Visit Project Project Details
Through the use of digitized archival documents and oral history interviews, “A Shaky Truce” tells the history of the civil rights movement in Starkville, Mississippi (home to Mississippi State University) with particular emphasis on the local fight for school desegregation.
African Americans fought for equal rights and freedom on the streets and in the schools of every Southern town during the Jim Crow Era. Yet each community and its residents have their own stories to tell about how local individuals organized, protested against inequality, and fought for equal employment, school desegregation, and voting rights. This site tells Starkville's story with an eye to positioning this town and its people as critical reflections of this national movement.
Subjects or Themes
African Americans; civil rights; school desegregation; Mississippi; Mississippi State University; Starkville, Mississippi
Project Language(s)
English
Time Period
Geographic Location
Project Categories
Content Type
oral histories, digitized images, digitized archival documents, mapping, sound, teacher resources, bibliography
Target Audience(s)
Creators
Judith Ridner, Professor, Department of History, Mississippi State University
Hillary Hamblen-Richardson, Assistant Professor, Library, Mississippi University for Women (formerly at Mississippi State University)
Nickoal Eichmann-Kalwara, Assistant Professor, Library, University of Colorado (formerly at Mississippi State University)
Year(s)
2013-2017
Host Institution / Affiliation / Project Location
Mississippi State University
Software Employed
Labor and Support
Although the idea for this project came out of a graduate class, we (a group of MSU faculty & students) took it on as an independent research project because we believed it was an important one. As such, each of us made a commitment to fit this work into our already busy research and teaching or student schedules. We completed the research for it over about two years. In addition, we probably spent another year researching the software we chose, and designing and building the website from scratch. Since only one member of our project team had any digital experience when we started, we had to teach ourselves how to use all of the digital tools and software we made use of -- from video editing oral history interviews on iMovie and YouTube to how to make a podcast and load it into Soundcloud to how to build pages in Wordpress. We learned it all from scratch. Completing this project was about as time-consuming as writing book -- only we did it as a group and framed it for digital audiences. It took a lot of time but most of us see it as one of the most rewarding projects we've ever done.
Project Cost
Partnerships, funding sources, or grant-funding acknowledgement
Mississippi State University Libraries, Mississippi State University Department of History, Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), Mississippi Humanities Council, Mississippi Library Commission
