Hagley Makes Film on African American Education in Delaware Available Online

CONTACT: Meg Marcozzi, Marketing Manager

                     (302) 658-2400, ext. 238    mmarcozzi@hagley.org

IMMEDIATE RELEASE

            Wilmington, Delaware – Hagley Museum and Library announces that its film, A Separate Place: The Schools P.S. du Pont Built (2003), is available for viewing and downloading at www.hagley.org/separateplace/index.html.  A Separate Place: The Schools P.S. du Pont Built presents the connection between Pierre S. du Pont’s philanthropy and efforts by African Americans to obtain quality education in Delaware.

            “The era of racial segregation is a deplorable episode in our nation’s history,” said Hagley staff member Roger Horowitz, one of the film’s producers. “A Separate Place tells an uplifting story of how P. S. du Pont and the Black community in Delaware came together to create better education for young African Americans during those difficult times.”

            The voices of former students and teachers in the du Pont schools provide most of the film’s content, supplemented by commentary from Dr. Jeanne Nutter, the film’s executive producer and herself a product of a du Pont-built school. A shortened 25 minute version of A Separate Place, intended for elementary and middle school students, is available along with the full 53 minute film.

            A Teacher’s Guide, produced by Hagley’s Education Department, may be viewed and downloaded from the website. The guide supplements the film, especially for school use, with documents from Hagley’s research collections, such as before and after pictures of African American schools and letters from children to P.S. du Pont written in the 1920s.

            Directed by Alonzo Crawford and edited by Kendrick Simmons, A Separate Place is a production of the Hagley Museum and Library. It was generously funded by the Longwood Foundation with partial support from the Delaware Humanities Forum, a state program of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Hagley.

            The Hagley Library is the nation’s leading business history library, archive, and research center. Current holdings comprise 37,000 linear feet in the Manuscripts and Archives Department, 290,000 printed volumes in the Imprints Department, 2 million visual items in the Pictorial Department, and more than 200,000 digital images and pages in the Digital Archives Department.  Hagley’s Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society, which coordinated production of A Separate Place, offers conferences, research seminars, and a public lecture series, and operates a research grant program.

Hagley Museum and Library collects, preserves, and interprets the unfolding history of American enterprise. Hagley is located in Wilmington, Delaware. For more information, call (302) 658-2400 weekdays or visit www.hagley.org

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