The National Endowment for the Humanities announced today a grant of $300,000 to support a movie by Douglas Blackmon, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Slavery by Another Name."
The documentary film, tentatively titled “The Harvest,” will be about desegregation in Leland, Miss. As a child in the Mississippi delta, Blackmon was among the first class of children to complete 12 years of education in an integrated public school system, from 1970 to 1982.
The NEH-funded film would use the events in Leland, Miss., to tell a broader story. Blackmon was formerly a political writer at the Atlanta Journal Constitution and was the Atlanta bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal, before joining the Miller Center at the University of Virginia.
He is a resident of Grant Park, in Atlanta.
According to the NEH, “The film will focus on a core group of black and white Americans in one small town, born at ground zero of the American quandary of race, at the height of the civil rights era. They entered public schools six years later as subjects of an ambitious national experiment – members of the first class in Mississippi to share racially mixed classrooms from the opening day of first grade to high school graduation 12 years later. Entering middle age in 2015 they are now leaders of that community, and the parents and grandparents of a new generation passing through the same classrooms and inheriting the deeply mixed legacy of those epic events.”
Blackmon will partner with documentary filmmaker Sam Pollard, producer/director of the movie version of “Slavery by Another Name,” as well as the four-part documentary “When the Levees Broke.”
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