PRESS KIT

Access this press kit as a Google Drive folder

Contact & social media

Embed link for Twitter: https://schoolcolors.simplecast.com/episodes/trailer

Embed HTML: <iframe height="200px" width="100%" frameborder="no" scrolling="no" seamless src="https://player.simplecast.com/5ad84c5a-2f4d-48e8-8a61-b474554e04db?dark=true"></iframe>

About the show

Short:

School Colors is a documentary podcast from Brooklyn Deep about how race, class, and power shape American cities and schools.

Longer:

School Colors is a documentary podcast from Brooklyn Deep about how race, class, and power shape American cities and schools. We follow generations of parents and educators fighting for their children in a rapidly changing Black neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York.

Bedford-Stuyvesant is one of the largest and most iconic historically Black communities in the United States. Schools in Bed-Stuy used to be so overcrowded that students went to school in shifts. Now, they're half-empty. Why?

Two of the most controversial forces in urban American life -- charter schools and gentrification -- have converged on Bed-Stuy’s Community School District 16, draining the schools of children and funding. But as new families, mostly white and middle-class, opt into local schools, tension is surfacing between two seemingly progressive ideals: integration and self-determination. What does this mean for the future of this historically Black neighborhood and others like it across the country?

To understand where we’re going, we have to understand how we got here. And the biggest, oldest questions we have as a country about race, class, and power have been worked out in the schools of Central Brooklyn for as long as there have been Black children here.

How to listen

Release schedule

The trailer was released on Friday, September 6. Episode 1 will be released on Friday, September 20, and a new episode will be released every Friday morning after that. We’ll take a week’s break between Episodes 4 and 5, and between episodes 6 and 7. The final episode comes out November 22.

Trailer: 9/6
Episode 1: 9/20
Episode 2: 9/27
Episode 3: 10/4
Episode 4: 10/11
Episode 5: 10/25
Episode 6: 11/1
Episode 7: 11/15
Episode 8: 11/22

The team

Brooklyn Deep is a digital journalism platform produced by people who have a personal stake in the future of Central Brooklyn. Trained journalists and untrained residents alike tell their stories and publish investigative news, analysis, and data that chronicle neighborhood change in Central Brooklyn and bring transparency to the exercise of institutional power.

Mark Winston Griffith (Producer/Host) is a third-generation resident of Crown Heights and the parent of two school-aged children. He’s the Executive Director of the Brooklyn Movement Center (BMC), a community organizing group based in Central Brooklyn, and the Executive Editor of BMC’s citizen journalism arm, Brooklyn Deep. Over three decades, Mark has led a combination of social justice organizations, cooperatives institutions, community organizing campaigns, and economic justice projects. He teaches a graduate course in community organizing at CUNY’s Murphy Institute. As a journalist, Mark was an adjunct professor of urban reporting at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. He is a frequent guest on WNYC, and his articles and editorials have appeared in the New York Times, the Nation, Mother Jones, the Daily News, and City Limits Magazine, among others. He was a columnist for Gotham Gazette and the Huffington Post, and has been a board member of City Limits Magazine, Free Speech TV and The City news site.

Max Freedman (Producer/Host) is a journalist, teacher, and theatre artist based in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. In addition to School Colors, he produces Unsettled, a podcast about Israel-Palestine and the Jewish diaspora. He is a facilitator with Theatre of the Oppressed NYC and adjunct faculty at Pratt Institute, where he teaches undergraduate courses in cultural organizing and urban education. As a Senior Educator at the New-York Historical Society, he created History on Broadway, an enrichment program using musicals to teach American history in public school classrooms.

Elyse Blennerhassett (Editing & Sound Design) is an audio and multimedia producer, oral historian, and interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn. She collaborates with documentary producers, journalists, artists, nonprofit organizations, and academic institutions to produce podcasts, films, and immersive exhibitions. Focusing on memory, trauma, and justice, she seeks to produce works that investigate alterity and provoke imagination. Her original and collaborative works can be seen/heard in publications including: The BBC Word Service and Sundance Institute, The Marshall Project, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, NPR, and The Invisible Institute. She has taught audio and permaculture throughout Africa and Asia and has contributed to productions that have screened at festivals and exhibitions throughout North America, Europe, and The Caribbean.

Interdisciplinary artist and educator avery r. young (Original Music) is a 3Arts Awardee and one of four executives for The Floating Museum. His poetry and prose are featured in several anthologies and periodicals including; Berkeley Poetry Review 49, Poetry Magazine and photographer Cecil McDonald Jr’s In The Company of Black. He is the featured vocalist on flautist Nicole Mitchell’s Mandorla Awakening (FPE Records) and is currently touring with her Black Earth Ensemble and his funk/soul band de deacon board. Young’s latest full length recording tubman. (FPE Records) is the soundtrack to his first collection of poems, neckbone: visual verses (Northwestern University Press).

Jaya Sundaresh (Production Associate) is a journalist, writer, and audio producer. Originally from Schenectady, NY, where she was a bartender and an activist, she moved to NYC to pursue a masters’ degree in journalism at CUNY. She has lived in Canada and India as well as all over the Northeast, and is deeply invested in the movement for racial, economic, and climate justice. She enjoys listening to podcasts and cooking in her spare time.

Press

Watch this space!

Listener reviews

For those who were there and those who were not, School Colors gives an in-depth experience of those tumultuous times in Ocean Hill-Brownsville during the longest teachers strike in American History. I love this podcast format reminiscent of radio programs that allow the listener to see the scenes via their mind’s eye. A welcomed change from the many screens that dominate our imaginations day long. A must for ANY parent with a child in the NYC school system and double must for any newbie/gentrifier. (Omonifa, Apple Podcasts review)

Logos & Branding

Click here for branding guidelines (PDF)

Images

Max Freedman, Mark Winston Griffith. Photo credit: Elyse Blennerhassett.

Mark Winston Griffith. Photo credit: Elyse Blennerhassett.

Max Freedman. Photo credit: Elyse Blennerhassett.

Trailer

Selected clips

Nikole Hannah-Jones, New York Times correspondent and creative director of The 1619 Project, describes how she felt listening to wealthy parents disparage her daughter’s elementary school.

Monifa Edwards was bused from a predominantly Black neighborhood to a predominantly white elementary school in the fall of 1966. One afternoon, her bus was attacked.

Rhody McCoy and Dolores Torres explain why the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Governing Board decided to dismiss 19 teachers and supervisors after the first year of community control.

Veronica Gee transferred into Junior High School 271 — the eye of the storm — in the middle of the citywide teachers’ strike. She had never had a Black teacher before.

Natasha Capers — Brownsville native and Executive Director of the New York Coalition for Educational Justice — explains what the story of Ocean Hill-Brownsville means to her today.

Fela Barclift describes her introduction to The East — a pan-African cultural center in Bed-Stuy — and how she became one of the first teachers at Uhuru Sasa Shule.

Annette Robinson served three terms as a member of the District 16 school board, starting in the late 1970s. She recalls one especially heated board meeting.

Producer Max Freedman interviews parents Kamality Guzman and Daisy Griffen at a public hearing to close their children’s school, P.S. 25.

NeQuan McLean, president of the Community Education Council for District 16, expresses how frustrating it can be to defend the disappearing district.

Virginia Poundstone, co-president of the Bed-Stuy Parents Committee, explains her discomfort with the name of the organization.

Principal Tanya Bryant of P.S. 309 describes a contentious PTA election at her school.