Mississippi State University Libraries to digitize untold civil rights stories with CLIR grant

Contact: Pattye Archer

STARKVILLE, Miss.—Mississippi State University Libraries soon will bring countless untold stories of Mississippi’s rich and complicated past to a broader audience through a $123,403 grant from the national Council on Library and Information Resources “Digitizing Hidden Collections: Amplifying Unheard Voices” program.

Through the new MSU Libraries project “Freedom Means: Digitizing the Hidden Stories of Black Mississippians’ Fight for Civil Rights,” University Archivist Jessica Perkins Smith and Curator of Material Culture Carrie P. Mastley will digitize materials that involve such topics as community organizers in Northeast Mississippi, Black MSU students, and Black extension and home demonstration agents.

Once digitized, these materials will be freely accessible online via the libraries’ website and the Mississippi Digital Library.

“This funding provides us with an opportunity to make materials that are vital to the study of the Civil Rights Movement more accessible to a wider range of scholars and students, including teachers in the K-12 classroom,” said Associate Dean for Archives and Special Collections David Nolen.

“Many students do not know a lot about the state’s civil rights history,” said Mastley, an assistant professor. “Our hope is that this grant will help not only researchers writing about the topic but also our students, giving them a better understanding of their state’s history.”

Perkins Smith, an associate professor, added that the project’s focus is to represent the daily lives, achievements and struggles of Black Mississippians who are not a part of the state’s well-known civil rights historical records such as Freedom Summer, James Meredith’s integration of the University of Mississippi, and the murders of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner in Neshoba County.

One example is from the collection of Starkville native Sadye Wier, a Black home demonstration agent and world traveler. Donated to MSU Libraries in 1977, Wier’s materials highlight her decades-long career as a home economics teacher and advocate for Black women and families in North Mississippi. Her husband, Robert Wier, was the first Black business owner on Starkville’s Main Street.

Another significant collection being digitized is the Afro-American Plus archive, representing MSU’s first Black student organization formed in 1968 after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The collection includes photos, event programs, issues of the organization’s newspaper Afro-Times, and correspondence with university administrators chronicling how early Black students navigated predominantly white systems while advocating for change.

Perkins Smith has been actively working with several of the university’s first Black alumni to identify items for digitizing. Materials slated for digitization include broadsides, voter registration education materials, Freedom Summer documents, poems from the Council of Federated Organizations, photographs, organization records and more, spanning from the 1920s through the 2000s.

Digitization is only the first step, and Perkins Smith emphasized the importance of these resources to educators in the classroom. She and Mastley plan to develop curriculum specifically for 4th- and 9th-grade students.

“The project will create a site for sharing educator resources, including K-12 lesson plans aligned with the Mississippi College- and Career-Readiness Standards, which emphasize the use of primary sources and civil rights education,” she said. “If we can get these materials into local schools, our children will learn about events that happened here—in their own communities, schools and churches.”

The two-year CLIR Digitizing Hidden Collections grant is made possible by funding from the Mellon Foundation.

The CLIR is an independent, nonprofit organization that forges strategies to enhance research, teaching and learning environments in collaboration with libraries, cultural institutions and communities of higher learning. To learn more, visit www.clir.org and follow CLIR on Facebook and Twitter.

More information on MSU Libraries is available at www.library.msstate.edu.

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