This video, shown on PBS, documents a wonderful story: Two high schools in Birmingham, Alabama, collaborate to produce “To Kill a Mockingbird.” One high school is all-black, the other is all-white. We are reminded that desegregation peaked in the 1980s, according to the UCLA Civil Rights Project.
The video shows high school students working together to present the play. The video devotes more time to the historical setting of the book, the realities of life in Birmingham and the segregated South than to the production. This is not a disadvantage but a strength because the play and the novel are set in time. The video includes film footage of the segregated South in the 1930s (which the book portrays) and the 1950s (when the book was written and the civil rights movement was on the march). It includes film footage of civil rights protests in Birmingham, when the police loosed dogs on black demonstrators. It interviews black and white adults about life under segregation. It includes clips from the film that starred Gregory Peck and home-made films from local families. It interviews the actors who appeared in the 1962 film and the students who appear in the play today. It raises the irony of white families who trusted black servants to raise their children yet would not allow black children to attend the local schools or universities.
It is a must-see, partly for the ideas of the play, but mostly for its realistic portrayal of segregation then and now and for the reactions of today’s students. It is an important story about our history, our past and our present.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
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beautiful.
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This is a wonder project. Are these public schools? If they are, it begs the question, “Why do we have one black and one white school in 2015, decades after civil rights legislation.?”
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retired teacher…….I felt like no one bothered to answer your question. I do not know whether you are wondering about some of the legalities of this situation……..but I hope someone offers something in the way of an explanation to what seems to me to be a worthwhile question.
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I know: my students and I talked about that in class today. We are a majority minority school, but much more diverse than these two schools appear to be.
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Even worse, retired teacher…Pew estimated in 2013 the median net worth of white households at 192,500 while for black households was at 19,200.
We have not come very far.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/12/12/racial-wealth-gaps-great-recession/
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I think sometimes we underestimate (or forget, as the case may be) how widespread and devastating poverty was in the 50s and earlier.
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Turner Classic Movie channel is running “To Kill a Mockingbird” tonight.
Do watch the PBS documentary it is great.
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That gap is overwhelmingly attributable to housing. Even when employment status, income, and available down payment are held constant, blacks (and to a lesser degree Hispanics) don’t have access to mortgages in the same proportions as whites. When blacks do obtain a mortgage, they pay much higher interest rates and are extended much less credit, and their housing marketplace looks far different than the one for white buyers: they are frequently steered to either already segregated or racially changing neighborhoods where housing values are far lower and less stable than white neighborhoods. Just to be clear, this has not only been going on for decades, it’s still happening now, in 2015.
Needless to say, this underlying residential segregation has led to extremely segregated traditional zoned school districts in many urbanized areas, but especially the Northeast and Midwest. It depresses me to no end how little political interest there is in examining meaningful solutions to the problem, even among liberals in the bluest blue states.
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The two high schools–one all-white, one all-black–are public high schools in Birmingham.
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Thank you for this: we read it this year in class, so I showed it to my students. They really enjoyed it!
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Thanks, Diane for posting about the screening. The all-white all black nature of the two schools is of course a result of geographical resegregation which occurs all over the country, not just in the Birmingham area. It was a wonderful experience for these students and opened their eyes to a wider world.
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Hi retired teachers wondering about these two schools. Hmm, What is a “public” school? Fairfield is a small city outside of B’ham. lI would say it is lower to middle class today. Fairfield Prep is the public school for this small city and is sort of on the opposite side of B’ham. from the white affluent suburbs. Mtn. Brook, the city of the white school in the doc, is also a “public school” outside of the city of Birmingham and initially organized and incorporated to escape desegregation. If you can afford to live in Mtn. Brook or the other affluent suburbs mostly created for the same reason, then you can attend their public schools. Some of these same communities also discriminated against Jews in not allowing them into their sororities, fraternities, social and country clubs. Blacks, of course, were out of the question. Neither Fairfiled nor Mtn. Brook are part of the Birmingham Public School system.
FYI, I am also a retired teacher. My father grew up in Fairfield when it was predominately white and worked there all his life. The schools there were integrated for awhile, but white flight ended that.
I grew up in Mtn. Brook and hated it. Some of us were part of an interracial social group in high school in the late 60s trying to bridge the gap between our communities.
There were crosses put or burned on lawns of a few white families who had the gall to work for civil rights.
I hope this answers some of your questions. You can google these schools and cities and find out more.
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Another word of explanation after seeing Ms. Ravitch’s post, people who live in the Birmingham area, whether from Mtn. Brook, Fairfield, Vestavia, or Homewood often say they’re from Birmingham when technically they are not. I think the main point is that the two schools in the film are not part of the Birmiigham Public School System and subject to desegration, and Mtn. Brook has never been subject to desegregation laws as was its purpose.
Your blog about the film is wonderful!
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Thank you so much for bringing this to our attention. I’ve always loved the book but this entire production was so heartwarming and enlightening. Should be part of every classroom’s study while reading this great book!
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