In 2021, while sorting my grandmother’s photo archive—more than 1,000 snapshots of our family’s history—I came across about a dozen from my father’s school days. Like all the children in Shannon, Mississippi in the 1950s and 1960s, he attended Siggers High School. Among the photos were images of him, a postcard of the brick school building constructed in the 1960s, a faculty portrait featuring principal Rev. E.L. Siggers, and a yearbook.

Over the next four years, with the help of State Representative Rickey Thompson and Shannon native Dexter Foster, I interviewed 27 alumni and gathered additional photographs and archival materials. I also partnered with filmmakers Ethan Payne and D.J. Toliver to capture contemporary footage of oral history narrators and the places central to their stories, including the school itself. The result is We Make, a narrative account of Black placemaking: a community that needed a school for its children and helped build one itself, using bricks from "the other school," as Mr. A.B. told it.