Jackson State University will screen “YAZOO Revisited: Integration and Segregation in a Deep Southern Town” by filmmaker David Rae Morris in the JSU Student Center Theater at 11:30 a.m. Thursday, Feb. 18.
Morris will appear to discuss the making of the film and to address questions from the audience.
Yazoo City, the largest and middle area of Yazoo County, is 40 miles northwest of the capital city of Jackson. As the hometown of noted author Willie Morris, it was settled in the early 1800s, known as “the gateway to the Delta” and is located half in the hills and half in the flatlands. Like many Delta communities, Yazoo City relied on agriculture and timber as its principal economy and benefited by having the Yazoo River flow through Vicksburg and the Mississippi River.
Morris graduated from Yazoo High School in 1952 and attended the University of Texas, where he made a name for himself as editor of The Daily Texan. After four years in England as a Rhodes scholar, he returned to Texas to serve as editor of the liberal journal The Texas Observer before moving to New York to become a junior editor at Harper’s Magazine. In 1967, at age 32, Morris was named the youngest editor in chief at Harper’s. His first book, “North Toward Home” – a memoir of growing up white in the South – was published in October of that year and won instant praise and recognition but angered many residents of his hometown because of its frank view of race relations in Mississippi.
In fall 1969, the Supreme Court ruled that Mississippi’s public schools must implement full integration immediately. As a result, there were rumors of violence, mass boycotts by white students and a rush by many parents to establish all-white private academies. Journalists from throughout the country descended on Yazoo City to cover the story. They included correspondents from 
Time Magazine, The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The Charlotte News-Observer, as well as many of the national television networks.
Morris returned as well to cover the story for Harper’s. His subsequent book, “Yazoo: Integration in a Deep Southern Town,” was published in 1971. Unlike many other towns in the state, Yazoo City’s transition to become an integrated school system went smoothly and without incident and the Yazoo City public schools became, at least for while, a model for racial diversity in Mississippi. It was only in the 1990s that they slowly began to re-segregate. Today, Yazoo High School, as well as many of the public schools in Mississippi, is almost entirely black.
Though a still photographer by trade, David Rae Morris – Willie Morris’ son – decided that a documentary film would be the most effective medium to pick up where his father left off to tell the story of Yazoo City.