I had just graduated from graduate school, and I chose Wilson High because on paper it was a beautiful microcosm of every race and every economic level - to me it was everyone you would want America to be. And I know that with great authority because I've traveled over the last 20 years to all 50 states with our book. Unfortunately, schools today are as segregated if not more so than they were back in the 1950s. It is one of the most important Supreme Court decisions and demonstrates how public education is a democratic issue. Gruwell: Brown versus Board of Education was a landmark decision declaring separate is not equal. Going back to 1994 when you first began teaching, what brought you to Woodrow Wilson High in Long Beach, California? We are now doing seven different screenings across the six counties that PBS reaches, recreating the magic that Andy experienced that night. So Andy and his team, expressed that they really wanted to make a documentary with us. from undocumented kids and high school students to college students, business leaders and Holocaust survivors - a dramatically diverse group, where we cried, and got down and dirty with these very intense subject matters about racism and inequality. We packed this auditorium at UC Irvine with every cross-section of L.A. Gruwell is currently working with students to compile a whole new set of stories for a new generation of young writers.Įrin Gruwell: Andy Russell came to one of our local screenings and was so enamored with not only the film but the event that night. The documentary release coincides with the book’s 20th anniversary. Proceeds from sales of the book funded college scholarships for many of the original Freedom Writers. The book was a New York Times bestseller and has been published in over a dozen languages. The name paid homage to 1960s civil rights group, The Freedom Riders. The students' work was compiled in 'The Freedom Writers Diary', first published in 1999.

Where Gruwell first found intractable divisions between students from different backgrounds, she suddenly began to see a growing understanding and even friendship. Not only did they embrace their own work, taking pride in telling their own stories, they also began to engage with students different from them. The new syllabus transformed the students. Gruwell assigned readings from 'The Diary of Anne Frank' and 'Zlata’s Diary.' She invited speakers to class, including Miep Gies, the Dutch woman who hid Anne Frank from the Nazis. She had her students keep journals, which allowed them to explore their own personal experiences while also becoming empathetic to the experiences of others. Her unconventional teaching style moved away from the standard curriculum found in most high school English classes – Shakespeare, the classics – and helped students to understand how narrative storytelling could be more personal. When only one of the students had heard of the Holocaust, Gruwell decided to shift the focus of the class entirely. When Gruwell discovered students passing around a racist caricature of one of their classmates, she explained how this kind of imagery was comparable to the propaganda spread by the Nazis. Board of Education declared “separate but equal” unconstitutional. The documentary explores Gruwell’s experience working in a school that remained markedly segregated even decades after the landmark Supreme Court decision Brown v. A recently completed documentary digs into her story, which was the basis for the 2007 film, “Freedom Writers” starring Hilary Swank as Gruwell. Over the next four years, she found she changed not only her own life but also those of the 150 students that passed through her classroom. Erin Gruwell took a job student teaching at Woodrow Wilson High School in Long Beach, California in 1994.

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