In 1966 Milwaukee’s Rufus King High School and Kaukauna High School participated in an exchange program of students that culminated in a production of the Martin Duberman play In White America. The goal of the program was to help the students have a broader view of the world, as well as spark conversations about racial understanding in their communities amid the Civil Rights era.
Now the documentary The Exchange. In White America. Kaukauna & King 50 Years Later, shares the impact this program had on its participants — both as teenagers and looking back as adults.
The documentary will be shown at the Oriental Theater this week as a part of the Cultures and Communities Festival. Directed, produced, and written by Milwaukee native Joanne Williams, she notes that the exchange is something that very few people know about unless they were directly involved.
"I knew about it because I was there," says Williams. "I graduated from Rufus King in 1967, and I was there when the exchange happened and I was there when the play was performed. And in doing research about the exchange and in trying to find these 'kids' who are no longer kids to ask them about their experience, I discovered some things about my high school years that I didn't know."
She says the story of the exchange has one that's been in the back of her mind for over 50 years. And in 2016 while Williams was cleaning out her garage, she found a box of files marked "high school stuff" that had a copy of the high school newspaper with a story about the exchange on its front page. "I realized that it had been 50 years since the exchange had happened, and it sounded like a good story to me so I decided I was going to tell it," she explains.
Kaukauna High School social studies teacher Tom Schaffer took the initiative to start the program and connected with Rufus King High School English teacher Ruth Thomas to help arrange an exchange of 13 students according to Williams.
"In Kaukauana at the time, as I say they were demographically challenged because there were no Black people," notes Williams. So students from King went up Kaukauna to live with families for a month while they did the play, and students from Kaukauna went down to Milwaukee to do the same.
Williams was able to interview six of the students who had participated, as well as two parents who had agreed to their children participating in the exchange.
"They had very strong memories about their participation in the exchange and the more we talked, the more they remembered ... and they all felt that it was one of the biggest things that had ever happened in their life," she says.
The original participants also come together with a new generation in the documentary, reprising the play "In White America" with reflection on the original exchange's production and with new meaning amid our own racial reckoning.
"The original exchange didn't have a great impact beyond the exchange itself ... One of the original participants said when they did it in '66 it was just a presentation and that's all there was. When we did it again in '16 and in '18 it had much more impact because people had the talkbacks and the conversations after the play, and that made it a much richer experience for everybody involved," says Williams.
You can see a free community screening of The Exchange. In White America. Kaukauna & King 50 Years Later on Sept. 15 at 6pm at the Oriental Theater as a part of MKE Film's Cultures and Communities Festival.
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