Mississippi
In a new documentary, a Pulitzer-winning Atlanta journalist examines the integration of his own Mississippi public school
![In a new documentary, a Pulitzer-winning Atlanta journalist examines the integration of his own Mississippi public school In a new documentary, a Pulitzer-winning Atlanta journalist examines the integration of his own Mississippi public school](https://cdn2.atlantamagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2023/09/harvest04_fb_courtesy.jpg)
Photograph courtesy of the Leland School District
Atlanta journalist and Douglas A. Blackmon has a distinguished career working at the Wall Street Journal and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. In 2009, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his book Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. Now, the Georgia State University professor is tackling a story very close to home as writer and producer of a new documentary, The Harvest.
Debuting September 12 on PBS’s American Experience, The Harvest explores the story of first integrated public school class in Leland, Mississippi, of which Blackmon was a part of. The film is produced by prolific Oscar-nominated filmmaker and producer Sam Pollard (Citizen Ashe, Black Art: In the Absence of Light), who also worked on the documentary adaptation of Slavery by Another Name.
Courtesy of The Harvest
While 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. the Board of Education mandated the integration of the country’s public schools, it did little to change things in Blackmon’s corner of the South, where schools remained defiantly segregated, as did almost every facet of public life in Mississippi. That status quo changed with the 1969 decision in Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education, which ordered still segregated schools to immediately desegregate. In the fall of 1970, Blackmon’s first grade class was the first in the town’s history to have both Black and white students. For a time, it looked like a civil rights success.
But The Harvest shows the many ways that new forms of segregation were created in the wake of the 1969 decision. Private, whites-only schools popped up. Classes in the newly integrated public schools began to be divided into “smart” and “average” students along largely racial lines. And deep social divisions remained, so that students who spent their days together in classrooms never socialized or visited each others’ homes outside of school. Black-and-white images from Leland yearbooks in the film show Black faces, but those students tended to stand apart, visually testifying to lingering divides.
The dreamy Kodachrome home movie footage that opens The Harvest documents football games, beauty queens, parades, boy scouts, immaculately tended front lawns, and smiling tow-headed children that paint a picture of all-American prosperity. This was hardly the case for Leland’s Black residents, working in virtual indentured servitude and trapped in grinding, inescapable poverty. Their exploitation was so intense many refused to work for white employers and started an encampment, Strike City, outside Leland. Schoolboy Blackmon foreshadowed his future as a journalist when he presented an essay on Strike City to the Leland Lion’s Club. The reaction of the Lions Club members to his sympathetic portrait of Strike City ranged from strained silence to rage.
Photograph by Scherman Rowland/UMASS AMHERST
It was a formative moment for Blackmon. “That moment amplified an interest that I obviously already had in both the civil rights story, but also just a genuine reflection about why were the lives of my Black classmates so radically different than mine?”
The Harvest was initially a storytelling challenge for Blackmon. Like most journalists, Blackmon’s job trained him to be an impartial observer. The idea of talking about his own experiences, narrating the film, even having his own mother, father, and brother interviewed felt a little uncomfortable.
“Sam [Pollard, the film’s producer] thought it was crazy of to even suggest anything else,” Blackmon says. “Sam comes from a very empathetic, human, emotional storytelling kind of approach. And so I think for him, it sounded kind of crazy to suggest that it would not be a very personal story, or that I would not narrate the story. He was right.”
Among the many insights and surprises in The Harvest is how it illustrates, in the voices of Blackmon’s Leland classmates and town residents, just what white privilege looks like—a kind of blindered, willful ignorance that allows great injustice to unfold conveniently outside its peripheral vision. The members of Leland’s white middle class interviewed for the film seemed to lack any inkling of what the foundation of their comfort and contentment is built upon, says Blackmon: “The film is very much about this world that was created by this tradition of extraordinary white privilege.”
Blackmon reached out to people he hadn’t communicated with, in some cases, for 30 years and persuaded them to sit down and recollect with cameras rolling. He says getting people to reveal an unflattering collusion in an oppressive system or the humiliating treatment some Black residents endured was mostly a matter of getting people comfortable. (Pollard often stepped in to interview Black subjects.)
“[The goal was] just to keep people talking and encourage them to go to places that they might have conditioned themselves to avoid because they were uncomfortable,” Blackmon says. At one point in the film, a former Black classmate, Jesse King, recalls the humiliation and shock the day he watched his father’s foreman kick him in front of his wife and children.
Photograph courtesy of The Harvest
The Harvest’s origin was a 1992 essay, “The Resegregation of a Southern School,” that Blackmon wrote in Harper’s about the 10th anniversary of his high school class’s graduation. He was encouraged to write a book about his personal experience of school integration, but the memoir he began to write, he later discovered, did not feel like an accurate recollection.
“I went back to the manuscript and I was startled that some of my memories in the manuscripts, and in my mind, didn’t match up anymore. Either I had gotten clarity, or I had gotten fuzzy about certain things—not so much about whether specific events occurred or didn’t occur, but how I interpreted them or the significance of them. And I realized that that manuscript was not the first draft of a book—it was an artifact,” says Blackmon. “I was, in effect, an unreliable narrator.”
It made more sense, after working with Pollard on Slavery by Another Name, to tell Leland’s story as a film. “I need to be a reporter,” Blackmon realized. “And I need to go back and find other people who were a part of all of these different things, and see how they remember it.”
The history Blackmon documents in The Harvest—how despite the inroads of school integration, public education became a racially divided enterprise over time—continues today. Public schools remain a battleground, Blackmon points out, in states like Florida, where new legislation prevents instructors from teaching students that a person’s race could contribute to their privilege or oppression. He says that under this law, The Harvest would likely be barred from high school classrooms.
Even in Atlanta, a city defined by the Civil Rights Movement, an assault on public education has impacted classrooms.
“We trick ourselves a bit in Atlanta into believing that some of these dynamics were not at play here, when in fact, they really were,” Blackmon says. “Once desegregation of the schools was underway, white people abandoned public school in massive numbers. And that’s what happened in Atlanta. And that’s still the case in Atlanta.”
“There is an increasing movement away from the idea that public schools are the great leveling influence in our society and the place where the rich and the poor become one,” he adds.
A series of screenings and discussions around The Harvest are scheduled through Georgia Humanities. You can view their calendar here.
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Mississippi
Arizona State RB Cam Skattebo ‘disrespected’ by Mississippi State football’s defensive game plan
![Arizona State RB Cam Skattebo ‘disrespected’ by Mississippi State football’s defensive game plan Arizona State RB Cam Skattebo ‘disrespected’ by Mississippi State football’s defensive game plan](https://www.gannett-cdn.com/authoring/authoring-images/2024/09/08/PKNS/75130225007-usatsi-24184754.jpg?auto=webp&crop=4080,2296,x0,y294&format=pjpg&width=1200)
Cam Skattebo slammed Mississippi State on the football field on Saturday night and also took another jab afterward in his postgame press conference.
The Arizona State running back, following a 30-23 Sun Devils win at Mountain America Stadium, took exception to MSU only utilizing three defenders on the line of scrimmage. The results were damning.
Arizona State (2-0) rushed for 346 yards. It was the most allowed by Mississippi State (1-1) in a game since Arkansas in 2016. Skattebo’s 262 rushing yards on 33 carries were the second-most in ASU history.
“They couldn’t stop us in that three-down front,” Skattebo said when asked what made ASU’s run game successful. “Honestly, we all felt disrespected with them in a three-down front. You can’t come in here and put five guys in the box and expect to stop six. I don’t know. We took that a little disrespectful, and we rushed for what over 300 yards? Something around there. It is what it is.”
Skattebo, a 5-foot-11, 215-pound junior, also led Arizona State with 35 receiving yards on three catches.
“I knew these dudes were big and heavy,” he said. “We knew going into the game they weren’t as physical as most other teams but they’re heavy. So when they hit you, it hurts, no matter how hard they’re coming — 300 pounds at 10 miles per hour or 16 miles per hour hurts the same. I just kept my feet moving.”
Mississippi State trailed 30-3 in the third quarter but scored 20 unanswered points to cut the score to 30-23 with 5:27 to play. The Bulldogs never touched the ball again, with the Sun Devils running out the clock on 12 plays.
Skattebo had a game-sealing 39-yard rush that allowed ASU to kneel down.
“Until the end, we had our ups and downs there, but that was fun,” he said. “You can ask these guys up front, bullying dudes, grown men that are 300 pounds, that’s fun to us. That’s fun to the front-five, the front-seven and the running back. The quarterback probably hates it. He probably likes watching, but he didn’t complain one time the whole game.”
Sam Sklar is the Mississippi State beat reporter for the Clarion Ledger. Email him at ssklar@gannett.com and follow him on X @sklarsam_.
Mississippi
Why Mississippi State football loss to Arizona State revealed a strong Jeff Lebby culture
![Why Mississippi State football loss to Arizona State revealed a strong Jeff Lebby culture Why Mississippi State football loss to Arizona State revealed a strong Jeff Lebby culture](https://www.gannett-cdn.com/authoring/authoring-images/2024/09/08/PKNS/75130223007-usatsi-24184733.jpg?auto=webp&crop=3382,1904,x0,y239&format=pjpg&width=1200)
It was 11:10 p.m. Saturday in Starkville when Arizona State quarterback Sam Leavitt barreled into the end zone for his second touchdown of the game.
At that point, it would’ve been fair for Mississippi State football fans to call it a night. The Bulldogs (1-1) trailed 27-3 at ASU in the final minute of the second quarter. They were dominated in just about every statistical category. New coach Jeff Lebby looked like he was headed toward his first loss, and an embarrassing one.
And even if you gave the second half a chance, eyes just a crack open, that wasn’t encouraging either. Arizona State (2-0) took the opening drive of the third quarter for a field goal while eating 8 minutes, 27 seconds of game time. That just about decided the game before Mississippi State touched the ball in the second half.
Wrong.
Instead, MSU scored touchdowns on three of its next four drives and cut the score to 30-23 with 5:27 to play. The defense, which was torched for 346 rushing yards, needed one more stop to let the offense try to tie it. It would’ve been the largest comeback in program history.
Mississippi State’s path to a bowl game seems murkier than it was a week ago. But in the long-term, there’s still encouragement after the 30-23 loss.
“Our guys battled in an incredible way in the second half, and we’re going to hold on to that,” Lebby said in his postgame radio interview. “We’re going to find ways to get back in the building, get back to work and be able to walk into Davis Wade (Stadium) with a ton of confidence and ready to go win a football game.”
The encouragement from Mississippi State’s comeback effort
Lebby said after beating Eastern Kentucky 56-7 in Week 1 that there is an abundance of teachable moments in wins, just like losses.
There is plenty to point to after losing to Arizona State.
Mississippi State came out incredibly flat. The Sun Devils scored on their first five possessions. The MSU offense had one field goal, two punts, a fumble returned for a touchdown and a turnover-on-downs in the first half. MSU had -13 rushing yards in the first half.
There were concerns entering the game about the travel distance, late kickoff and high temperature. But let’s be real, Mississippi State was playing so poorly at the start that it was hard to judge if those were factors.
“I got to do a better job getting these guys ready to go play out of the gate,” Lebby said. “I thought our energy, our effort and our emotion was really good, but then we did not play clean there in the first quarter, so that part was frustrating.”
The Bulldogs outscored the Sun Devils 20-0 in the final quarter and a half. It was a surprise. Arizona State was rolling. Mississippi State was not.
MORE: Introducing Sam Sklar, the Clarion Ledger’s new Mississippi State beat reporter
For Lebby, a first-time head coach at any level, let it be a learning moment for him. It was his first time getting pinned in a corner. The Bulldogs adjusted correctly in the second half like good coaches do.
The rushing offense and defense both need to improve. Badly. Quarterback Blake Shapen has been impressive in his first two Mississippi State games and the wide receiver room is deep and talented as ever, but they can’t be the only answer.
That’s just for this season.
Mississippi State has its first tally in the loss column. But it isn’t a strike against Lebby leading the future of the program.
Sam Sklar is the Mississippi State beat reporter for the Clarion Ledger. Email him at ssklar@gannett.com and follow him on X @sklarsam_.
Mississippi
Arizona State football turns heads with ‘unreal’ uniforms vs Mississippi State
![Arizona State football turns heads with ‘unreal’ uniforms vs Mississippi State Arizona State football turns heads with ‘unreal’ uniforms vs Mississippi State](https://www.gannett-cdn.com/authoring/authoring-images/2024/09/07/PPHX/75127214007-asuuniformms.png?auto=webp&crop=450,254,x0,y9&format=pjpg&width=1200)
Sam Leavitt leads ASU to convincing victory in 1st career start
Leavitt and the Sun Devils cruised past visiting Wyoming 48-7 on Saturday night at Mountain America Stadium.
The Arizona State football team elevated its play on the field in its 48-7 win over Wyoming in Week 1.
It is elevating its uniform game for Week 2 against Mississippi State.
ASU football is wearing a gold alternate jersey against the Bulldogs at Mountain America Stadium in Tempe on Saturday night.
The jersey includes maroon “Arizona State” lettering and maroon numbering, along with a noticeable Big 12 logo.
The Sun Devil football team unveiled the uniform last month, with Athletic Director Graham Rossini posting that “you’ll see this on the field early this season.”
On Thursday, ASU football announced that it would be wearing the uniform against Mississippi State with a video that said “Modern shine, with a classic design.”
On Friday, it posted another look at the uniform.
More: Arizona State vs Mississippi State live score updates, analysis for college football game
ASU vs Mississippi State schedule, TV: How to watch college football game
Promising look: Arizona State football’s 2024 win prediction doubles after Week 1 victory over Wyoming
Social media reacted favorably overall to ASU football’s uniform vs Mississippi State:
Do you like the look for ASU football?
ASU vs. Mississippi State picks: Who wins Week 2 college football game?
Looking promising: Arizona State football makes huge leap in college football ranking, Big 12 power rankings
Reach Jeremy Cluff at jeremy.cluff@arizonarepublic.com. Follow him on X, formerly Twitter @Jeremy_Cluff.
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