desegregation order.

The cross-town busing was met with shocking violence, much of it directed at children: angry white protesters threw rocks at school buses carrying Black children and hurled racial epithets at the students as they walked into their new schools.

The chaos and racial unrest would escalate and continue for years.

The production uses eyewitness accounts, oral histories and news footage that hasn't been seen in decades, as it pulls back the curtain on the volatile effort to end school segregation, detailing the decades-long struggle for educational equity that preceded the crisis.

It is directed by Sharon Grimberg and Cyndee Readdean.

The fight for educational equity in Boston began in the early 1950s, years before the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling.

Local activists, including Ruth Batson, a mother and head of the local NAACP's education committee, began documenting the differences between majority Black and white schools. They reported that Black children were taught in the oldest school buildings, the most overcrowded classrooms, and by the most inexperienced teachers. On June 11, 1963 — the day President John F. Kennedy gave a historic Civil Rights speech on national television saying civil rights was a "moral issue" — Batson presented her findings to the all-white Boston School Committee and demanded its members acknowledge de facto segregation in Boston's public schools. The committee, headed by South Boston lawyer Louise Day Hicks, refused to do so. That meeting was a turning point. In the words of activist Hubie Jones, "It ignited a movement."

Over the next several years, Black activists led a series of demonstrations and protests, including "Stay Out for Freedom" actions, during which students boycotted their regular classrooms for the day to attend Freedom Schools, where they learned that the struggle for civil rights wasn't unique to the South.

Meanwhile, "The Harvest" follows Pulitzer Prize-winning author Douglas A. Blackmon as he explores his experiences as part of Leland, Mississippi's first integrated public school class in 1970.

The film airs at 8 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 12.

The film is produced by Blackmon and Sam Pollard, and executive produced by George.

It 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.

It starts with 1954 Supreme Court's landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision 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 Mississippi schools to fully — and immediately — desegregate. As a result, a group of children, including six-year-old Blackmon, entered school in the fall of 1970 as part of the first class of Black and white students who would attend all 12 grades together in Leland, Mississippi.

"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.

"These two stories happened in the late-'60s and '70s," George says. "Even when there are laws passed, there still is a lot of work happening in the communities. It's important to know that it takes a long time for change and to have justice in their communities. Every advance that we make is a work in progress."