School Sagas is an oral history project that documents the history of school integration in the Ark-La-Tex region—the area surrounding the Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas borders. The project began in 2020 when the Bishop Blue Foundation, with offices in Texas and Louisiana, partnered with Louisiana State University, Shreveport and Southern University, Shreveport to collect oral histories of high school integration in Caddo Parish, Louisiana. A 2020 pandemic relief grant from the NEH 2020 allowed the project to continue its work collecting oral histories and produce a one-hour radio documentary sharing these stories.
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In 1970, two high schools in Caddo Parish were merged: Herndon High School, a K-12 school for Black students, and North Caddo High, a high school for white students. Fifty years later, School Sagas organizers began collecting stories both from Black and white students about their experiences during this period. These interviews offer richer insights than the general narrative of school integration: some of the Black interviewees, for example, spoke of how their parents were wary of desegregation because they feared both white students’ attitudes towards their children and the loss of a Black school culture. Organizers also interviewed contemporary students at North Caddo High School to understand the continuing impacts of school integration and to document the school’s 2020 decision to change its longtime mascot, the Rebels, to one less evocative of the Confederacy. Because of the diverse nature of the interviewees, these oral histories help illustrate that segregation affected everyone, not just Black Americans.
This oral history, from Brenda Grundy Wells, tells what it was like to be the first Black graduate of North Caddo High School.
School Sagas was only able to collect about ten interviews before the COVID-19 pandemic put a stop to activities. Though the project had received funding from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, they relied on donated labor from their university partners to do the interviews, archive them, and, eventually, help produce and edit the radio documentary. When the universities shut down to contain the pandemic, students and faculty were no longer able to participate actively in the project. An NEH CARES grant, however, enabled the project to hire several contractors to collect oral histories as well as a sound editor to help improve the radio documentary. The final hour-long product aired on Red River Radio, a local NPR affiliate, at the end of 2020. It was so successful that School Sagas is looking to expand the project into an audio miniseries as well as a television documentary.