Phyllis Slack, Dona Hodge Nichols and Linda Harris reunited 47 years after their Savannah, Ga., school was integrated. Slack and Harris were the first blacks to attend the all-white Southern school and are now the subject of a documentary by Nichols titled, "The Token From Montgomery Cross Road." (Dona Nichols image)
Phyllis Slack thought nobody remembered her struggles as the first black student at all-white Bartlett Junior High School in Savannah, Ga., in 1965.
But Dona Hodge Nichols, now an instructor within SJSU’s Department of Journalism and Mass Communications, never forgot Slack. Nichols witnessed firsthand the torment Slack endured.
Forty-seven years later, Nichols reunited with Slack to feature her in a documentary on the year they spent together at Barlett.
Nichols and Slack will recount the turbulent South of the 1960s at a question-and-answer session 3 p.m. March 13 in DBH 213.
SJSU students and the public are welcome to attend this unique event intended to educate university students who know about the Civil Rights era only through history books and movies.
Slack was a witness to what many blacks faced during the turbulent 1960s in the South. Most school districts were still segregated more than a decade after the historic 1954 “Brown v. the Board of Education” decision and the Supreme Court ruling that separate schools are inherently unequal schools.
Nichols traveled to Georgia in January to interview Slack and other former Bartlett classmates. The documentary will focus on Slack and Savannah, the city Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called “the most desegregated city south of the Mason-Dixon Line.”