The Delta Oral History Project
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Contents |
Overview:
The Delta Oral History Project is a joint venture between Dickinson College in Pennsylvania and Tougaloo College in Mississippi. With support from these two institutions and the National Endowment for the Humanities, researchers Kim Lacy Rogers, a historian from Dickinson, and Jerry W. Ward Jr., who at the time was an English professor at Tougaloo, along with community organizer Owen Brooks interviewed more than a hundred residents of the Mississippi Delta between 1995 and 1997. The project particularly conducted interviews in the counties of Sunflower, Washington, Bolivar, and Coahoma although a few interviews were conducted in Jackson and Canton, Mississippi as well. The goal of the project was to “discover how local activists in Mississippi communities described their lives in terms of the patterns of stability and change that often structure life stories.” (1) The project focused on the life-stories and reflections of community activists and carefully noted the experiences, traumas, and achievements undergone in the Delta.
Methods:
Finding and Selecting Interviewees: The project found many participants through the networks of community organizer Owen Brooks. Project directors note that the set of narrators is limited to those who obviously survived the trauma of racism and to those who did not move away. The ability to interview was also dependent upon the health and willingness of individuals, many of whom were elderly or suffering ill health. All of the narrators were recognized as political leaders within their respective communities. The co-directors note that these narrators encompass not only those who ran for office but also those who organized and ran programs like Head Start, a War on Poverty program.(2)
Framing the Questions: The questions asked by interviewers sought out “concrete memories of ordinary daily life and experience.”(3) These questions elicited narratives about family, schooling, and labor. Other questions targeted the role of the narrator as activist. These questions emphasized personal motivations for activism, results of activism, and reflections on changes. In addition, narrators were asked about national and regional events, movements, and ideas. All of the questions dove beneath the fact of an event occurring and sought to find the motivations and methods for the occurrence. Significantly differing from other oral histories of the civil rights movement, narrators were also asked about the current (1990s) state of life in the Delta and how past and current activism has impacted the economic, political, and social landscape of the Delta.
Conducting the Interview: In her book, Life and Death in the Delta, Rogers notes that gender often influenced the level of comfort in the interview setting. When the interviewers were males, the male narrator tended to share more deeply. Female narrators seemed to be more receptive to Rogers as a female interviewer. The comfort level was also bridged by the presence of the recognizable local figure Owen Brooks. His involvement in the project not only led to finding narrators but also facilitated the willingness to share.(4)
Analysis: Kim Lacy Rogers utilized the interviews of The Delta Oral History Project in her book Life and Death in the Delta. She divulges that some key elements in the individual narratives were expected by the interviewers. Not only did these expectations influence the forming of questions, but they also impacted and refined analysis. Rogers states in Life and Death in the Delta that the interviewers anticipated narrators to frame their lives in a mixture of familial and community relationships and to “structure their assessments of positive and negative changes by comparing their own experiences of family and community,” that individuals would tend to “valorize” their stories, and that narratives would be complex and occasionally contradictory.(5) As she discusses the structural violence of white supremacy and its detriment to African American communities of the Delta and the activism conducted to combat these traumas, Rogers keeps these important narratives structures and techniques in mind.
Collection Information:
The interviews were deposited at both Tougaloo College in the Zenobia Coleman Library and at Dickinson College in the archives of its Community Studies Center. A finding aid for the collection at Dickinson College is available on the Community Studies Center website.(6) There a few tapes that are not publicly accessible but they are labeled.
http://www.dickinson.edu/departments/commstud/PDF_files/finding_aids/delta.pdf
Notes:
1. Kim Lacy Rogers,Life and Death in the Delta: African American Narratives of Violence, Resilience, and Social Change, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 10.
2. Kim Lacy Rogers,Life and Death in the Delta, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 12.
3. Kim Lacy Rogers, Life and Death in the Delta, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 11.
4. Kim Lacy Rogers, Life and Death in the Delta, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 14-15.
5. Kim Lacy Rogers, Life and Death in the Delta, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 11.
6. Community Studies Center, “Archives,” Dickinson College, http://www.dickinson.edu/departments/commstud/
