♪ ♪
SARAH BLACKMON: You have one shot at raising your children.
You don't get do-overs.
We were very, very concerned
that our children get a good education.
♪ ♪
JOHN MCCANDLISH: Growing up in Leland and thinking about where I lived,
it seems somewhat like a Mayberry to me.
It was a very tight-knit community.
People knew each other.
People really cared about each other.
KEVIN MAGEE: I grew up kind of a latchkey kid
and had the run of the town, basically.
I felt like, growing up, that
the whole thing belonged to me, and I could go anywhere
and do just about anything that I could get away with.
BRANDON TAYLOR: Certain places, you know,
we couldn't, you know, we couldn't visit.
I mean, just like these park benches, you know.
This park was off, off-limits, you know, to Blacks.
♪ ♪
EVELYN GORDON-MURRAY: Leland was divided.
You had Black Dog, where I grew up,
and you had the white section.
(insects chirping)
VAN POINDEXTER: There was always a railroad track.
There was always a creek.
There was always a road.
There was always some
marker that divided the neighborhoods.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: In 1969, my hometown of Leland, Mississippi,
finally had to reckon with
something it had been avoiding for years.
ROGER MUDD: In 1954, the Supreme Court made school integration
the law of the land,
a law to be implemented with all deliberate speed.
Last fall, the court ruled that after 15 years,
deliberation should end, and speed meant now.
JOHN BELL WILLIAMS: The quality of public education in a great portion of our state
has been made an impossibility
under conditions inflicted on our public schools
by a vindictive, autocratic, arbitrary Supreme Court.
All Blacks that was involved was nervous about it,
because we didn't know what was going to happen next,
but we were still trying to do what we felt like was right.
The only thing I can see this leading to
is the destruction of our school system.
The Negro children, on a whole,
are further behind in their studies than our children.
MAN: We've got a psychology running in this state
which is very deeply negative about the possibilities
of Black and white working this thing out together.
Because of it, we've managed to stay 50th or 48th
for a mighty long time,
while we're so busy holding one down
and keeping the other just on top.
REPORTER: What are your thoughts about going to school with
about half and half white and Black students?
I don't care.
I mean, you know, the same people.
I think we all should be together.
And I hope that we could get along together.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: My class was the first in Mississippi to have
Black kids and white kids in school together
from the first day of first grade
to high school graduation.
We were supposed to be
the seeds of a great harvest of racial harmony.
Three decades later, I needed to understand what happened,
and why America is still so divided
even after all we went through.
I went back to find out.
♪ ♪
♪ You can't hurry God ♪
♪ ♪
♪ You got to wait ♪
♪ ♪
♪ Give him time ♪
♪ ♪
♪ He's a God ♪
♪ You can't hurry ♪
♪ He'll be there ♪
♪ Don't you worry ♪
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: When I was a kid,
my family lived in this little town in the Mississippi Delta
called Leland, Mississippi.
SINGER: ♪ He's right on time ♪
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: If you have any vision in your mind
of a cotton plantation in the Deep South,
the place you are imagining is the Mississippi Delta.
♪ ♪
In the 1960s, Leland was still
as harshly segregated as it ever was.
In those very early years,
I just noticed that it was all white over here
and all Black over there,
and Black folks had more trouble than white folks.
And it perplexed me.
I started asking a lot of questions,
which seemed uncomfortable to everybody I asked them to,
including my parents at times.
And so, I couldn't make any sense out of it.
♪ ♪
Later, in middle school,
I became aware of a place called Strike City.
Strike City was a settlement just outside of town,
created in the middle of the 1960s
after a group of Black tenant farmers went on strike.
JOHN HENRY SYLVESTER: The reason we went on strike,
I was tired of working for six dollars a day,
and I was tired of my wife and kids working
for three dollars a day.
♪ ♪
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: They were among
the very first African Americans in American history
to rebel in this way against a white landowner.
There was a town oratorical contest
sponsored by the Lions Club,
and so I decide to write a speech about Strike City.
I went to the library,
read stories that had been written
in the local papers at the time.
I learned that the strikers were thrown out of their homes,
they were attacked by the Ku Klux Klan,
the men are blackballed from employment.
None of the men ever work again.
All kinds of terrible experiences.
So my little boy essay maps all this out,
and at the end says,
"Martin Luther King came along,
and the Civil Rights Movement solved everything."
That was the conclusion. (laughs)
And so, the day of the contest, I go in.
And, of course, it's a room of about 45 middle-aged white men.
♪ ♪
The other students give their speeches,
and then I get up and give my speech about Strike City.
And immediately, as soon as I start speaking,
I realize that something, something's wrong.
As soon as I mention Strike City,
the men in the room begin to snicker.
I was so confused.
Then as I proceed through the speech,
and talk about the courage of the strikers,
they go dead silent.
When I get to the part about the Ku Klux Klan attacking them,
there's no response whatsoever.
I don't win the contest, naturally.
Then afterwards, all the men file by and shake our hands.
But this one fellow stands back,
and waits till the others are gone.
And then he comes up to me, and he attacks.
"Who told you all those things, boy?
"Where did you get all that stuff, boy?
Nothing like that happened."
You know, "Did your momma and daddy tell you all that stuff?"
"They," you know, "They fillin' your head with lies."
And he gets louder and louder,
and I stood there thinking, why is this happening?
Why is this man so angry at me?
And he's yelling and screaming.
Finally, my teacher comes over,
bumps into the guy, and says, "What are you doing?"
And he spins around and takes off.
SINGER: ♪ He'll be there ♪
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: That was the beginning of my quest.
I became obsessed with trying to get to the bottom of,
you know, why is this the way that things are?
SINGER: ♪ When you want him ♪
♪ He's right on time ♪
♪ ♪
(radio tuning)
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: In 1967, my dad was finishing his Ph.D.
and got a job at a research laboratory
in the Mississippi Delta.
So my parents, two older brothers, and I
moved from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to Leland.
(radio tuning)
I was three years old.
♪ ♪
For me, that's when this story began.
SARAH BLACKMON: We chose to live in Leland.
We liked that our children would be able
to do things on their own, that they could
ride their bicycles around town.
Uh, we, we liked the idea of a small town.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Leland was a busy, growing community in the 1960s.
The farm economy was strong,
particularly for the people who owned large amounts of land.
Almost everyone made their living,
one way or another,
off the vast cotton and soybean fields
that surrounded us.
(pipe organ playing, people singing)
People came from far and wide at Christmas every year
to see the decorations on the wide creek
flowing through the center of town.
(marching band playing)
Every fall, there was football and homecoming parades
that wound through town
and ended up on the field.
(band playing)
Everyone seemed to agree that Leland was a special place,
a little wealthier than most,
better educated,
more tolerant than other places nearby,
and it did have a certain unique spirit.
(marching band continues)
(crowd cheering and applauding)
JAMES LACEY: At that time,
Leland had an unusually good school system.
It was the pride of the community.
I grew up going to the Leland schools.
We rode school bus number 13. (laughs)
High school-- it was a really good time.
And there were 35 people, I think,
in my graduating class in 1960.
(whistle blows, crowd cheering)
ANNOUNCER: Fourth down coming up.
(crowd cheering)
NEILL: Football was the big sport.
Everybody from town was at the game on Friday night.
Everybody rooted for the Cubs.
♪ ♪
It was a community-supported...
There again, in, in these terms of modern days,
it was a white- community-supported, um, school.
♪ ♪
There was a team on the other side of town.
Gosh, I hate saying it this way. (laughs)
But that's the way it was.
I mean, that's the way we grew up.
♪ ♪
BILLY BARBER: Breisch High School was the high school for Black people
and Black athletes in Leland, Mississippi.
You know, they did a good job.
They competed, they...
They, they played for titles.
We had one of the best
basketball teams in the state.
Basketball, football, track.
We didn't have a gym.
We played on the bare ground outside.
We had a football field.
It wasn't, you know,
with the bleachers and all, but you had a football field.
Oh, we had good, some great ballplayers.
Had some great ballplayers.
They would even have a crowd,
a cheering crowd, a supportive crowd.
Loved the mascot.
We were the, the Braves.
The Breisch High Braves.
BARBER: You know, you take Breisch High
and go back and check the history,
they could compete with any team in the state of Mississippi.
♪ ♪
The school was like the center of social life
for the Black people in Leland.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: The crazy thing was,
racial segregation was illegal.
15 years had passed
since the Supreme Court declared in 1954
that segregation had to be dismantled forever.
But during those years,
Leland remained two very separate worlds:
one white and one Black.
In the white version,
many people were still enthralled with
"Gone With the Wind" fantasies about Confederate officers,
Southern belles,
and ugly racial attitudes.
(people talking and laughing, "Evalyne" playing)
Then, in 1969,
something enormous happened.
The Supreme Court spoke again.
There could be no more delays.
All separate Black and white schools
had to be completely combined, almost overnight.
A giant social experiment
that would radically change American society
was beginning.
Dr. Martin Luther King's dream of a nation
where the children of former slaves and slave owners
would grow up together
was finally supposed to be happening.
And somehow, all those millions of kids
were expected to heal America's racial divide.
In the fall of 1970,
my hometown's first fully integrated class
of Black and white first-graders
began school together--
on the same day, in the same classrooms,
with the same teachers and books.
And that was my class.
GORDON-MURRAY: When we started the first grade,
I didn't know anything that was going on.
You know, I was six years old,
so I didn't know anything about anything.
We were excited just to be in school.
♪ ♪
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: As the first day of first grade was coming up,
I had absolutely no idea
that there was anything whatsoever happening
except that school was beginning,
and I finally got to go.
There was no conversation about,
you know, anything, you know, being different.
We were just going to another school.
Be on your best behavior, you know?
Like your parents would want you to.
There were Black kids in my class.
That didn't strike me as surprising or unusual,
because it was the only thing I...
It was the only kind of school I knew.
DONALD RICHARDSON: From a, a five-year-old's perspective,
there was no difference in the children.
Black, white.
MCCANDLISH: I didn't really have
any awareness of the racial integration.
I think I was just trying to make new friends.
JESSIE KING: It was the very first time I experienced...
The experience of interacting
with the white students
was at the school,
and I thought it was cool.
BARBER: I came from a Head Start in Strike City
that was all-Black.
And going to school and, you know,
there was some white here and white there.
I mean, it wasn't just something that I saw every day.
KING: We all were receiving the same multiplication facts.
We were all getting the same vowel sounds.
We were all reading from
"Sally, Dick, and Jane" books.
There was no difference.
It was school.
It was first grade.
I was, I was allowed to be a first-grader
without the shackles of the responsibility that,
"You are in the first class of integration,
"as a first-grader.
Our hopes and dreams are on your shoulders."
I didn't have any of that.
And I think that's...
That's pretty good, for my parents.
Not to have scared me out of...
(laughing): ...scared me out of my wits
about, you know, racial situations,
being where we're from.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: None of that
should have been necessary.
JAMES M. NABRIT, JR.: It is my opinion that the South
will comply with the decision of the court and accept it.
I don't think there's any question about it in the South.
People in the South are just as law-abiding as anybody else.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: In the years since the Supreme Court decision in 1954,
segregation was supposed to have disappeared.
But in Mississippi and almost everywhere in the South,
nothing had truly changed.
WOMAN: I'm against the niggers and the whites
going to school together.
I think that, um,
we as white people have developed an air of superiority
over their race.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: In a few places,
like Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas,
a handful of Black students were eventually able
to enroll in previously all-white schools.
(shouting)
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: But soon, huge numbers of white Southerners
were fighting tooth and nail
to preserve segregation.
VERONICA RICHARDSON: The Little Rock Nine,
we were glued to the newspapers and to the television.
We didn't participate in it
too much around here.
I guess it was a little too risky,
but we were glued to it and we talked about it.
We were so happy that somebody did that.
COLEMAN: Where we were,
whatever was going on in Little Rock
wasn't about to happen here-- not any time soon.
♪ ♪
(insects chirping)
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: No place in America
has a more terrible past than Mississippi,
with its long abuse of African Americans
and violent resistance to racial equality.
♪ ♪
But as a young child,
I had almost no understanding of that.
No one ever spoke of the nightmare lynching in Leland
50 years earlier.
Or the murder in 1955 of a Black pastor
on the other end of the county
after he began registering Black voters.
Or the church burnings and KKK rallies not far away.
Or the two civil rights workers beaten in Leland
during Freedom Summer in 1964,
the year I and most of my classmates were born.
I can't remember hearing anything about Emmett Till,
the African American 14-year-old
brutally killed barely 50 miles from my hometown
for supposedly whistling at a white woman.
And the grown-ups I knew rarely ever offered any explanation
for why Black people all around us
suffered such relentless, grinding poverty.
That was at the heart of racial segregation,
and separating Black and white children during the school day
was the cornerstone of an entire system of life designed
to deny education and services for Black children
and to trap their parents
in work that made some white people wealthy,
but left millions of Black families desperate.
VERNICE SANDERS: My family were sharecroppers.
Any family that lives on a farm,
you know, their kids was out there, too.
We chopped cotton, picked cotton.
It was a hard, difficult life.
I really wanted an education.
I would get up early in the morning
and go out and do work, and then go to school.
But the boss man stopped that.
He told my dad that I had to be out there chopping cotton.
And so I had to go to school
whenever there wasn't anything else to do.
SCOTT: We picked cotton and worked in the field,
but we owned our own farm.
We, we weren't on a white person's farm.
(insects chirping)
One day, my daddy had gone to the cotton gin.
(chuckling): And I got on my knees in the cotton.
Boy, he didn't like you to get on your knees.
And I prayed.
I asked the Lord, I said, "Lord, you got to help me
to find something else to do."
I said, "I can't stay in this cotton field all my life."
So I made up my mind.
I said, "I want to go to school.
I want to go to college."
So when my dad came back, I went up to him and I said,
"Dad," I said, "I, I want to go to school."
He said, "You want to go to school?"
He said, "You go to school."
I said, "I want to go to college,"
I said, "when I finish school."
He, he hesitated,
and he waited a minute.
He said, "Well, if you want to go,"
he said, "I'll help you, if that's what you want to do."
And he did.
♪ ♪
COLEMAN: I was born and raised here in Leland, Mississippi.
My father died before I was born,
so my mom raised me.
(laughing): I'm the only hell she ever raised.
♪ ♪
We lived in a little shotgun house
in an area called Black Dog.
I think what we're talking about here
is the different sides of the track.
We lived over on this side.
Was a completely segregated neighborhood,
completely segregated.
That's the way we grew up.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Veronica Richardson-- still Mrs. Richardson to me--
was one of the daughters of A.B. Levison,
probably the most influential
African American leader in my town
in the years of segregation.
He had been in charge of Leland's Black schools
since the 1940s,
quietly walking an impossible tightrope,
pushing white leaders to provide more for schools
that were overflowing with Black students,
but always knowing that the slightest push too hard
would backfire.
My dad was the principal at this school,
and we lived on the school campus.
Our house was across the street.
(chuckles): So I actually rode my bicycle all around the schoolyard.
COLEMAN: The area where I lived was a lot of families.
Two-parent families, most of them.
If it was a single-parent,
Mama took care of business.
Was very supportive of education,
because at that time, that was your only way out.
Your restaurants--
you had to go to the back door.
SANDERS: I worked at the Leland Cafe for years.
Even though I was a cook,
I had to come through the back door to cook.
Doctors, they had an entrance for Black people
and they had an entrance
for white people.
They had a waiting room for Black people
and they had a waiting room for white people.
VERONICA RICHARDSON: The thing that I hated, though,
was the fact that I couldn't go to the library downtown,
the city library.
We would pass by,
and I'd want to look in, you know.
But, "No, you can't stop there."
They didn't really tell me why.
♪ ♪
COLEMAN: We passed by the Leland Hotel down there,
and it was nice linen on,
and you peep in the window.
But I always thought, "One of these days,
I'm going to be able to do that, too."
WOOLFOLK: The Temple Theater.
The Black people had to sit in the balcony,
and the white people sat on the floor.
It just didn't feel right.
SANDERS: This lady had hired me
to do some housecleaning for her.
This one time, I was working,
she went to bridge club or something and she left me there.
The phone rang, so I picked up and said hello,
and she didn't hear me.
And she was talking to somebody in the background,
and she said she had to call to check on...
This N, to see what this N is doing.
It, it really did something to me.
It really did.
♪ ♪
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: My family wasn't wealthy,
but we had a comfortable life.
Dad had a good job.
Mom taught algebra at Leland High.
We lived in a little house on Redbud Drive.
Birthday parties,
camping trips,
and every year what seemed like
a perfect Christmas.
It was a long time
before I realized just how different that was
from the lives of so many of my classmates.
KING: When I was very young,
we were living on Neill's Plantation.
The Black families were sharecroppers.
My dad drove tractors, plowed fields,
worked at the barn.
My mom was the maid for a white family.
And they worked all the time-- all the time.
CEDRIC BUSH: I lived on Walker Farm.
Mr. Jimmy Walker was the owner of the farm,
and my dad did dairy farming for him.
You raised hogs, and we had cows, we had goats.
It was a difficult life-- it was really a difficult life.
We had a shotgun house.
We didn't have heat.
We did not have indoor plumbing.
(water stops)
BUSH: We had outside toilets-- outhouses.
We had to go out to the outhouses
by yourself at night, with creepy-crawly things outside.
Later, we moved from one community to another.
We had a chance to experience having an inside toilet.
That was in 1977.
Yeah, I thought it was the greatest thing on Earth,
the greatest invention on Earth.
KING: My dad had accepted, "This is how it is.
This is the way it's going to be."
But my mom always thought that there must be a better way.
(insects chirping)
I'll never forget this particular evening.
We were sitting on the porch, waiting on him to get off work.
We did that every day,
because we didn't eat before he got home.
Back then, there were straw bosses
or plantation managers who supervised the laborers.
My father must have done something that, um,
did not gel with the straw boss,
and he kicked him
once he got out of the truck and...
SAM POLLARD: He kicked your father?
Kicked my father,
in front of my mom
and my brothers and sisters.
I was shocked, because that was my dad.
I was so shocked
that I didn't know what to say, what to do.
It was like we were frozen,
we were hurt, because that was our hero.
My mom, of course,
knew that if he had struck back,
he would also die.
She knew that.
That was the straw that broke the camel's back for her.
She wanted her children not to be trapped on a plantation.
She wanted her children to get an education,
where he and she were not granted one.
My mom packed everything,
and we moved to Leland.
And when Dad got off work, he found an empty house.
Next thing we knew, he had shown up.
I think he said, "What are you doing here?
Who told you to do this?"
And her response was, "Your bath water's ready."
And next thing I knew, he was in there taking a bath,
and that was the end of the story.
When I came to Leland in 1953,
the building that the elementary students were in
was a wooden building.
COLEMAN: I started first grade there.
I doubt if there were ten rooms in there.
But it was one long hallway.
And on each side, there were your classrooms.
The textbooks had been used when they came over.
They might have somebody's name in the front of them.
SCOTT: We didn't have a lot of materials and things like that,
but we worked well with what we had.
You had dedicated teachers,
people who cared about the students,
and saw their needs, and just really helped them.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: For most white people in Mississippi,
making the changes ordered by the Supreme Court in 1954
was unimaginable, or even repulsive.
So instead of abolishing racially separate schools,
Mississippi did exactly the opposite,
launching an aggressive campaign to convince the rest of America
that white and Black people should remain separate forever,
and began building and expanding
even more segregated schools.
Since 1956,
the state legislature
has provided $80 million
for school construction.
70% has been spent for colored schools
and 30% for white schools.
Each week for the past three years,
we have completed an average of three new buildings
or additions to buildings.
Contracts have been awarded for over 5,000 classrooms,
about 3,500 for colored children
and approximately 1,500 for white children.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Leland's all-white school board
doubled down on segregation, too,
adding a new classroom wing,
gymnasium, cafeteria, and library
to the dilapidated school for African American kids.
And they named it, yes, after Abraham Lincoln.
♪ ♪
An aerial photograph of Leland's Black campus
was added to the Mississippi history textbook
used by almost every ninth-grader in the state,
including me, 25 years later.
The caption described it as a model
for the education of Black pupils.
Nothing else changed for a decade.
Black and white children
still attended completely separate schools.
Until 1965, when the federal government
finally began pressuring Southern schools
to obey the law.
Leland adopted what was called a "freedom of choice" plan
that supposedly allowed any family, regardless of race,
to attend whichever school they chose.
SANDERS: My daughter, under freedom of choice, she went to
the Leland High School in the ninth grade,
and integrated the school.
TEACHER: All the people...
SANDERS: I thought by having these integrated schools,
that our kids would have an opportunity
to have a better education-- this is what I thought.
WOOLFOLK: I was very much aware of freedom of choice,
and that I could have chosen
to go to the white school.
As little girl, you know, I was very fair.
And I remember talking to my mother and dad about,
I could go to the white school.
I said I would fit right in,
and my mother said, "You are going to Lincoln."
SCOTT: At that time,
I was assistant principal of the Black elementary school.
Several Black students went over there.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: And how many white students chose to go to the Black school?
None.
Wasn't any white students over here.
None.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: In reality,
freedom of choice was a ruse,
designed to technically comply with federal law,
but for all practical intents and purposes,
still preserve segregation.
No white family was ever going to choose the Black school,
and Black parents knew there could be serious consequences
if they sent their children to the all-white schools.
VERONICA RICHARDSON: A few Black parents sent their children to the white school,
even though you knew that you would have
some animosity toward you.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: That threat was real.
As far back as the 1950s, the state of Mississippi
established a sovereignty commission
with private detectives
and its own agents to spy on and harass
anyone who supported the Civil Rights Movement.
They even hired a paid informant in Leland.
And when local police heard that the town plumber,
a Black man named B.T. Grossley,
had secretly formed a local chapter of the NAACP,
they threatened that white customers would refuse
to hire him and ruin his business.
But there was one group of African Americans
who had little to fear anymore.
The families out at Strike City already had lost everything.
They never got their homes or jobs back.
They'd been harassed and terrorized.
But still, they managed to build for themselves houses
and a meeting hall.
They received federal war on poverty funds
to open up a Head Start program for preschoolers.
Strike City became a hub of civil rights activism.
The strikers even took their tents
to the lawn of the U.S. Capitol.
And in 1966, their leader,
a former tractor driver named John Henry Sylvester,
testified before Congress about the hardships
and abuse in Mississippi.
When freedom of choice finally opened up
those first few seats in Leland's white schools,
the families at Strike City were not intimidated.
EMMA SYLVESTER ADAMS: I was one of the first kids that
integrated the white school.
Dean, Dean School out there.
I was 13 years old, in the sixth grade.
It was hard when we first moved over there.
If you sat at a table
with some of the whites, they'd get up and move.
They didn't want to be by you.
And another thing,
we had to go to the bathroom separate from the white kids.
We had to wait till they go to the bathroom, then we went.
Some of the teachers was all right.
Some of them wasn't.
Some of them, they didn't want to help you learn, they...
You know, like, you'd be asking them something,
they'd tell you to sit down.
"Go do like I told you.
Look in the book if you want to know this here."
The principal over there,
that was the meanest white man I ever seen in my life.
If he caught you in the bathroom with a white,
that man made you sit out in that hallway.
And they'd sit out in that hallway
till it was time to go home.
He wouldn't let you go back to the classroom.
Then you had to come up there with your parents the next day.
Well, I took my dad up there with me.
Most folks said my daddy mean,
but John Henry Sylvester wasn't mean.
He just didn't like nobody picking on his kid for nothing.
He went in the office-- they wouldn't let me go in there.
And from that day on,
I didn't have no problem at the school.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: After a few years,
freedom of choice had turned out the way it was always intended.
Barely three percent of Black children in Mississippi
were attending school with white children.
The Leland High graduating class of 1969
had only three African Americans out of a class of 70.
White Southerners always insisted
that if segregation truly had to be abandoned,
it should happen as slowly as possible.
But the time for that kind of gradual change was running out.
♪ ♪
In 1969, tensions in Leland boiled over.
African Americans launched a boycott of white-owned stores.
Students at the Black high school organized a walkout
and tried to march across town to the white high school,
but they were tear-gassed by the town police chief.
(crowd shouting in panic)
A melee began.
(glass shattering)
Windows were broken.
A white man confronted two Black teenagers
outside a store near the edge of town,
pulled out a pistol... (gun fires)
...and shot a 16-year-old African American.
He survived,
but there was no serious investigation.
The white man was never charged.
There were news stories all of the time
about the push for integration
in different parts of the South.
So as school year 1969 started,
there was a lot more discussion
that full integration is getting closer.
It's likely that there will be a major change.
I don't know if this is sort of
the best time to tell this story,
but since we're talking about integration,
in 1962,
I had just graduated from Louisiana Tech,
and we moved to North Carolina
for your father to go to graduate school.
And so I had to have a job.
I took a job teaching in a small rural school.
When I interviewed, the principal said,
"Well, you should know that this year,
we're going to be integrated."
And I, there...
(stammering): I couldn't even...
I didn't have a choice of thinking about
whether that was okay with me or not,
because I had to have a job.
Then he said that
the Native American school close by was being closed,
so we would have Indian students.
That was the integration he was talking about.
And I was, I was totally confused.
I... I had no idea
that Indian students had been kept apart,
and I didn't know that I was supposed to be
prejudiced against them, so I wasn't.
During that year, I kept trying to figure out
why there was this prejudice.
And as I began to realize
that the prejudice I saw
was, in my opinion, wrong,
then my ideas began to change
about what was right and what was wrong about race.
I realized that we had to open up society
and open up educational opportunities
to other groups of people, including Blacks.
♪ ♪
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: In October 1969,
the Supreme Court finally issued the decision
that would change everything.
♪ ♪
The ruling in Alexander v. Holmes
combined dozens of lawsuits
against white school systems in Mississippi
and ordered all of them
to genuinely integrate every school immediately.
No more "take your time,"
no more "with all due speed."
The ruling was crystal-clear:
close all segregated public schools
in the middle of the academic year,
combine them, and then reopen
as fully integrated schools.
In the South, reaction to
the Supreme Court ruling was
predictable, angry, and swift.
Governor Lester Maddox of Georgia
called it criminal.
Others characterized it
as a disaster for public education.
Now we're going to have
a great number of private schools
that will be formed in this state.
And I have found that neither race desires
highly integrated schools.
Oh, terrible.
He, he would, he would trade off
any votes for segregation.
They come along today with this kind of stuff,
well, it's excusing somebody's activities
like Senator Eastland's activities:
"That's just the way it was back then."
Well, that's, that's baloney.
That's the way Eastland was back then,
that wasn't the way things were back then.
He could have been different if he wanted to be.
♪ ♪
COLEMAN: In the middle of the school year,
we had to desegregate.
If the order came down on Thursday,
Monday, they were backing up trucks,
'cause they had to get the, the,
all the little desks at one school
and then all the larger desks at another school.
We got this big truck,
and we started hauling books and things.
SCOTT: The superintendent called me into the office and told me,
you're going to be going to Dean School as principal.
First thing I did, I lost my voice, I got, I,
I was so nervous and upset.
White parents were reluctant, a lot of them,
about Blacks teaching their children.
My principal told me,
"You will teach science."
I guess they said, "That's not an important subject,
"so let her teach the science.
"She's Black, she can't teach the reading.
"She's not equipped to teach the math.
"We'll give her something insignificant,
so we'll let her teach science."
Well, I didn't like science, really, but I said, "Okay.
"If I have to teach science,
"it's going to be the best science class
that they've ever had."
♪ ♪
We quickly learned that many of the,
of the African American teachers
had degrees from prestigious universities--
Ohio State, Michigan State.
You know, and, and we couldn't quite figure out why.
And then we learned that the state of Mississippi
gave those people scholarships
to go out of state to get their degree,
rather than having them integrate places like
Ole Miss and Mississippi State.
And that's why the, the teachers,
on the surface of it, the Black teachers
seemed more qualified than the white teachers.
When the school integration thing came along,
there was this effort to support the public school.
SARAH BLACKMON: Your father and I,
we were very strong supporters of public school.
Now, there are at least two different reasons.
One is financial.
We didn't feel like that we could afford
to send our children to a private school.
But then also philosophically, we believed that
integration was okay.
We were not marching for integration,
but we were not as opposed to it
as many people that I knew.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Did you have any reservations?
SARAH BLACKMON: We had many reservations about it.
You have one shot at raising your children.
You don't get do-overs.
And we were very, very concerned
that our children get a good education.
It was something that nobody had done before.
We didn't know how it was going to go.
But we felt strongly that we had to,
had to give it a chance.
LACEY: We had Bert Tuggle, a young preacher there
in the Presbyterian church,
got up and said the unthinkable:
"Segregation is un-Christian."
Now, that was a bold, bold statement for that time.
I'd never heard a preacher say it
and nobody else around had ever heard a preacher say it.
Maybe in private, but not from the pulpit.
The reaction was upset,
indignation, rage.
My personal reaction: I was proud of him.
He spoke bravely from the pulpit
that this was the right thing to do.
His position essentially divided that church.
There was about a third of the congregation
that didn't like what he was saying,
and they left the church.
But guess what?
The church was better off without them.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: A group of Black and white parents
began meeting privately every Thursday night,
mostly at Black churches and often led by
Mr. Grossley, the African American plumber
who refused to back down when the state of Mississippi
threatened to ruin his business.
Mrs. Scott,
the uncompromising Black principal
at our elementary school, also joined in.
Those sessions led to even larger public gatherings.
SARAH BLACKMON: There were several community meetings, as I recall,
in the school auditorium,
where these issues were discussed.
There were little placards passed out that said,
"Think positive."
"Keep a positive attitude about this.
Don't assume that it's going to all be negative."
One man, I never will forget, he had a patch over his eye.
He got up in the meeting and asked,
"How come they, they want to come over here to our school?"
He said, "Let them stay in their own school."
Some white people really didn't think
it was going to ever happen.
SARAH BLACKMON: A group of people began to say, publicly,
"We're going to keep our children in public school."
We decided to buy an ad in the local newspaper,
"The Leland Progress,"
and put our name on the line
that we are committed to public education.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: My parents' names were near the top of the list.
Then, a few days later, the Ku Klux Klan
dropped threatening fliers on the front yard
of our home and every other house on our street.
But the newspaper ad kept appearing,
every week for a month, each time with more names.
♪ ♪
Finally, it was time
for me and my classmates to begin first grade.
Our class arrived on September 4, 1970,
under a still blistering-hot Mississippi Delta sky.
When that day came,
more than half of Leland's white children didn't show up,
but the other half did.
MAGEE: First day of school for me,
I don't know, I guess it just felt like
anybody else's first day of school.
A little scary.
My mother went to school with me
to, to get you all registered
and hand her baby boy off to
Miss Scott, who the was principal.
BUSH: You had the plantation owners' children
going to school with us.
You would think
they would treat you differently,
and it didn't really happen like that.
We did playground, recess, ate lunch together.
We just didn't ride the bus together,
because their parents, I guess, you know, at that time,
were fortunate enough to drive them to school.
The only explicit,
racially specific memory
that I have from those very early days
was being out on the playground one day,
and another little white boy comes along,
and clearly, he's repeating something
he heard from his parents.
But he says, "I think all of the...
I think all the Blacks should go back to Africa."
And I remember my amazement
at the idea that they were from Africa.
(chuckling): Because in my limited imagination,
I could only hear that as to mean that,
that these kids I knew
were born in Africa and had come to Leland, Mississippi,
to go to school.
And I said, I remember saying,
"Anthony and Craig and Donald, they're from Africa?"
And then he said, "Yeah, they're all from Africa."
(laughing): And, and so...
And to me, it's...
To me, I thought, "Wow," you know,
"that's, that's incredible."
You may have been taught things at home,
but, you know, it wasn't taught in school.
Some of my Black friends
pulled me to the side,
as a matter of fact, one on each side,
and said, "You're coming to play with us today.
You're going to play with the Black boys today."
You know, "You're not supposed to be over there
"with the white boys, you're supposed to be...
You're supposed to be with the Black boys."
And, I mean, they kind of pressured me,
and they were serious, and they were...
They seemed to be upset to a degree.
And I told them, I said,
"Hey, let's go all play together.
"They don't mind you playing with them,
I'm going over there."
But they still were kind of adamant about it,
and I didn't go with them.
I went with my friend Jimmy,
because that's who I played with every day.
It was great, I don't think you could've...
Especially the elementary years,
I don't know that you could've had a better experience
or better teachers or better supervision.
I just don't remember ever having a problem
with anything then.
We always got along at the school.
I'm, I'm sure there were things
that maybe I'm forgetting
where we didn't get along
from a racial perspective,
but it seemed to me,
when you removed the school
and you went outside and into the community,
and I hate to say this, but to the adults,
that there wasn't the embrace of the integration.
MAGEE: I, I, I do remember,
there were several people I was friends with, you know.
I remember my mother having to tell me,
"Well, they're not going to go to school with you,
they're going to go somewhere else."
And I thought it was a little weird.
How come they're not going to school with us?
♪ ♪
LACEY: The group of people who
could not stand integration
got together and created Leland Academy,
and that threw a lot of children out of the public school.
I was on the original board
to start the Leland Academy.
I don't know how deep you want to get into the mindset,
but I don't think it was
so much a racial thing as it was a,
uh, social, cultural, uh,
moral, economic, uh, thing.
Um...
And educational.
Uh, there was a...
I, I think those figured into it more than race,
although
there was a racial factor involved.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: All over Mississippi,
and soon all across the South,
white people opposed to racial integration
were doing something the Supreme Court
would never have believed possible.
All-white private schools,
like the one in Leland,
popped up almost overnight
in dozens of towns.
PHIL JONES: In the Canton, Mississippi, school district,
parents and their children
have been working around the clock
to convert this former tent manufacturing plant
into an academy for grades one through 12.
Most of the 1,400 white students in the district
are now enrolled.
♪ ♪
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Soon, there were more than 100 of those schools
across Mississippi and nearby states,
attended by more than 30,000 white students.
Most of the new schools,
including Leland Academy,
claimed not to exclude African American children.
But, in fact,
they were part of an association of private schools
that for years secretly required them
to refuse admission to any Black child
and never to hire a Black teacher.
Leland Academy opened in 1969
in the education building of a nearby Baptist church,
while organizers rapidly constructed a new school
on vacant land
right next to the Leland High School football field.
Oh, at the time of integration,
my expectations of what white families would do
would be to leave.
SCOTT: I wasn't surprised-- I wasn't surprised at all.
I knew the reason they was doing that.
They just didn't want to be with the Black people.
And see, a lot of that, I think, had to do with...
(clicks tongue)
Ignorance-- I'm sorry.
I mean, I mean it "not knowing."
If you don't know something, you're fearful of it.
And so, many of the white families
had only known
their maids.
And for some of them, just,
they were people, but not people.
SARAH BLACKMON: Before I moved to Leland,
I really had never had a conversation
with a Black person as equals
until my children started school in Leland,
and Veronica Richardson
was one of my oldest son, Glenn's, teachers.
And I always met all of my teachers.
And she would have been the first person
that I can remember where I and a Black person
had a conversation as absolute equals.
You know, it...
I just had never had that experience before.
♪ ♪
VERONICA RICHARDSON: I always wondered, how could all the whites
go to the private school?
How they could afford to go.
And what was there that was so different?
Because we catered to the whites a good bit
when they were in the school system.
PAM PEPPER: I started school at Leland Academy.
It was an all-white school.
It was, I think, a combination of kids whose parents
actively did not want them to go to the public school
and kids whose parents
were maybe interested in the public school,
but worried that this was a new experiment thing,
and nobody knew quite where it was headed.
So, there was a combination of,
"My child will never go to a public school,"
and, "I'd like my child to, to go to public school,
but I don't know how this is all gonna go."
It felt like a makeshift,
which I suppose it was.
It, it was kind of out on the highway
in a building that looked sort of like a school building.
It was very small,
weren't a whole lot of kids there,
and it was very barren.
There were no trees or anything.
I mean, it looked like it had just gone up.
My memory of it is,
"Well, this is a temporary installation," sort of.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: In the year before full integration,
Leland's public schools
had barely changed from a decade earlier.
The African American schools remained 100% Black.
Leland's previously all-white schools
were still more than 90% white.
Only 81 Black kids had shared classrooms
with more than 1,000 white children.
After it all became one system,
Leland's schools were 80% Black and 20% white.
SARAH BLACKMON: That school year,
I started back teaching full-time.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: How did you react to being around all these Black folks?
I had to do some fast learning.
There were things that I had said all of my life,
like calling my students "boys and girls."
But I began to realize that,
to my Black students,
being called a "boy"--
always being called a "boy"-- was very offensive.
I didn't want to offend my students.
So I began to work at never calling them boys.
I worked at not doing things that I knew were offensive.
I am a teacher.
I wanted my students to learn.
And if my behavior kept them from learning,
then I needed to do something about my behavior.
SCOTT: At first, I went through
some challenges there with teachers.
There were some teachers,
you know, going to other schools
because they refused to work under me or with me.
One in particular was something to deal with,
let me tell you.
I hated to see a school where one shade is up
and one's half down.
So I made an announcement, I said,
"Please adjust your shades before leaving."
She said she had been at that school
don't know how many years.
I don't know how many years she said.
But she said nobody ever told her to adjust her shades.
I said, "Okay"-- I just said, "Okay."
So in the evening, when school was out,
I'd walk down the hall, walk in her room.
She'd be sitting at her desk, all the children would be gone.
"Hey, how you doing?"
Walk over to her window,
adjust her shades, and walk out.
(shades sliding) (footsteps retreating)
I did that for three evenings straight.
The fourth evening I walked in there, I never will forget it.
She said, "You don't have to come in here
and adjust my shades-- I can adjust my shades."
I said, "Well, I don't mind it.
I don't mind it at all."
Since then,
when I would get down there,
her shades was adjusted, and she was gone.
I worked that out, me and the good Lord.
♪ ♪
VERONICA RICHARDSON: The faculties actually got along pretty well,
the whites and the Blacks.
Some of us became friends on down through the years.
Teaching strategies, how do you do this,
how do you teach this,
and shared the ways that we could, uh,
handle the children.
We didn't talk race too much.
We just more or less talked people.
POINDEXTER: The way we were set up in school was,
they had A, B, C, D,
all the way, I think all the way down to G and H,
as far as grouping children into classes.
(children calling and talking in background)
MAGEE: Early in elementary school,
we had to take a test, and, and,
and people were grouped afterwards.
DONALD RICHARDSON: That whole A, B, C group, I...
The whole, uh, the connotation behind it.
I, I remember, I starkly remember,
conversations with other Black kids, Black males,
about the ability groups.
Paul Chambers,
and I'm trying to think, maybe Craig Rainey,
and that's it.
Only three African American males in the A group, you know,
in a town that is, uh, to say the least,
chock-full of African American males. (laughing)
The A section was mostly gonna be your white students.
But I was in the B section.
The B section were mostly Blacks, some white kids.
You kind of remember that, right? (laughs)
Later in our elementary, elementary career,
some of the African American students
got a real sense of that A, B, C group.
And, and I left Leland as a sixth-grader
and went to Greenville, because we had moved.
And so, I'm talking about fourth-graders
and third-graders who understood,
"Oh, we are ability-grouped,
but this may not be fair."
POINDEXTER: I started out in fourth grade in C.
You knew, if you were in C,
you're not as smart as the kids in 4, 4B or 4A,
you're not as good as the kids in 4B or 4A.
And so you knew that, you know, you were kind of....
What's a C? A C is average.
You knew that you were average,
and it was kind of taken that way.
What we did at that time
was to group by ability.
You know, after a test?
The white parents who stayed with the school systems
were kind of forward-thinking people, you know.
So, naturally, their children were pretty,
in pretty good shape, and so, when they took those tests,
it ended up with a lot of whites together.
And so you still had, in a way, a, a sort of a segregation.
I decided that I'm not gonna stay in 4C.
I think I belong in A,
and I'm gonna work to make sure I did, and I did.
In the fifth grade, I moved to 5B,
and there were a few more white children,
but still mostly Black.
But then I moved to 6A.
That's where you and I met-- 6A almost flipped.
It was mostly white,
and mostly middle-class and upper-middle-class children
that were in those classes.
I'm a new guy, just coming in,
so I was an interloper.
They're looking at me, like,
"How did you get in here?
Where did you come from?"
Not just the white students, but more so the Black students.
And so I had issues.
I had bullying issues with several of the folks.
And I won't mention names, so...
PEPPER: Leland Academy only went through the sixth grade.
And so my parents had a choice,
and that was either put me on a bus to another town
or go to the public school.
And by that time, the public school had been six years,
and the world hadn't collapsed, and the sky hadn't fallen.
And my dad was teaching, I think,
at Leland High School at that time.
And my mom had got, gotten to know a lot of the teachers.
And I think she started to feel
the teaching was, in many ways, better at public school
than, uh, at some private schools.
And so they just made the decision
that they were gonna send me to, to public school,
which turned out to be one of the best things
that ever happened to me, so...
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Leland's public schools
were not perfect,
but it meant something when families
like Pam Pepper's came back.
Things were changing.
(drums beating in distance, crowd talking in background)
In 1976, Leland geared up for a classic small-town celebration
of the 200th anniversary
of the founding of America.
(marching band playing)
The town renovated the old train station.
Our congressman came to speak.
♪ ♪
There were two parades,
wagon rides, R.O.T.C. units,
a float celebrating Leland High's
integrated championship football team.
♪ ♪
And the Cub Scouts marching down Main Street
with my mother were both white and Black.
♪ ♪
I marched in the junior high school band.
We proudly wore blue and gold,
the old colors of Breisch High.
BOB BLACKMON: We thought that this is gonna ultimately work out.
We believed that we had done something good.
We were gonna change things,
and maybe begin to create
Martin Luther King's "beloved community."
We were optimistic.
I mean, you know, that,
that many years after desegregation, we were,
we were pretty optimistic that it was gonna work out.
(insects chirping, birds trilling)
One white child
that had gone to the private school all his life,
and then he came to our school,
he seemed to be okay on the front end,
but, but I could tell,
and my other Black classmates could tell,
and my other white classmates could tell,
that he hadn't been around Black kids.
We were in line, and I tripped over a rock,
and I bumped into him.
And he told the teacher that I pushed him in the back.
And my teacher took me outside,
my white teacher took me outside.
She went across the hall,
and she called another teacher, who was Black,
and she punished me.
I got, I got, uh, three licks for that.
And I remember, um, being very upset, I remember crying.
I remember being very confused
about why the Black teacher had to come punish me.
But, even more so, why did the white teacher
just take what he said as law?
I started, my first year in the Leland school system
was the sixth grade.
(children calling in background)
So on the very first day, we're out on the playground,
and I ran into a Black boy that was in the same grade.
It was purely accidental,
but, you know, his friends, like, "You gonna let this guy
do this to you?"
It became very adversarial very quickly.
And, um, so we got into a fight.
There was tension, um, between some of the white students
and some of the Black students,
and...
Gosh, it wasn't too far around the time when "Roots"
was on television for eight nights.
(breathing heavily)
POINDEXTER: That stoked even more of the,
kind of the racial fervor.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: There seemed to be some kind of tension or animosity at school,
even though it wasn't really clear
what this was about or where it started.
You know, was it the white kids
who were, had animosity first
or the Black-- it didn't, I didn't know.
Probably didn't matter, probably wasn't a first.
But there was just this unexplained tension
between the Black kids and the white kids,
uh, that built on itself.
♪ ♪
POINDEXTER: Your parents talked to you about, "Well, you know,
you need to speak to white people a certain way."
It was ingrained in them,
and they were kind of giving us the, the talk, if you will,
to say, you know, "You need to kind of conduct yourself
a certain way around white folks or you're gonna get in trouble."
We've had the talk.
We don't like the fact that we've had the talk.
And now I'm, I'm in with a guy who's basically my peer
that I have to walk around on eggshells with.
And that's where a lot of tension was.
I'm not gonna walk around on eggshells.
And there were fights.
The guy that I had the wrestling match with,
or, it was more a wrestling match than a fight,
was Billy Barber.
And, uh, I gave him a bloody nose.
I know that for a fact,
because I can still see it in my mind.
So, about that time, the teachers come and separate us
and we got off to the principal's office,
and we didn't even know each other.
How could we be angry with each other?
We didn't even know each other.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Don, I got this memory,
and I'm trying to remember if it's right.
It was the, I was really
into G.I. Joes, you were really into G.I. Joes.
COMMERCIAL ANNOUNCER: And here's Super Joe's Rocket Command Center,
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DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Do you remember that?
DONALD RICHARDSON: Very well.
We were into G.I. Joes big-time.
I don't think they developed the Kung Fu grip yet, but, uh,
we wanted to play at home, as opposed to school.
So we both made mention to our parents,
"Hey, I want to go over to Doug's house.
Hey, Doug wants to go over to my house."
I remember doing that with my Black friends all the time.
I remember a discussion in my home.
I don't remember what was said, exactly,
but I could understand: Oh, that might be tricky.
They didn't say "bad."
They said,
or they implied, okay,
that that might be, uh, controversial.
They, without using the word "controversial,"
without using the word "tricky."
I don't even remember the word "black" or "white."
Or "Black boy" or "white boy."
I just remember
them sort of glossing over it a bit,
and saying, "Well, we'll see."
Of course, my son always reminds me,
"Oh, Dad, whenever you say we'll see or maybe, that means no."
(chuckles)
I can't remember even now anyone ever saying,
"No, you can't do that."
But somehow, we got the message.
Those kinds of experiences did begin to stack up.
And by middle school, I began to think about,
oh, it's very strange that school
is Black and white and combined, but church is all white.
Little League baseball in the summer is all white.
My Boy Scout troop is all white.
The swimming pool I go to
never has a Black person in it.
Every other dimension of life
is as archly segregated as it ever was.
But here in this one place, for a few hours every day,
it's Black and white.
♪ ♪
PEPPER: I don't recall having even the remotest consciousness
that something was significant
about going to an integrated school.
I don't remember having
a consciousness of the fact
that there was a Civil Rights Movement, quite frankly,
at that age, which is horrifying and embarrassing to say.
♪ ♪
BARBER: Leland was one of the best districts
that you could go to school in.
We had a tough grading system.
Anything below 75 was an F.
And I think it helped us.
It helped us a lot, and, and it helped us to value things
and, and to want more and to do more.
We had great English teachers, math teachers,
home economics teachers
right here in this small community.
I was able to do a term paper
because we had teachers
like Miss Quimby, for example.
She made certain that we knew how to do an essay.
When I got to college, I knew how to do it.
There was every kind of club and every kind of activity,
and that's how we formed our friendships, mostly.
Van Poindexter, he and I were in the school play together.
The friendships came from common interests.
Because the school was small, there were a lot
of overlapping common interests.
So you might be on the school newspaper with somebody
and be a cheerleader with somebody.
And so you, you kind of have crossover friendships.
BRYAN BLACKMON: I was fairly athletic, I played football.
You developed
the same sorts of relationships, really,
uh, with the Black kids as you did the white kids.
Probably had a lot to do with, we were a team,
and we had to work together.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: I wasn't the greatest athlete in the world,
but I played basketball all the time.
In my junior high school years, I'd been afraid to try out,
because, in fact, the team was overwhelmingly Black.
Uh, they were clearly better athletes
than I believed myself to be at the time.
And so I get to high school,
and I've decided I'm not gonna let that happen again.
I'm gonna try out for the high school team.
So I was the only white kid on the team.
We were an overwhelmingly Black team
from a majority Black school
playing in a league made up of other schools
that were pretty much all 100% Black.
That experience of being the one white kid on that team
was a singular one in my life.
TAYLOR: I was focused, you know, as far as being
a good student and a good,
you know, athlete, as well.
My senior year, we went 21 and five.
We won some big tournaments.
We were serious about what we were doing, you know?
MAGEE: Brandon Taylor was, uh,
one of the best basketball players that any of us had seen.
He could slam it in the hoop any time he wanted to,
and nobody could really stop him.
TAYLOR: I mean, they had us sharp.
We ran, you know, the sprints,
jump rope, the long distance, as well.
Because as a big guy, you know, being six-seven,
when I was jumping that rope, man, my quickness was,
I mean, it was phenomenal.
You know, the little guards blow by you,
they think they're going to get a layup.
(slaps table): You pin against the board.
And he's, like, "Hey, where did you come from?"
(chuckling): That was fun.
We represented ourselves,
our families, and the city of Leland.
And we wanted to, you know, come out on top.
Every night we wanted to win.
I think, as a unit,
we cared about each other.
COGGIN: The neat thing about that story of the bloody nose
with Billy Barber is that, in high school,
we were one of the best baseball teams in the state.
He was a catcher, I played shortstop.
He was such a great leader.
And I just,
when I think of him, I can't help but smile,
because I think about how it started...
(quietly): ...and how it ended.
I recall wonderful experiences in high school.
One is when I was a part of
the Future Farmers of America,
the FFA.
We had two sponsors,
Terry James and Allen Clark.
They took me in like I was their son.
They made me parliamentarian.
Barely knew the word parliamentarian.
Certainly didn't know what it meant.
But they gave me an opportunity.
And there was a young guy that was the president.
Last name was Smyly.
I was a freshman.
He was a senior.
But Smyly took me under his wings
and told me I could do it.
And we had drilled and drilled
over the parliamentarian procedures.
We had "Robert's Rules of Order" contests.
We had to learn how to distinguish
between the Jersey cows and the Brahman cows.
Everywhere they would go, I found myself going.
And there were times I didn't have money,
but they did not let me go without.
And if Smyly and Allen and James had the money,
Jessie did, too.
It increased my confidence.
And when I became a junior, nobody had to ask me,
"Will you run for junior class officer?"
I was ready.
I did it without second-guessing myself.
PEPPER: It wasn't all delightful and, and perfect and wonderful.
One time, a bunch of us
went to cheerleader camp at Ole Miss,
and I remember ordering a frozen yogurt, because I had
always heard about it and heard about it,
and it sounded so cool,
and I wanted to try frozen yogurt.
And one of the Black cheerleaders said,
"Well, what does it taste like?"
And I said, "Well, taste it."
And I gave it to her.
And one of the white cheerleaders said,
"Are you gonna use the spoon after her?"
I remember thinking, "What did you just say?"
Um, and I don't remember how the Black cheerleader reacted.
I, I remember going,
"Give me my yogurt back, I'm gonna keep eating it."
Looking back, I have sadness now
that I didn't have then
about the fact
that there were wonderful social relationships
between 8:15 and 3:30,
and at football games,
and working on homecoming floats and whatever else
but they didn't extend beyond that
between Black kids and white kids.
Outside, going to each other house...
Didn't do that often.
Once you got out of school in May,
you know, you may see each other at the store,
in passing, you'd speak.
But really, you may not see your white friends
until August or September.
In hindsight, you look at it and think, well, why?
That doesn't make sense.
It's not the way you live your life now.
It was just the way it was.
The fact that we didn't have any events together,
Black and white, was noticeable.
The one thing I do remember was prom.
That was it.
And it was...
It was kind of tenuous then.
You know, the whites were together
and the Blacks were together.
And even though we were dancing
with our significant others...
(chuckling): ...at the time,
it was still a division.
And you could see it.
Whites on one side, Blacks kind of on another side.
That was, that was weird.
PEPPER: We had Blacks kids and white kids
on the homecoming court,
but no joint homecoming dance.
After homecoming was over,
all the white kids went to the garden club
or wherever we went.
And the Blacks kids went to wherever they went.
And we had separate homecoming dances,
even though everybody had sat right there
on the homecoming court together.
After the senior play, my mom and dad wanted to do
a cast party at our house.
Van said something about
he didn't think he was going to come.
And I remember sort of having my feelings hurt.
And he said, you know, "I don't know if my parents will let me,
"'cause if I'm over there in the white neighborhood,
"my mother would be worried
"that I could be stopped
or I could get in some sort of trouble."
It was just the way we thought.
"You can't go to white people's houses like that."
He said it, and I thought, "Well, no!"
I mean, "How could that be?
It's just our neighborhood, it's just our house."
I'll be honest with you, we were just frightened
of the trouble you could get into
by going to an, a white person's house.
We just, we just didn't do it.
(birds chirping, insects buzzing)
And I've heard stories, and you probably have, too,
that if you're around a white girl, you know,
make sure you know your bearings,
because if she cries anything untoward towards you,
you're in trouble.
She's right, you're wrong, you're in trouble.
A Black guy and a white girl, it just didn't happen here.
It was not gonna happen.
♪ ♪
We were learning to talk to each other
in our safe school environment,
but we never really took it to the next level, the next step,
which was learning to deal with each other socially.
(insects chirping)
It was still the creek and the railroad track dividing us.
(train horn blows)
(train bell ringing)
♪ ♪
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Those 12 years of school hadn't turned out
exactly the way anyone predicted at the beginning.
But the segregationists who said
it would never work to put Black and white kids
in the same schools were proven wrong.
The first harvest
of all that effort, the class of 1982,
crossed the stage on commencement night
and stepped out into the world,
Black and white together.
That was a milestone.
Because we wanted equality.
PEPPER: Brown was supposed to get rid of the "separate"
in separate but equal.
And to an extent it did.
We went to school together.
For a long time, a lot of us went to school together.
Some of us really liked it. (chuckles)
Hope a lot of us really liked it.
KING: 1982, integration was a reality.
And then here come the children of integration
who had to be taught about racial biases,
had to be told about-- we didn't know it.
And thank God nobody really just drove it in.
You had a few,
but you had more who were saying,
"In Leland, it's time-- it's time."
And it really was time.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: As it turned out, I didn't get to be one of those graduates.
My dad got a new job in another town,
and my family moved there while I was still in high school.
I went to college,
became a journalist,
even won a Pulitzer Prize.
And for a long time,
lost touch with most of my childhood friends.
(insects chirping)
I imagined that progress in Leland would just keep going.
It seemed like we in the town had done the hardest work.
(people talking in background)
Three decades later, I decided to go back
and watch another Leland High School graduation.
("Pomp and Circumstance" playing)
The stage, the auditorium,
and the excitement of the graduates
all seemed the same as back in 1982.
(audience cheering)
(playing gentle piece)
(man announcing graduate's name)
(audience cheering)
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: But the classes looked very different
than the one I'd been part of.
Almost all the white kids were gone.
(audience cheering)
MAN: You may now turn your tassels.
(cheering)
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: It was almost as if everything
from those remarkable years together
had never happened.
TAYLOR: Back when Doug and I were in school, we had a good mix.
Now it's 90% Black, you know?
Maybe a little higher.
There have been changes.
A lot of people have sent their, you know, kids
to private schools.
You don't have that many whites
in Leland Public School District.
A lot of the whites have moved out.
If they come to the Leland Public School,
they'll take their kids in the elementary part,
and once they get past elementary,
by the time they make it to junior high,
they're going to the private school.
COLEMAN: Some of the families are not pleased
with what public schools are doing.
Blacks and whites who want
their children to be educated
will seek other means.
Even Black churches.
Unity Church has its own school
because of faith-based money that's out there.
And it's a sad statement.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: In the decade after my class graduated,
Leland's public schools performed well academically.
A steady trickle of white students returned.
♪ ♪
And Leland Academy, the white private school,
closed its doors.
But that was an illusion.
Most white families were gone forever.
They still lived in Leland,
but the hundreds of white students
who left during integration
and the brothers and sisters who came after
almost all were sent to other private schools
in nearby towns.
Those schools eventually began accepting
a few students who were not white.
But the schools set up to preserve
segregation had accomplished their purpose.
Integration didn't stick the way we thought it was gonna stick.
We're segregated again.
The thing that we have been fighting
for years and years, we're there again.
Now it's back to almost the way it was.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: The failure to genuinely integrate public schools
affected more than just what happened in kids' classrooms.
The dream had been to build a community
of different kinds of people
who could trust each other enough
to work through the troubles that eventually hit every town.
But that never really happened.
And places like Leland
had a lot of trouble to work through in the 1990s.
Technology eliminated massive numbers of farm jobs.
Dramatic cuts to public education,
the war on drugs,
one store after another closing down
in the center of town.
It all took a terrible toll.
♪ ♪
(sirens wailing)
Then, in 1996,
Leland was tested when a Black TV repairman named Aaron White
crashed his truck on Deer Creek Drive
and tried to flee the scene.
He exchanged gunfire
with a white policeman named Jackie Blaylock,
a former Leland High School quarterback.
White died from a gunshot wound to the head.
Black residents erupted in days of angry protests.
Hundreds of state troopers were called in
to enforce a nightly curfew.
We stood for something that we believed in.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Cedric Bush, one of my former schoolmates,
was one of the leaders of those protests.
He was arrested for refusing to comply with the curfew.
BUSH: There were a lot of questions
behind the death of the young man,
and the community thought
that we should have had some answers,
or someone in leadership
would come forth and tell us something.
Tried to keep it hush-hush.
A lot of people were upset behind how that,
that particular, you know, thing went down,
and the only thing they were asking for was,
what, what was the investigation,
is the investigation ongoing?
You know, just tell us something.
You know, we just thought that this man
had been killed in cold blood.
Leland has not been the same since.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: In the end, an FBI investigation
concluded that the bullet that killed Aaron White
came from his own gun.
Publicly, they said it was a tragic accident,
but the possibility that a Black man in Mississippi
would kill himself rather than face a white policeman
still haunts me.
Leland was supposed to have been the town
that exorcised its racial demons,
or at least a lot of them.
I began to wonder if failed school integration
was as much a cornerstone of my hometown
as segregation had been 50 years before.
For us to still be fractured
along racial lines is heartbreaking.
A lot of very important people
put their lives on the line
to make sure that we would have
and would see better days.
And I don't think people think about
that part of our history now.
You know?
Um, that's something that should be
near and dear to everybody's heart, you know,
regardless of what color you are.
I mean, 'cause, that was a struggle,
and it's a struggle now.
I don't know why resegregation is happening,
but I can anticipate that,
or I can imagine, that part of it might be
that there are experiences
that Black people have had
that they feel like
they can't really talk to white people about,
because there won't be any comprehension
of a similar experience.
I think it's difficult
for people to, uh, remember,
because they, then they have to talk about it.
You know? And that's a difficult conversation
that, um, to have with each other
and to have with a, a Black person.
But, and, and then, perhaps, uh, as children,
they were shielded from some of that.
I, I have no idea.
But, but I, I have talked with classmates who say,
my classmates who say, "Oh! I'm so sorry that happened to you.
I didn't know, you know, that was going on."
"So you didn't know why I was sitting up in the balcony?"
You know?
"You, you didn't know why we had to go through the side door,
"and we had-- you didn't know any of that?
Surely, you jest."
We work hard to forget things, we...
It is a human instinct, and there are things
that we don't want to remember,
uh, that we end up not remembering.
Or at least are able to pretend we don't remember
for a really long time.
Uh, and as hard as we work to forget,
we have to work just as hard to remember.
It's a difficult conversation.
But until we start having that, those difficult conversations,
we're always gonna be, you know, um, divided in some way.
Because it has to be reconciled.
My truth has to be reconciled with your truth.
It's hard to believe
that things wouldn't be better
if there were, certainly, people
with a more openness
to accept people for who they are.
And I do think that much of that in me
came from the time I was in public schools.
Maybe I didn't see that bigger picture then that I see now.
Maybe I didn't see that.
But I do think I saw a glimpse of it.
And so what if some of us, more of us had stayed around?
Would it be the same?
Was it a reasonable expectation
to think that simply putting
innocent little kids of one race
and innocent little kids of another in a school together,
then everything would be fine?
The everything would be fine part I think is unreasonable.
But I still think, I still believe
that it's really hard to hate somebody who you know.
It's really hard to hate somebody
who is smarter than you in math
and they're willing to sit with you for 15 minutes
and help you with it.
So, was it perfect?
Did it solve the world's problems?
Was it reasonable to expect that that was the only piece?
No.
But was there some, some kernel of reason
to the thought of, "Look, if you could just sit down and,
next to each other and see"?
I think that was reasonable.
Integration in its purest form,
uh, it dispels stereotype,
and it helps with prejudice.
We are all prejudiced.
We just have to find a way to move forward together,
and to make sure that everybody has a piece of the pie,
and a level playing field
to set our tables on to eat our pie.
♪ ♪
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: After I started returning to Leland,
I discovered something new happening.
Some of my former classmates were coming back home.
All right, everybody, looking at me.
(camera shutter clicks)
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Billy Barber came back to Leland
to be chief of police.
Doug said he went to school with everybody.
Jessie King, you...
That's right, we all went to school together.
BARBER: After college, I left Leland.
I really felt like I was going to do ten years
in law enforcement and get out.
But it kept tugging at me
that Leland needed some leadership in law enforcement.
Not to say that I was, I'm the best.
But I know it was the Lord telling me, "Go back home
to help home out."
Brandon and Cedric and Evelyn Gordon told me,
said, "Come on back, come home."
I'm still here.
And I just think that this is where the Lord wanted me to be.
(congregation singing)
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: And I found out that on weekends,
Billy Barber has another calling.
(singing)
BARBER: Being a police chief
is actually not much different from being a pastor.
You have the same love.
And my love is for the citizens,
to keep them safe...
(congregation singing)
...and just having the love of God,
and to love people,
and to treat people right and treat people with respect,
and, and to try to make the community better.
(singing)
(song ends, congregation applauding)
(marching band playing)
(shouting and cheering)
(speaking indistinctly)
Play your hearts out-- whatever position...
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Cedric Bush had been a football superstar
in high school,
the kind of young athlete who actually had a shot
at playing professional football.
BUSH: I thought about a conversation
with one of my professors.
And, um, and he had asked the question,
he said, "What do you plan to do
once you're done with college?"
And I said, "Oh, man, I'm going to the pros,
"I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do that,
and buy my dad a truck, I'm gonna build Mom a house."
He said, "Yeah, but what if that doesn't work out?"
I said, "What do you mean, if it doesn't work out?
I'm, I'm, you know, I'm good-- I, I'm gonna make it."
He said, "Listen.
"Your parents sent you to school to get an education.
"When you get the education,
"you're supposed to get the knowledge
"and take it back home
to help build your community."
Now, I never heard that before in my life.
No, right there! Right there!
(voiceover): He gave me the greatest tool
that I could ever hear as a young man.
I end up coming home.
I went to the school system to coach and teach.
ANNOUNCER: Touchdown, Cubs.
BUSH: And then I began my political career
and ran for the city council.
I served, uh, one term.
Now, serving as a justice court judge,
you do more help to people than harm to people.
Some people just need a second chance.
And that's who I am, that's the role I try to play
in coming back home to help my community.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Cedric and his wife also went into business,
taking over the old Leland Café.
They now run the restaurant
that wouldn't have let their parents enter
through the front door.
They also started a funeral home
at the center of Leland's downtown
and in the same building
where the segregated Rex Theater had once operated.
BUSH: To be proud owners of this particular building,
knowing the history behind it, you can't beat it.
You can't beat it.
Brandon Taylor and Evelyn Gordon-Murray
were elected to the school board.
She has served more than ten years.
Brandon is president of the board.
TAYLOR: I played basketball at, uh, Baylor.
And then I went across seas to Germany.
I could've stayed across seas and played in other countries,
but I love, you know, the smalltown feel,
the smalltown atmosphere.
There's nothing like being at home.
What made me decide to run for the school board?
My love for the kids.
I want to make sure the children
have someone fighting for them every day.
GORDON-MURRAY: I would like to see our school back like it used to be.
If we had
more whites in our school,
you would have the backing of the community.
MAN: ...the stadium, uh, you see the...
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: A few years later, after an unexpected drop
in the performance of Leland schools
and a succession of superintendents
who struggled to turn the system around...
And, and all great ideas, we welcome...
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: ...the board hired another of our classmates,
Jessie King, to be school superintendent.
We need to clear it up.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: In the years since then,
student scores in Leland
have improved dramatically.
KING: When I was a teacher,
and the superintendent said,
"Jessie, what do you want to do in life?
I mean, what would be your dream job?"
I said to the superintendent, "To have your job."
And the superintendent smiled and said,
"You can have it someday."
And someday came.
I've been the superintendent of the Leland School District
since February of 2016.
Good morning. WOMAN: Good morning.
Just wanted to stop in and see how learning is progressing.
(voiceover): That first year, I walked into some situations
that I just did not know
existed in the school district.
The technology was not here.
The libraries did not have current, um, books.
And so we had a lot of challenges.
And our kids deserve better,
our kids should have better,
and our community, I hope,
will help us to make it better.
Hello, how are you?
♪ ♪
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: For reasons I've never entirely understood,
giving that little speech about Strike City
to the Lions Club long ago
seemed to connect me to that place
and the people who lived there
even decades after I no longer lived in Mississippi.
They were self-sufficient, really, on a lot of stuff.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: I visited more than once over the years.
And in the 1990s, I took a cameraman along
and did one of the last interviews
with John Henry Sylvester,
the leader of the walkout,
a few years before he passed away.
And then, when we went on strike with him that day,
we had to, he, he put us all off the place that day...
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: I was struck by their determination and bravery,
basically still on strike 30 years
after the day they walked off that farm.
But Strike City was also crumbling by then.
Some of the houses had burned or been abandoned.
The painted sign with Black and white hands clasped in unity
had fallen long ago.
The original plans to make bricks,
to create an economy separate from white control,
were all abandoned.
I wasn't sure what to make of it all.
MINNIE BELL YOUNG (on record): ♪ Well, no matter how long it takes ♪
♪ Well, I know he... ♪
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: That's your voice, isn't it?
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, that's it. (laughs)
I guess I got a little solo.
(singing along): ♪ Well, he may not come when you want him ♪
♪ But he's right on time ♪
(recording stops) ♪ You can't hurry God ♪
♪ You just have to wait ♪
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: I also realized that, among the many things I never knew
about my Black classmates when we were kids,
was that Jessie King and Billy Barber
both had deep connections to Strike City.
This is the place that I went to Head Start,
which was very popular for low-income children
going into public schools.
♪ ♪
This is Strike City here.
It used to be very vibrant.
A lot of the buildings are gone now,
but a few are still standing.
It was classroom space,
it was, um, a dining hall, lunchroom.
Was a huge playground here for us,
where we did not have the luxury on the plantations.
I remember very vividly,
you would only have standing room.
Kids were everywhere.
Teachers were everywhere.
Once you became a teacher in Head Start,
it was like you had really struck oil.
I think about the people
who actually came from the plantations.
Sharecropping no longer existed.
So we had the gardens up there
with greens and vegetables and crops.
If you pitched in, you'd get an opportunity
to get some of the vegetables.
Even when you didn't pitch in,
the kindness of the spirit would be, "Pitch in next time."
(birds chirping)
Strike City symbolized a step up for African Americans.
And it gave motivation and encouragement,
that this may be the first step,
but it was a huge step in the right direction.
You know, I have, I have--
I'm not exaggerating this--
in just this last few minutes of listening to you,
I've had a little epiphany.
Mm-hmm.
You could look at Strike City and say,
"Well, you know, it was a good thing to go on strike,
and they were right, but it didn't work."
Mm-hmm. You know, you can say that.
But the truth is, it did work.
Mm-hmm. And the story you're telling
is, is, it just worked in this different way.
Mm-hmm. The store and
the women who had been working in houses
becoming teachers, and, you know... Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Just, all the things that you're talking about. Yeah.
You're gonna get, you're gonna get me emotional.
I have...
I've always just known in my heart
that this was a story of a great success. Mm-hmm.
But I couldn't quite put it together
until I was listening to you just now.
Yeah, it, it really is.
KING: Um, if this had not existed,
living where we lived,
we only saw what we saw.
And just getting out of that
gave us another target to improve,
to advance, and to move forward.
I think about my mom,
who made the bold assertion,
"Enough is enough, and we're leaving.
We're leaving."
If she'd never decided to do that,
we would not have had choice.
I never would have made it to, um, superintendent.
Yeah, no! You would not be here.
You would not, you would not be doing the good things
you're doing now, which are a version of the same thing.
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Of looking out for each other.
Mm-hmm, it planted the seed.
Not just in education, but law enforcement,
with Billy Barber
and all of those who may have come this way.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: That's exactly right.
KING: Mm-hmm.
♪ ♪
POINDEXTER: I spent,
all total, 20 years and ten months in the Air Force.
I retired in 2007 as a lieutenant colonel.
Now I'm a professor at, uh,
Defense Acquisition University.
I am a United States District Court judge
for the Eastern District of Wisconsin,
which is in Milwaukee.
I live in Little Rock, Arkansas.
I'm an assistant principal
at the famous and historic Little Rock Central High School.
WOOLFOLK: I am the president of Lincoln University
in Jefferson City, Missouri.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Doesn't that sound cool to say?
(laughing): Yeah, that sounds pretty cool.
For a little girl from Leland.
♪ ♪