Barnard hosts premiere of film about Mississippi school integration

In Diverse Issues in Higher Education, read about Forty Years Later, Now Can We Talk?, a documentary executive produced by Lee Anne Bell, Barnard's Barbara Silver Horowitz Director of Education, which focuses on the integration of a Mississippi high school. An excerpt:

"The documentary Forty Years Later: Now Can We Talk?, the story of the first African-American students to integrate a White high school in Batesville, Miss. in 1967, premiered with exactly the dialogue the filmmakers hope to promote.

Dr. Lee Anne Bell, the director of education at Barnard College, has taught and written about storytelling as a means of teaching about racism. Several years ago, when Cheryl Johnson, a 1969 graduate of South Panola High School in Batesville, Miss., received an invitation to a high school reunion for the very first time, she searched the Web to find someone who could help her and her African-American classmates tell the story of their experiences. Johnson found information about Bell’s book Storytelling for Social Justice: Connecting Narrative and the Arts in Antiracist Teaching and contacted Bell.

Last Thursday, the film, which examines the experiences of 13 African-American students who attended South Panola from 1967 to 1969 from the perspective of those students and 13 of their White classmates, premiered at Barnard College in New York City. The screening was followed by a panel discussion in which Bell, the film’s executive producer, was joined by director Markie Hancock and Dr. Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, assistant professor of English education at Teachers College."

Read the full article.