AMERICAN EXPERIENCE's The Busing Battleground: The Legacy of America's Efforts to Integrate Public Schools

AMERICAN EXPERIENCE's The Busing Battleground: The Legacy of America's Efforts to Integrate Public Schools

  1. 104th NCSS Annual Conference
  2. AMERICAN EXPERIENCE's The Busing Battleground: The Legacy of America's Efforts to Integrate Public Schools

In 1974, after decades of racial segregation and clear evidence of educational disparities, U.S. District Court Judge W. Arthur Garrity ordered the Boston Public Schools to integrate through a court-mandated busing plan. Cross-town busing led to an eruption of explosive racial violence that tore the city apart, setting a tragic course for Boston’s children that still reverberates today. Told through rare archival footage and first-person interviews with community leaders and students who took part in the busing plan, THE BUSING BATTLEGROUND is a definitive reexamination of a tumultuous piece of racial history.

In this session, filmmakers Sharon Grimberg (Joseph McCarthy, The Abolitionists) and Cyndee Readdean (Reconstruction: America After the Civil War) will discuss using eyewitness accounts, oral histories and rare news archives to examine volatile efforts to end segregation in Boston's public schools and the decades-long struggle for educational equity that preceded the busing crisis. The film's witness-driven approach elevates the stories of those who lived through the events on both of sides of the color line, now with the hindsight of five decades.

During the presentation we will screen portions of the film, and film participants will give their first-hand accounts of the events. Educators will discuss using the film in history and social studies classes, and connecting the themes of THE BUSING BATTLEGROUND to contemporary issues. Special classroom materials to support integration of the film into curricula—available free on PBS LearningMedia—will be showcased. 

 

Panelists

Sharon Grimberg

Sharon Grimberg is an award-winning filmmaker with 25 years of experience working for public television. According to The Baltimore Sun, her latest film McCarthy, about the infamous Wisconsin senator, met “the highest hopes that the most enlightened founders of public broadcasting had for the medium.” Her previous project, a mini-series on the history of the circus, garnered a Writer’s Guild nomination and was on The Wall Street Journal’s list of the best television of 2018. Grimberg was the executive producer of The Abolitionists, which was nominated for a Primetime Emmy and of the multi-platform mini-series We Shall Remain, which retold US history from a Native perspective. According to The Washington Post, the project “shifted the focus and the weight of history.” 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

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. She served as the series producer on the four-hour series By Whatever Means Necessary: The Times of Godfather of Harlem. Her producer credits include Freedom Summer, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and won the George Foster Peabody Award; the Emmy-nominated Tell Them We Are Rising: The Story of Black Colleges and Universities, which also premiered at the Sundance Film Festival; and the two-hour premiere episode of the OBAMA series. Readdean is a member of DGA, PGA and WGA.  

 

Chika Offurum

Chika Offurum oversees marketing, promotion, social media, outreach and engagement activities for the award-winning documentary series. Over the past eight years, Chika has had the privilege of managing campaigns supporting some of the series’ most notable works, including Walt Disney, Chasing the Moon, The Vote and the Oscar-nominated Last Days in Vietnam.

 

Alysha Butler

Alysha Butler is a 20-year veteran social studies teacher. In addition to working at GBH Education, she teaches U.S. History and African American Studies for District of Columbia Public Schools. She graduated from Florida Atlantic University with a B.A. and M.A. in History with a special focus on African American women during Reconstruction. She was recognized as the 2019 History Teacher of the Year by the Daughters of the American Revolution for the District of Columbia and the 2019 Gilder Lehrman National History Teacher of the Year for her innovative lessons and civic based student projects. In 2019 she was a D.C. Community Cornerstone Awardee. She currently resides in Silver Spring, Maryland.