Ms. Elaine
Spoiled Brat
So, there's the documentary on HBO GO that was released in 2007 that examines the past and present history of the first southern high school to be segregated, I guess. I turned that shyt off within the first 10 minutes. Cacs shown in a heavenly light while the black students ain't doing shyt. 
I googled the documentary to see what people were saying at the time and came across this article. Look at all these c00ns...
Return to a Showdown at Little Rock
By FELICIA R. LEESEPT. 25, 2007
Photo
The filmmakers Craig Renaud, left, and his brother, Brent, in front of Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., last week. CreditOscar Hidalgo for The New York Times
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I googled the documentary to see what people were saying at the time and came across this article. Look at all these c00ns...
Return to a Showdown at Little Rock
By FELICIA R. LEESEPT. 25, 2007
Photo
The filmmakers Craig Renaud, left, and his brother, Brent, in front of Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., last week. CreditOscar Hidalgo for The New York Times
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RELATED COVERAGEThose at least are the voices and lives captured in “Little Rock Central: 50 Years Later,” a provocative documentary to be shown on HBO on Sept. 25. It is a roughly 70-minute film without narration, experts or statistics, just grainy footage from 1957 and a series of current snapshots of lives at a place that has become a benchmark for measuring racial progress in this country.
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Minnijean Brown Trickey, one of the Little Rock Nine, at a New York screening of HBO’s “Little Rock Central: 50 Years Later.”CreditPhotographs by Oscar Hidalgo for The New York Times
The filmmakers, Brent and Craig Renaud, white brothers from Little Rock, said their documentary updated the story for a new generation, with screenings being followed by discussions like the recent one here at Harvard.
“It’s mostly the voices of younger people that are at the school,” said Craig Renaud, 33, who graduated from Central in 1992. “It’s not experts, in terms of school desegregation or the achievement gap. It’s just seeing those things through people’s lives.”
At the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, where Ms. Trickey was recently invited to discuss the film and receive a medal from the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research for her role a half-century ago, the audience pondered many questions. What public policy initiatives are needed? How have the black residents of Little Rock changed? What are the different impacts of class and race?
“This indictment — and that’s what it is — is not about Little Rock but the nation,” Ms. Trickey, 66, said of the film. “The black kids in this documentary believe in their intellectual inferiority and the white kids believe in their intellectual superiority,” she continued, calling this a pattern of internalized stereotypes that she sees as she talks to groups across the country. Ms. Trickey gives lectures on her experience at Central and conducts antiracism and nonviolence training.
Sept. 25, 1957, the first day that the Little Rock Nine were actually able to stay at Central, is being commemorated in many communities around the country. In Little Rock, where Central has been designated a national historic site, recent events have included a legal symposium and an education town hall, with an address today by former President Bill Clinton and comments by the Little Rock Nine themselves.
But the Renauds, whose recent work includes the Emmy-nominated HBO documentary “Dope Sick Love” and “Off to War,” a 10-part series on the Discovery Times Channel that followed an Arkansas National Guard unit deployed to Iraq, said they wanted to steer clear of prescriptions and politics. Because it is not a film about the events of 1957, Ms. Trickey is the only one of the Little Rock Nine who appears to tie the past and present together.
“We didn’t know what we were going to make a film about,” Brent Renaud, 35, said. “We wanted to look back, but we wanted it to be rooted in the present.” The Renauds said they were given free rein to spend months at Central, which is 53 percent black, 42 percent white and 5 percent “other,” according to school district figures, and has a good academic reputation nationally.
The film offers enough views to suggest that the school either has come a long way or has a long way to go.
“Central is still pretty segregated,” Brandon Love, the affluent student body president who is the only black person in his Advanced Placement classes, says in the film. “It is just that we do not have to have the National Guard here to get in the school and to go to school.”
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Elizabeth Eckford, right, one of the Little Rock Nine, in 1957.CreditWill Counts/Arkansas Democrat Gazette
Angelica, a black student who lives in a rented house without a working stove or sink but is one of a handful of black students in advanced classes, echoes many black students as she says, “Most African-American students do not want to try.” They would rather be comfortable in classes with other black students, she contends, than compete with whites.
A white student on the golf team says of black students: “They do not care about school. If they get suspended it is just three more days they can go do something else.”
In the film, some students and teachers blame the legacy of slavery and the difficulties of their lives for the lagging progress of black students. Others say that blacks have themselves to blame for their problems, and one teacher even asks her class if things were better before desegregation, as some black leaders have suggested.
The Little Rock portraits include the affluent Doramus family, who recently sent their son Mark from Central to Princeton, and Maya, a 16-year-old black student who had her first baby at 13 and another before she was old enough to drive.
Nancy Rousseau, the principal at Central, said the film focused on familiar problems. “The filmmakers’ approach overlooked the unique character of today’s Central High that was shaped by the people and events of a half-century ago,” Ms. Rousseau said in an e-mail message. “Had the filmmakers only looked deeper, they would have produced a far more compelling story.”
The Harvard audience watched the film with a panel that included the filmmakers; the Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr.; David L. Evans, an admissions officer at the university; and James L. Rutherford, a dean at the University of Arkansas and a founding member of the Little Rock Central High Museum.
Mr. Gates, director of the Du Bois Institute, said the film clearly highlighted the divide of class as well as race, and that the two intersect. But 50 years after Central’s desegregation, he said, African-Americans themselves constitute two groups — one in poverty, one doing well — and he wondered how much progress that reflects.
“We have two nations, and they’re both black,” Mr. Gates said.
Like their 2005 film “Off to War,” which some saw as pro-war and some saw as antiwar, viewers may read into “Little Rock Central” their own feelings and beliefs, Brent Renaud said in an interview in New York, where the brothers live.
“To me,” Mr. Renaud said, “it’s always O.K. to tell people’s stories. Their opinion is always O.K. because it’s their experience, it’s the way they’re seeing the world.” He added, “That to me brings more to an issue, more to a headline, that understanding of different perspectives.”
