‘All American: Homecoming’ Bosses On Addressing Bomb Threats At HBCUs & The Complexity Of Shared Trauma

08.11.2022 - 07:21 / deadline.com

The usually bustling lives of the students at Bringston University came to a halt after the campus was put on lockdown due to a bomb threat during Monday night’s episode of The CW series All American: Homecoming.

It’s a story that showrunners Nkechi Okoro Carroll and Marqui Jackson have been hoping to bring to the small screen since the show’s inception, given the rising number of bomb threats made against historically Black colleges and universities over the past several years.

HBCUs in the United States have been targeted by bomb threats at least 57 times this year. In August, Howard University received two bomb threats in the span of a week. To date, no arrests have been made in connection with any of these incidents.

“If there was ever a show to talk about it, I felt like it was ours because we’re set in an HBCU environment and we really push ourselves to put an authentic portrayal of Black youth on TV,” Carroll told Deadline during a recent interview.

Over the course of the episode, the students and faculty are forced to have difficult conversations about how to best move through this shared trauma that they are experiencing. Naturally, the students have very different ideas about how to cope, as well as how to stop this from happening on their campus again.

Carroll and Jackson spoke with Deadline about how they crafted the complex narrative, and how this incident will set the stage for even more discussions about mental health and the importance of Black joy in Episode 5.

DEADLINE: Why was it important for you to center these two episodes on a bomb threat at Bringston, as opposed to many other incidents that could trigger a conversation about mental health?

NKECHI OKORO CARROLL: Marqui and I have talked about