Charles Guggenheim's "A City Decides" follows the events that led to the desegregation of public schools in St. Louis in 1956, through the optic of a teacher who's favorable to the act but understands the polarization about the issue and its complications among blacks and white towards progress and against prejudice.
It's presented through the usual settings of traditional documentaries of the period, a quite didatic manner, which helps and educates the viewer about the topic, the context of everything and its obstacles, from teens attacks on African-American kids and teen in St. Louis and other southern cities, and the whole society debate over what integration could case, upside and alleged and unfounded downside.
A good short documentary but not without some problems. It makes us learn and understand things, despite a certain superficiality and treatment of its presentation, not as colorful as a world where everything is solved easily but the real harsh dimension of situations are far too hidden, almost absent that a clueless viewer who don't know that moment in history, will find that the racial division was simplistic and without a real hatred. Yet it's a perfectly watchable and historical doc. 7/10.
