PBS LearningMedia East Lake Meadow: A Public Housing Story Collection

East Lake Meadows in Atlanta, GA

Provided by PBS

PBS LearningMedia has a wide range of learning resources for students in grades 7-12th grade, focused on public housing and civil rights. East Lake Meadows, the public housing project opened by the Atlanta Housing Authority in 1970 and demolished a generation later, and provides resources to understand housing policy and racism.  

The East Lake Meadows film tells the stories of more than a dozen families who lived in the community between the 1970s and its demolition in the mid-1990s, including the Lightfoot family and four generations of the family of Eva Davis, the long-time tenant leader at East Lake Meadows. The film documents the tremendous hardships faced by East Lake families; the lack of access to grocery stores and fresh produce; the impact of devastating unemployment and poverty; conditions that included mold, leaky pipes, and collapsing walls and ceilings; and the seemingly ubiquitous presence of crime, drugs and guns. It also follows the births of children, celebration of holidays, daily activities in schools and the ways in which residents were “making a way out of no way.”

See Program Clips

Local Discussion of East Lake Meadows & Rochester's Experience with Public Housing

To further this conversation, WXXI Education has pulled together educational resources (appropriate for 7-12th grade) from PBS LearningMedia:

• Explore the East Lake Meadows Collection
  
• Steretyping and the Narrative of the Welfare Queen
• Redlining 

• What You Need to Know About Gentrification | The Lowdown
• Redistricting: How the Maps of Power are Drawn | The Lowdown
• How Many Americans Live in Poverty, and What Does That Actually Mean? | The Lowdown
• What Does it Mean to Be Poor in America? | The Lowdown
• San Fransisco Affordable Housing Gap
• Coded Geographies: South Central Civic Action
• Move On Up...or Not | Black America Sink MLK: And Still I Rise
• Vel Phillips: Dream Big Dreams
• Teaching Guide: Exploring Busing and School Segregation in Boston | Digital Public Library of America
• Primary Source Set: Busing & Beyond | Digital Public Library of America
• Primary Source Set: Postwar Rise of the Suburbs | Digital Public Library of America

WXXI Education has also curated a list of resources to support conversations and instruction around race, racism, bias, protests, civil rights, and more.