An Imperfect Revolution

FAIN: GN-50692-05

Minnesota Public Radio (St. Paul, MN 55101-2217)
Stephen Smith (Project Director: March 2005 to November 2008)

Development of a one-hour radio documentary and companion website and production of a pilot segment examining efforts to desegregate schools in six American cities in the 1970s.

American RadioWorks requests $65,000 to support development of An Imperfect Revolution, a one-hour public radio documentary and Web site chronicling American school desegregation in the early 1970s. American schools were the central battle-ground in the fight to end Jim Crow because African Americans knew better schools held the key to upward mobility and full acceptance into American society. Despite significant desegregation since Brown, in the past ten years African American and Latino children have increasingly wound up in racially isolated, impoverished schools. ARW will document the struggle to desegrate the nation’s schools, which had a profound effect on American race relations in the rest of the 20th century.