43 min listen
S2 E4: The Mason-Dixon Line
FromSchool Colors
ratings:
Length:
50 minutes
Released:
Nov 30, 2022
Format:
Podcast episode
Description
So much of the present day conversation about District 28 hinges on the dynamic between the Northside and the Southside. But why were the north and the south wedged into the same school district to begin with? When we asked around, no one seemed to know.What we do know are the consequences. As soon as the district was created, white and Black folks looked over the Mason-Dixon line and saw each other not as neighbors, but as competitors for scarce resources. And the Southside always seemed to get the short end of the stick.On this episode: how the first three decades of District 28 baked in many of the conflicts and disparities that persist to this day.Click here for a full episode transcript.Join us at the Queens Public Library on December 15!Are you using School Colors in your own teaching or organizing? Fill out this audience survey.School Colors is created, reported, and written by Mark Winston Griffith and Max Freedman. Produced by Max Freedman, with Carly Rubin and Ilana Levinson. Edited by Soraya Shockley. Additional reporting by Carly Rubin and Abe Levine.Project management by Soraya Shockley and Lyndsey McKenna. Fact-checking by Carly Rubin. Engineering by James Willetts. Additional research by Anna Kushner. Original music by avery r. young and de deacon board, with additional music by Blue Dot Sessions.
Released:
Nov 30, 2022
Format:
Podcast episode
Titles in the series (25)
Episode 1: Old School: Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn is one of the most iconic historically Black neighborhoods in the United States. But Bed-Stuy is changing. Fifty years ago, schools in Bed-Stuy's District 16 were so overcrowded that students went to school in shifts. Today, they're half-empty. Why? In trying to answer that question, we discovered that the biggest, oldest questions we have as a country about race, class, and power have been tested in the schools of Central Brooklyn for as long as there have been Black children here. And that's a long, long time. In this episode, we visit the site of a free Black settlement in Brooklyn founded in 1838; speak to one of the first Black principals in New York City; and find out why half a million students mobilized in support of school integration couldn’t force the Board of Education to produce a citywide plan. by School Colors