Category: civil rights
-
The Autobiography of Brenda Lavern Travis, c. 1961
I had the honor of meeting Mrs. Brenda Travis in 2023. Ms. Marilyn Lowen called and asked if I could drive Mrs. Travis from Jackson to the Delta for a two-day event commemorating the 60th anniversary of Freedom Summer. It was a quick yes! That is how our friendship began, in my car, during a…
-
July 5, 1964 in McComb, MS
On July 5, 1964, dynamite went off at a house on 702 Wall Street in McComb, Mississippi. Four different documents tell a piece of what occurred that night. Civil rights workers used the home as a gathering place for the Movement and conducted voter registration work. Willie May Cotten owned the property and leased it…
-
“One of the Sleepless Ones:” The Autobiographies of Winson Hudson
The Autobiography of Mrs. Winson Hudson, A Black Woman of Mississippi (an excerpt)—I live in Leake County. I was born here. My father and mother was born here. My husband and I moved to Chicago a year after we were married, neither one of us liked it there. It was not long after we got there that we…
-
She Went to Hopkins Too | Jo Ann Ooiman Robinson
“When I entered orientation for the summer project at Oxford, Ohio, I thought that I already knew about Mississippi. I had read up on the shameful school system and the widespread poverty. I’d seen pictures of Thompson’s Tank and Allan’s Army. I knew about Medgar Evers, Herbert Lee and Lewis Allen.”
-
FIS Library | David Llorens, Freedom Summer Volunteer
My research focuses on the Black volunteers who came to Mississippi that long, hot summer of 1964. With my work at the FIS Library, I began processing some of the volunteer applications.
-
FIS Library Box 2, Folder ‘Bob Moses’
Two years ago, I met civil rights veteran Jan Hillegas. Since 1965, Hillegas has preserved the history of the Mississippi Movement through the Freedom Information Service (FIS) Library. The FIS Library’s first holdings included materials she rescued from the COFO statewide headquarters in Jackson when the organization dissolved that year.
-
“The Forgotten One”: Wayne Yancey
We are the survivors of Mississippi but I knew one who did not come back Not one of the murdered the three young men, two Jewish and one Black but the fourth who died that summer of 1964 in a car accident that may or may not have been an accident He is the forgotten…
-
Freedom Summer | Volunteer Phil Lapsansky
When I learned that Mr. Phil Lapsansky transitioned, I remembered seeing his application for the Mississippi Summer Project in the F.I.S. Archive. I thought it would be fitting if I began with his.
-
research journal, # 1: Mrs. Garlee Johnson
More than ten years ago, I created this digital space to share my research findings which began with Rachel H. Flowers. It shifted to other scholarly projects, including my research on Flowers’ niece, Geraldine L. Wilson, and now the history of Friends of Children of Mississippi, a grassroots antipoverty organization, established in 1966.
-
Personal Musing: 50 Years Later
“I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” [Annotated Speech] I stopped my Civil Rights Bus Tour series on Day 5 in Birmingham and Montgomery, Alabama. So this post jumps to Day 7, our day in Memphis. I only took one picture that day and it was at the National Civil Rights Museum located at the former Lorraine…
Diary of a Historian 