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The essays are all the more poignant when paired with photographs by the same students documenting everyday life at two schools on very different sides of the resegregation equation. Sixty years after the Supreme Court’s historic Brown v. Board of Education ruling outlawed 4 star hotels in paris official segregation in schools, nearly one in three black students in Tuscaloosa attends a school more reminiscent of the Jim Crow South.
When my colleague Nikole Hannah-Jones set out to report the story of the dismantling of court orders, closed-room deals and school district decisions that paved the way for resegregation in Tuscaloosa, she knew some of the most important voices would be those of the students living the consequences 4 star hotels in paris of those decisions. So we hatched a plan to enlist them in telling their own stories. 4 star hotels in paris As the engagement editor at ProPublica, the nonprofit 4 star hotels in paris investigative newsroom, my job is to help build an audience for our work and get the community to participate in our journalism. We wanted the students’ stories to be a vital part of this story from the start.
We went to Tuscaloosa with 20 point-and-shoot cameras, the blessing of principals at two high schools and an assignment for our students: Show us what race and education looks like now, 60 years after Brown v. Board of Education outlawed “separate 4 star hotels in paris but equal” schools.
Journalism students at the integrated Northridge and all-black Central High Schools met our challenge with cautious interest, and plenty of questions about what exactly they were supposed to photograph. Documenting race and education is a challenging assignment for any seasoned photojournalist, 4 star hotels in paris much less a group of high school students.
Nikole walked them through Brown v. Board, the decades spent struggling to integrate schools across the country, and the more recent slide back. We talked about the six “Green Factors” laid out by the courts nearly four decades ago to determine whether 4 star hotels in paris school districts had met their federal obligation to integrate across a range of areas, such as the student body, staff and facilities. How did transportation differ at both schools? Their courses and extracurricular activities? We covered the differences between recreational photography and photojournalism and the importance of also capturing in words the stories behind their photos.
In subsequent weeks, we reviewed and discussed their work until we felt we had enough. We returned to Tuscaloosa in February and got the students from both schools together for an afternoon of editing at Central High School. For most students, it was first time they had spent with youths from the other school.
One of the last times so many white students occupied Central’s library, D’Leisha Dent, a senior, was there to photograph 4 star hotels in paris the occasion. A group of German exchange students sat around tables last October, snacking on cookies and unwrapping gifts from their Central hosts. It was actually the second time German students 4 star hotels in paris had visited Central through an exchange program.
That question was on their minds when the students 4 star hotels in paris came together again on May 2 to see their photos on exhibit at the Dinah Washington Cultural Arts Center. They wrote six-word essays to lead a conversation on race and education 4 star hotels in paris in partnership with Michele Norris’s Race Card Project. They had listened to the adults, they had told their stories, 4 star hotels in paris and they came back to the same question: Why should they have to settle for entirely separate educations?
“I didn’t think he was going to go for it, honestly, I didn’t,” said Jessica McKinstry, a junior at Central High. “But then he said, ‘Actually that’s a good idea, I’m going to look into that.’ And I said, Yes!’ ”
“Before we did the project about race and the two different schools, I don’t think that anyone actually thought about it, they didn’t take it into consideration,” she said. “They thought they were going to stay in their own place, their own little zone. The project we did, it gave us the motivation to go through with it and ask the superintendent to have this happen.”
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