American Experience PBS presents a conversation with the filmmakers of our two new films The Busing Battleground and The Harvest: Integrating Mississippi's Schools exploring the struggle for school integration in the United States. The conversation will feature clips from both films and discussions with the filmmakers on the progress of educational equity and the work that remains to be done.
The event will be held at the Jack Morton Auditorium on the campus of the George Washington University, 805 21st St NW, Washington, DC 20052 and will be livestreamed on the American Experience YouTube channel.
Both The Busing Battlegroundand The Harvest: Integrating Mississippi's Schools are available to stream now on PBS.org, the American Experience YouTube channel, and on the free PBS App.
Panelists:
Sharon Grimberg is an award-winning filmmaker with 25 years of experience working for public television. According to The Baltimore Sun, her 2020 film McCarthy, about the infamous Wisconsin senator, met “the highest hopes that the most enlightened founders of public broadcasting had for the medium.” From 2003-2015, Grimberg was the senior producer of AMERICAN EXPERIENCE where, she played a key role in the origination, development, acquisition, and editorial oversight of more than 130 films.
Cyndee Readdean is an award-winning director, producer, and writer. Her films have appeared on PBS, ABC, MSNBC and EPIX. Readdean directed and produced episode two of the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University award-winning series Reconstruction: America after the Civil War and the Emmy-nominated film The FBI & the Panther. Readdean is a member of DGA, PGA and WGA.
Douglas A. Blackmon is a Pulitzer-Prize winning author, journalist, and filmmaker. His bestselling first book, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009. He was co-executive producer of the acclaimed documentary film based on Slavery by Another Name, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2012. A native of the Mississippi Delta, he directs the Narrating Justice Project and teaches in the Creative Media Industries Institute at Georgia State University in Atlanta.
The event will be moderated by Dr. Ivory Toldson. Dr. Toldson is the national director of Education Innovation and Research for the NAACP, professor of counseling psychology at Howard University and editor-in-chief of The Journal of Negro Education. Previously, Dr. Toldson was appointed by President Barack Obama to devise national strategies to sustain and expand federal support to HBCUs as the executive director of the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities.