By LAURA H. SMITH
Delta Research and Extension Center
STONEVILLE — The Mississippi Humanities Council with co-sponsors Mississippi Public Broadcasting and Georgia Humanities will host the world premiere of a film by Pulitzer-Prize winning author and former Leland resident Douglas A. Blackmon on Wednesday, Aug. 30, at the Charles W. Capps Jr. Entrepreneurial Center at Delta Research and Extension Center in Stoneville.
Events centered on the premiere of “The Harvest” will begin with an hors d’oeuvres reception at 5:15 p.m. The film screening begins at 6 p.m., and a panel discussion will follow the screening. Admission is free.
“The Harvest” looks at how school integration transformed Leland. Blackmon was part of the first class of Black and white children to attend school together in Leland after the Supreme Court ordered Mississippi schools to fully and immediately desegregate.
According to the film’s synopsis, “The Harvest” follows a coalition of Black and white citizens working to create racially integrated public schools in a cotton town, Leland, in the middle of the Mississippi Delta, one of the most rigidly segregated areas in America.
“The Harvest” traces the lives of Blackmon and his classmates, teachers, and parents from the first day through high school graduation in 1982. It is a riveting portrait of how those children’s lives were transformed and how the town — and America — were changed. But as the film follows the lives of those children into the present, it is also a portrait of what our society has lost in its failure to finish the work begun a generation ago.
Blackmon is an award-winning former senior national correspondent and bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for his first book, “Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.”
A documentary film based on the book premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2012 and is broadcast through PBS.
