Funding
for this project
provided by

The Mississippi State Legislature

The Mississippi 
Humanites Council

The Mississippi 
Department 
of Archives 
and History 

The Center
for Oral History
and Cultural Heritage
at  The University of Southern 
Mississippi

History of the Project

How did this project arise?

For many years, the Mississippi Humanities Council has involved itself with the collection and preservation of oral history in the state.  Until 1995, the council focused on funding and promoting oral history projects through its regular granting mission. After that time, the council stepped up its efforts in oral history through three mechanisms: 1) it directed a statewide effort to compile a comprehensive list of all oral histories available in the state; 2) it turned an eye on its own history by commissioning an oral history of the Council itself; and 3) it funded an effort to compile a bibliography of all oral histories in the United States about the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi.These efforts focused state attention on the importance of oral history as a primary resource and the wealth of information that remained uncollected.  Rather than jumping into oral history projects, the council chose to first view existing collections systematically and noted gaps.  From this vantage point, the Council partnered with a university to develop the Mississippi Oral History Program. The purpose of the program was to draw on Mississippians’ deep love of oral tradition and storytelling as a way to engage average citizens with humanities content – history, literature, culture, traditions – and to use this excitement over oral tradition to spark or renew interest in local museums, cultural centers, collections, and projects.

How were the council board and staff involved initially?

This initiative began because of the efforts of Dr. Barbara Carpenter, who in 1995 was the assistant director of the Mississippi Humanities Council. Dr. Carpenter wrote the exemplary award planning grant that was funded by the NEH to begin collecting information about oral history in Mississippi. As director of MHC, Dr. Carpenter initiated an effort to act on the information gathered during the planning grant process. She established a partnership with the largest oral history program in the state, the Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage at The University of Southern Mississippi. She and the Center director, Charles Bolton, developed the concept of a statewide oral history program that would collect the memories and stories of Mississippians from all walks of life.  She and her board lobbied the state legislature to fund such an effort.  The lobbying was successful and money was appropriated from the state legislature to fund a statewide oral history project that began in 1999.  The project was deemed such a success that the legislature appropriated a second year of funding for 2000-2001.

How did the humanities shape the format and content of the project?

The concept of a statewide oral history project was to engage Mississippians with their history, culture, literature, and traditions in a way that would connect the humanities with quotidian life.  From the start, then, projects have been focused on local history, local literature traditions, and local culture.  The format was to allow communities follow their own local interests to design a project. In other words, communities or groups developed project ideas that focused on particular aspects of local history, culture or literature.  Communities were challenged to develop humanities-based projects that were of special interest to them and would, therefore, generate the greatest amount of local enthusiasm. Communities were not limited by theme, yet the focus on history and tradition unified the overall project. In one sense then, the  “history” documented in this project varied as much as the individual telling the stories. In another sense, these small “histories” are being woven together to form a complex, contoured large “history” of Mississippi. The focus on local history has formed most of the content of the interviews collected, but the effort to look at these local histories and traditions as part of a larger story has shaped the project into a story that is transcending its individual parts.

Public involvement in the planning, implementation, and evaluation

The first steps toward this statewide oral history project were taken by the formation of a committee of experts to establish standards for oral history in Mississippi. Overall standards were established in media and preservation. Other than the media and preservation standards, most of the structure of the project is flexible enough to allow the public to control the product at the local level. For example, actual project design – topic, scope, time frame, public programming – is in the hands of the communities or groups involved.  Community leaders often submit the original proposal, but these leaders then hold public meetings to allow everyone to have an opportunity to suggest people to interview, topics to cover, and public programs that should arise as a result of the oral histories. All of the firstprojects held community-wide meetings and had articles published in local papers. The specific shape of each local project was determined, in large part, by the information gathered in these public meetings. Scholars are key support people, but the projects belong to the groups themselves.

 

Public issues in the project

The history of public issues addressed by the projects ranged from the Civil Rights Movement to rural school consolidation, from the decline in farm and manufacturing jobs to the increase in population.In other words, the projects themselves became forums in which individuals, in recounting their lives, revisited the important public policy concerns of the 20^th century.

In addition, a central public policy issue address by the entire project was the one of common ground.  In the advance materials promoting this project to the public, the goal of finding common ground was explicitly set forth.  Mississippi has a long history of division, and the racial divisions in the state often overshadow any other knowledge that outsiders have about Mississippi. The Council recognized oral history and storytelling as a love of all Mississippians and devised a project in which Mississippians from all walks of life could participate and offer their life experiences for the record.  Each community’s story casts one thread in the weave of Mississippi history. By sharing these stories told by people from all walks of life, the Council is seizing the opportunity to invite Mississippians to create a collective memory of life in the 20^th century and build a foundation for our common future. These community meetings 1) allow people from diverse backgrounds to come together and share their experiences and, by sharing, come to a deeper understanding of the breadth of experience in the state, and 2) by pooling the stories together create a harmonious, rather than divisive, foundation for the future.

The format of the project

The format of the Mississippi Oral History Project was innovative in its structure. Rather than simply replicating the structure of traditional grants, the Council set up a statewide coordinator for the project through its partnering with a local university. The partnering assured the Council that all tapes recorded would be archived according to national standards, that all the sites would receive technical training, and that all the interviews would remain available to the public. Each project had a local project director (who arranged the town meetings, handled local logistics, and finalized the list of interviewers and interviewees). This project director worked under the tutelage of a statewide coordinator (who also functioned as project scholar for the pilot sites). The coordinator ensured consistency in the technology and technical details and stepped in if a project appeared to become exclusive.  In this way, the Council designed a statewide project that could be consistent in technical quality and could provide technical expertise at the disposal of the local groups, but did not impose any particular structure on a community or group. The concept of the scholars and coordinator as “facilitators” rather than experts who determine the shape or scope of a project is an innovative approach. In this way, humanities scholars were treated much like people with particular technical knowledge. In a figurative sense, you could say they taught people how to drive the car, but didn’t drive it for them. This had two positive effects. First, scholars worked directly with the public in a way that humanities scholars often don’t. This brought more of the public in touch with humanities scholars in a work-a-day fashion that raised the profile of the humanities with the general public. In other words, this wasn’t a scholar giving a talk or a lecture, but rather working with (or for) the public. Secondly, this became a mechahnism for scholars to meeting people in various communities and establish relationships. Oral history projects are perfect for bringing communities and scholars together because the projects initially produce primary documents, which require intimate knowledge of the subject but don’t require training in, say, historiography. Both scholar and community member approach the project as experts – the community member steeped in knowledge of local history and the scholar in methods, technical details, and interpretation.

 

Impact of this project on participants; on-going and lasting effects

In 1999, five pilot projects were launched. The five projects were recording histories of Delta State University, Lee County (conducted by local historical society), Noxubee County (run by the county library), an oral history of the lives of graduates of Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College, and an oral history of the traditionally African- American section of Biloxi (conducted by Community Bridges, a nonprofit humanities and arts community group). Those five projects results in more than 250 interviews recorded. The interviews were all indexed and are available to the public. The local project directors included an archivist, a historian, an artist, a librarian, and a banker. Each project resulted in some public programming effort, such as storytelling sessions, a permanent collection being added to a local repository, and stories generated in the local newspaper. Lee County, Noxubee County, and Community Bridges were so excited about their projects that, although funding has ceased, they are continuing to interview people. The Noxubee County Library has put its interviews on a Web site. Lee County reports that it never plans to end the project, but rather to make collecting local history through recordings a permanent part of their historical society’s activities.  Art students at Community Bridges are listening to the oral histories in order to glean stories that they can paint in a mural to show the history and local wisdom handed to them by their elders through these recordings.

After learning the lessons of the pilot sites, the Council settled on a structure for the program that included a planning phase. Twelve sites have just completed their planning phase. Working closely with scholars, many of these sites have designed projects that incorporate school children into the collection of the histories and train teacher, design web sites featuring excerpts, create a CD-ROM featuring clips from the oral histories on public tours, initiate a narrative stage for a local festival, revise museum exhibits to use oral histories to interpret collections or explain general history, and also, of course, continue to provide the ever-popular public storytelling sessions. 

These projects transferred knowledge from scholars to the community about how to conduct, process and preserve oral history projects as well as the step-by-step instructions for how to bring a community together to develop common ground for a group effort – rather than having one group or one point of view direct a project –  and how to manage such a large group project.