Past Featured Films

The Town Before Brown
DOCUMENTARY - 31 minutes, 49 seconds)
Gerald Unks

The Town Before Brown documents the existence and character of segregation throughout the south by focusing on the experiences of residents of the town of Chapel Hill prior to 1954.  Both African Americans and Whites were interviewed about their experiences in “liberal” Chapel Hill.

Filmmaker Profile: GERALD UNKS

Gerald Unks is a professor in the University of North Carolina's School of Education. Unks has written about overarching issues facing society as well as specific issues facing schools. His work with the London Program influenced authorship of “Three Nations’ Curricula: What Can We Learn From Them?” Inquiries about a course he designed for non-education majors led to the publication of “Educating Consumers, Not Just Practitioners: An Education Course for Non-Majors.” In 2000, he wrote the textbook for this course, titled Schooling in America: Cases, Studies and Comment. He has authored numerous critiques of curriculum, schools and their organization.

For 17 years, Unks edited The High School Journal, an international scholarly journal now in it 89th year and published by the School of Education. Volume 77 (Nos. 1 & 2), devoted to “the homosexual adolescent,” was the largest circulated volume in the journal’s history and provoked further research and writing. Routledge published Unks’ work as The Gay Teen, and is currently considering a second edition.