All posts by Karlyn Forner

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Learn from the Past, Organize for the Future

This Friday and Saturday, March 23 – 24, veterans of the Civil Rights Movement, contemporary activists from the Movement for Black Lives, scholars, librarians, educators, and students are gathering in Durham for the culminating events of the SNCC Digital Gateway Project. We hope you can be there too.

The SNCC Legacy Project, the Center for Documentary Studies, and Duke University Libraries joined forces over four years ago to create the SNCC Digital Gateway, where those who made the history are central to telling the story. Now as the project nears completion, we’re reflecting on the collaboration and celebrating the good work.

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)—the only youth-led national civil rights group—organized a grassroots movement in the 1960s that empowered Black communities and transformed the nation. Veteran SNCC activists have been collaborating with Duke University to build the SNCC Digital Gateway, a website told from the perspective of the activists themselves that documents SNCC’s work building democracy from the ground up and makes those experiences, thinking, and strategies accessible for the generations to come.

Over 20 SNCC veterans, members of the Durham chapter of BYP100, phillip agnew of Dream Defenders, Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson, co-director of Highlander Center for Research and Education, local activists, educators, students, and more are coming together this weekend to reflect on the creation of the SNCC Digital Gateway and to explore how grassroots organizing work of the past can inform today’s struggles for justice and democracy.

Events on Friday, March 23, taking place in the Richard White Lecture Hall at Duke University, will focus on the partnership between SNCC veterans and the academy and the nuts and bolts of doing collaborative digital humanities work. Then on Saturday, March 24, participants will gather at the Walker Complex at North Carolina Central University to explore how SNCC’s organizing can inform today’s struggles and strategize about electoral politics and power, grassroots organizing, controlling the public narrative, coalition building, and more.

You can find more information about closing events here. Don’t miss this chance to learn from and interact with those who were organizing in the sixties and those who are organizing today. Bring yourselves. Bring others. It’s free, and you’re invited.

Behind the Scenes, Projects

The New and Improved SNCC Digital Gateway

It may only be 6 months old, but as of May 31, the SNCC Digital Gateway is sporting a new look. Since going live in December 2016, we’ve been doing assessment, talking to contemporary activists and movement veterans and conducting user testing and student surveys. The feedback’s been overwhelmingly positive, but a few suggestions kept coming up. Give people a better sense of who SNCC was right from the homepage, and make it more active. Connect SNCC’s history to organizing today. As one of the young organizers put it, “What is it about SNCC’s legacy now that matters for people?” So we took those suggestions to heart and are proud to present a reworked, redesigned SNCC Digital Gateway. Keep reading for a breakdown of what’s new and why.

Today Section

The new Today section highlights important strategies and lessons from SNCC’s work and explores their usefulness to today’s struggles. Through short, engaging videos, contemporary activists talk about how SNCC’s work continues to be relevant to their organizing today. The nine framing questions and answers of today’s organizers speak to enduring themes at the heart of SNCC’s work: uniting with local people to build a grassroots movement for change that empowered Black communities and transformed the nation. Check out this example:

More Expansive Homepage

The new homepage is longer and gives visitors to the site more context and direction. It includes descriptions of who SNCC was and links users to The Story of SNCC, which tells an expansive but concise history of SNCC’s work. It features videos from the new Today section, and gives users a way to explore the site through themes like voting rights, the organizing tradition, and Black Power.

Themes


Want to know more about voting rights? Black Power? Or are you not as familiar with SNCC’s history and need an entry point? The theme buttons on the homepage give users a window into SNCC’s history through particular aspects of the organization’s work. Theme pages feature select profiles and events focused on a central component of SNCC’s organizing. From there, click through the documents or follow the links to dig deeper into the story.

Navigation Updates

To improve navigation for the site, we’ve changed the name of the History section to Timeline and the former Perspectives to Our Voices. We’ve also moved the About section to the footer to make space for the new Today section.

Have suggestions? Comments? We’re always interested in what you’re thinking. Add a comment or send us an e-mail to snccdigital@gmail.org.

Projects

Photographing the Movement

Ella Baker, 1964, Danny Lyon, Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement 12, dektol.wordpress.com

You never know what to expect with the SNCC Digital Gateway Project project. This three-and-a-half year collaboration with veterans of the Civil Rights Movement, scholars, and archivists has brought constant surprises, one of which came this past January.

The SNCC Digital Gateway website went live on December 13, 2016. One of the 20th century’s most influential activists, Ella Baker, brought the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) into being out of the student sit-in movement in 1960, and it would have been her 113th birthday. The SNCC Digital Gateway tells the story of how young activists in SNCC united with local people in the Deep South to build a grassroots movement for change that empowered the Black community and transformed the nation.

Bob Dylan, Courtland Cox, Pete Seeger, and James Forman sitting outside the SNCC office in Greenwood, Mississippi, July 1963, Danny Lyon, dektol.wordpress.com

Over 175 SNCC staff, local activists, mentors, and allies are profiled on the site. The entire project is built on open communication and collaboration between movement veterans and scholars, so after the website went live, SNCC Legacy Project president Courtland Cox sent all living SNCC veterans a link to their profile and requested their feedback. And this is where the unexpected happened. Danny Lyon, SNCC’s first staff photographer, wrote back, offering the use of his photographs in the SNCC Digital Gateway.

Photograph of Danny Lyon with his Nikon F Reflex, Chicago 1960, Danny Lyon Photography, Magnum Photos
Photograph of Danny Lyon with his Nikon F Reflex in Chicago, 1960, Danny Lyon, dektol.wordpress.com

In many ways, Danny Lyon’s photos are the iconic photos of SNCC. In the summer of 1962, Lyon, then a student at the University of Chicago, hitchhiked to Cairo, Illinois with his camera to photograph the desegregation movement that SNCC was helping to organize. After SNCC’s executive secretary James Forman brought Lyon onto staff, he spent next two years documenting SNCC organizing work and demonstrations across the South. Many SNCC posters and pamphlets featured Lyon’s photographs, helping SNCC develop its public image and garner sympathy for the Movement. Julian Bond described Lyon’s photos  as helping “to make the movement move.”

For Danny Lyon to offer these images to the SNCC Digital Gateway was something like winning the lottery. The ties between SNCC veterans run deep, and Lyon explained that he wanted to help. Due to the website’s sustainability standards, our sources for photographs have been limited. While the number of movement-related digital collections are growing, the vast majority are made up of documents, not images. Lyon agreed to give us digital copies of any his movement photos for use in the site. These included rarely photographed people, like Prathia Hall, Worth Long, Euvester Simpson, and many others.

We spent two months working with Danny Lyon and the people at Magnum Photos to identify images, hammer out terms of use, and embed the photos in the site. Today, the SNCC Digital Gateway website proudly features over 70 of Danny Lyon’s photographs. Spend some time, and check them out. And thank you, Mr. Danny Lyon!

James Forman leads singing with staffers in the SNCC office on Raymond Street, 1963, Danny Lyon, Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement 123, dektol.wordpress.com
Announcements, Projects

SNCC Digital Gateway goes LIVE

sdglogoA new documentary website: SNCC Digital Gateway: Learn from the Past, Organize for the Future, Make Democracy Work (https://snccdigital.org) debuted on Tuesday, December 13th. It is the product of collaboration between the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) Legacy Project, Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies, and Duke Libraries. SNCC, which grew out of the student sit-in movement in 1960, was brought into being by Ella Baker, one of the 20th century’s most influential activists. Tuesday would have been her 113th birthday.

Made possible by the generous support of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the SNCC Digital Gateway tells the story of how young activists in SNCC united with local people in the Deep South to build a grassroots movement for change that empowered the Black community and transformed the nation.sdghomepage

Using documentary footage, audio recordings, photographs, and documents, the site portrays how SNCC organizers, alongside thousands of local Black residents, worked so that Black people could take control of their lives. It unveils the inner workings of SNCC as an organization, examining how it coordinated sit-ins and freedom schools, voter registration and economic cooperatives, anti-draft protests and international solidarity struggles.

In this new documentary website, you’ll find:

  • Historic materials including documents, photographs, oral history interviews, and audiovisual material hosted in digital collections at repositories across the country
  • Profiles examining individuals’ contributions to the Movement
  • Events tracing the evolution of SNCC’s organizing
  • Inside SNCC pages unveiling the inner workings of SNCC as an organization
  • Perspectives presenting aspects of SNCC’s history from the eyes of the activists themselves
  • Map connecting users to the people who worked—and the events that happened—in a specific place.

In 2013, the SNCC Legacy Project (SLP) and Duke University formed a partnership to chronicle the historic struggles for voting rights and to develop ongoing programs that contribute to a more civil and inclusive democracy in the 21st century.

sdginsidesncc

SNCC veterans shaped the vision and framework of the SNCC Digital Gateway. They worked collaboratively with historians of the Movement, archivists, and students to weave together grassroots stories, digitized primary source materials, and new multi-media productions to bring this history—and its enduring legacy—to life for a new generation.

The SNCC Digital Gateway is a work in progress. We will continue to add more stories and fill out its content in the year to come.

The story of the Movement told on this website is one of unsung heroes: domestic workers and sharecroppers, young organizers and seasoned mentors, World War II veterans and high school students. The SNCC Digital Gateway is here to share their story—and to help continue their legacy of organizing for self-determination and democracy in the generations to come. We feel certain that the site not only provides an unprecedented and valuable window onto past civil rights struggles, but a valuable tool for all those interested in social change today.

Behind the Scenes, Projects

Content Galore: the SNCC Digital Gateway’s Ongoing Challenge

SDG_ContentLog
Google Drive content log for SNCC Digital Gateway.

So much content. Gobs of content. Never-ending ideas for more content. Content–how to produce, present, and connect it–it’s a challenge the SNCC Digital Gateway Project faces on a daily basis.

The SNCC Digital Gateway deals in two types of content.

First is the content written by the student Project Team under the direction of our SNCC Visiting Activist Scholar. This includes 600 – 700 word profiles of people, stories of events, audiovisual pieces exploring different perspectives in SNCC, and close-ups of the inner workings of SNCC as an organization. When the SNCC Digital Gateway debuts in December of 2016, it will feature over 150 profiles, 50 events, 9 audiovisual pieces, and 25 organizing SNCC pages.

Arrest record for Willie Ricks Individuals active in civil disturbances, vol. 1, ADAH

The second type of content in the SNCC Digital Gateway is the primary sources embedded within the profiles, events, and organizing SNCC pages. Each piece of written content features 6 – 8 digitized primary sources. These are items like the arrest record of SNCC field secretary Willie Ricks — “Extremely radical, militant individual”–, articles from SNCC’s newsletter, The Student Voice, or SNCC activists recounting their organizing experiences in the 1988 We Shall Not Be Moved conference at Trinity College.

Multiply the amount of written content by the number of embedded sources, and that totals well over 1500 items. And that’s only for the 2016 debut…2017 is devoted to producing more content! By the time the SNCC Digital Gateway is complete, it’s aiming to feature 300 – 400 profiles, 100 plus events, 50 organizing SNCC pages, and over 20 audiovisual pieces.

Producing so much content is a challenge in and of itself, and our resources have limits. But the SNCC Digital Gateway also needs to present these vast volumes of content in a user-friendly, intuitive way. One Person, One Vote, the pilot site to SDG, taught us a good deal about what works and doesn’t work in site architecture. We wanted the SNCC Digital Gateway to be more accessible to students and teachers, movement veterans and the general public. That meant providing users ways to explore by people and place, periods, organizations, and ideas. The Editorial Board and project staff have spent months hammering out how best to do that. We ended up with something that looks like this:

SDG_Wireframe
Wireframe for the SNCC Digital Gateway sketched on the whiteboard wall of the project room.

In mid-January, we met with Kompleks Creative, the designers of the SNCC Digital Gateway, to see what they thought was possible. Here’s an illustrative recount of the conversation about profiles and how to navigate through them using geography:

    SDG:“We want users to be able to sort through profiles by state, region, county, or city, and we’d really like them to be able to get to counties and cities directly.
    Kompleks: “How many counties are you talking about?”
    SDG: “Probably 100 or more.”
    Kompleks: “Wow. That’s not going to work.”

Don’t worry. We came to up with a good solution. But the fact that the SNCC Digital Gateway needs to handle 500 – 600 pieces of content when finished (never mind the thousands of embedded sources) is an ongoing hurdle. The design process is only beginning, so our site architecture questions are far from sorted out. But in the end, the SNCC Digital Gateway needs to bring SNCC’s history to life in a way that both channels how movement activists understood their work and is accessible and compelling for a new generation of young people, teachers, and scholars.

Good thing we’re only half a year into a three-year project.

Behind the Scenes

Launching One Person, One Vote

Promotional postcard for One Person, One Vote site.
Promotional postcard for One Person, One Vote site.

On Monday, March 2nd, the new website, One Person, One Vote: The Legacy of SNCC and the Fight for Voting Rights, went live. The launch represented an unprecedented feat of collaboration between activists, scholars, archivists, digital specialists, and students. In a year and a half, this group went from wanting to tell a grassroots story of SNCC’s voting rights activism to bringing that idea to fruition in a documentary website.

So what did it take to get there? The short answer is a dedicated group of people who believed in a common goal, mobilized resources, put in the work, and trusted each other’s knowledge and expertise enough to bring the project to life. Here’s a brief look at the people behind-the-scenes:

Advisory Board: Made up of representatives of the SNCC Legacy Project, Duke Libraries, and the Center for Documentary Studies, the Advisory Board tackled the monumental task of raising funds, making a way, and ensuring the future of the project.

Editorial Board: One Person, One Vote site has content galore. It features 82 profiles, multimedia stories, an interactive timeline, and map that collectively tell a story of SNCC’s voting rights activism. The enormous task of prioritizing content fell to the Editorial Board. Three historians, three SNCC veterans, and three Duke Libraries staff spent long hours debating the details of who and what to include and how to do it.

OPOVlogo_mediumProject Team: Once the Editorial Board prioritized content, it was the Project Team’s job to carry out the work. Made up of six undergrads, two grad students, and one intern, the Project Team researched and wrote profiles and created the first drafts of the site’s content.

Visiting Activist Scholars: SNCC veterans and Editorial Board members, Charlie Cobb and Judy Richardson, came to Duke during the 2014 – 2015 academic year to advise the Project Team and work with the Project Manager in creating content for One Person, One Vote. As the students worked to write history from the perspective of the activists and local people, the Visiting Activist Scholars guided them, serving as the project’s “SNCC eyes.”

OPOV_logo_textDesign Contractors: The One Person, One Vote Project hired The Splinter Group to design and create a WordPress theme for the site with input from the Editorial Board.

Duke Libraries Digital Specialists: The amazing people in Duke Libraries’ Digital Production Center and Digital Projects turned One Person, One Vote into a reality. They digitized archival material, built new features, problem-solved, and did a thousand other essential tasks that made One Person, One Vote the functional, sleek, and beautiful site that it is.

Of course, this is only the short list. Many more people within the SNCC Legacy Project, the Center for Documentary Studies, and Duke Libraries arranged meetings and travel plans, designed postcards and wrote press releases, and gave their thoughts and ideas throughout the process. One Person, One Vote is unquestionably the work of many and represents a new way for activists, scholars, and librarians to partner in telling a people’s history.

Behind the Scenes, Technology

Challenges of Embedding

One Person, One Vote project room in The/Edge. Countdown shows 17 days until launch
One Person, One Vote project room in The/Edge. Countdown shows 17 days until launch

During its first five months, the One Person, One Vote project concentrated on producing content. The forthcoming website (onevotesncc.org) tells the story of how the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s (SNCC) commitment to community organizing forged a movement for voting rights made up of thousands of local people. When the One Person, One Vote site goes live on March 2nd (only 17 days from today!), it will include over 75 profiles of the sharecroppers and maids, World War II veterans and high school students, SNCC activists and seasoned mentors that are the true heroes in the struggle for voting rights. From September through January, the project team scoured digital collections, archival resources, secondary sources, and internet leads to craft these stories.

At the end of January, the One Person, One Vote WordPress theme was finished and our url was working. The project had just settled into its new space in The/Edge, Duke Libraries new hub for research, technology, and collaboration, making it a great time to start a new phase of the project: populating and embedding.

An example of the layout of a profile on One Person, One Vote with photos embedded in the context and primary source documents in the right sidebar.
An example of the layout of a profile on One Person, One Vote with photos embedded in the context and primary source documents in the right sidebar.

Unlike traditional digital collections, the One Person, One Vote site does not host any of the primary source material it uses. Instead, it acts as a digital gateway, embedding and linking to material hosted in different digital collections at institutions across the country. These include the Wisconsin Historical Society’s Freedom Summer Collection, the Civil Rights in Mississippi Digital Archive at the University of Southern Mississippi, Duke’s SNCC 40th Anniversary and Joseph Sinsheimer collections, and the Trinity College’s 1988 SNCC conference tapes to name only a few. Every profile featured on the One Person, One Vote site includes 4 – 8 unique sources, and the entire site has over 400 items embedded in it.

Figuring out how to cleanly and uniformly  embed sources has been a challenge to say the least. Many archival institutions use the archival management system, CONTENTdm, to organize their digital collections. The Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement website hosts their documents as pdf files. The Library of Congress provides an embed code for the oral histories in their Civil Rights Oral History Project, but they also post them on YouTube. Meanwhile, the McComb Legacies Project and Trinity College use Vimeo. The amount of digitized material is staggering but how it’s made available is far from standardized. So by trial and error, One Person, One Vote is slowly coming up with answers to the question: how do we bring diverse sources together to tell a compelling story (both narrative-wise and visually) of the grassroots struggle for voting rights? Right now, these are some of our footnotes.

The One Person, One Vote Project's running footnotes on how to embed primary source material.
A selection of the One Person, One Vote Project’s growing list of footnotes on how to embed primary source material.

 

Behind the Scenes, Projects

Profiling Movement Activists in 7 Steps

SNCC workers prepare to go to Belzoni in the Fall of 1963 to organize for the Freedom Vote. Courtesy of www.crmvet.org.
SNCC workers prepare to go to Belzoni in the Fall of 1963 to organize for the Freedom Vote. Courtesy of www.crmvet.org.

On the surface, writing a 500-word profile about a SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) field secretary or a Mississippi-beautician-turned-grassroots-organizer doesn’t seem like a formidable task. Five hundred words hardly takes ten minutes to type. But the One Person, One Vote project is aiming for more than short biographies; it’s trying to capture why each individual was important to the movement and show that using stories. So this is how we craft a profile in 7 steps:

Step 1: Choose a person

Back in June, the Editorial Board generated a list of people that the One Person, One Vote site needed to profile in order to understand SNCC’s voting rights activism. In less than an hour, we had a list of over a hundred names that included SNCC field secretaries, local people, movement elders, and everyone in between. And those were only the first names that came to mind! We narrowed that list down to 65 people, and that’s what the project team has been working from.

Step 2: Find out everything you can about the person

The first step in profile writing is research. We have a library of twenty books for instant referencing of secondary sources. Next comes surveying available primary sources. Our profiles include documents, photographs, audio clips, news stories, and other items created during the movement to make historical actors come to life. Some of our go-to places to find these sources include: Wisconsin Historical Society’s Freedom Summer Digital Collection, the Civil Rights History Project at the Library of Congress, the Joseph Sinsheimer interviews and SNCC 40th Anniversary Conference tapes at Duke University, the Civil Rights in Mississippi Digital Archive at the University of Southern Mississippi, the University of Georgia’s Civil Rights Digital Library. There are more, of course, but that’s the start.

Step 3: Figure out why the person you’re profiling was important to the movement

The central question behind every profile the project team writes is: who was _______ to the movement? Once you start filling in the blank, the answers vary to an incredible degree. Movement elders like Ella Baker and Myles Horton contributed to the movement in different, yet equally important ways as  Mississippi-born field secretaries like Charles McLaurin, Sam Block, and Willie Peacock. Trying to figure out how and why is no small undertaking. This is where the guidance of our Visiting Activist Scholar helps focus the One Person, One Vote site on the themes that were at the heart of the movement: grassroots activism, community organizing, and individual empowerment.

Step 4: Use stories to express that in 500 words

Next, spend hours trying to express who the person you’re profiling was to the movement in only five hundred words. The profiles on the One Person, One Vote site aren’t mini academic biographies. Instead, we try to tell stories that illustrate who the people were and how their lives and work influenced SNCC’s voting rights activism in the 1960s. Finding the right story to highlight these central themes is key, and telling it well takes time and (lots of) revision.

The OPOV project does all content production in Google Drive. Here is the OPOV Profile Log to keep tract of profiles through the steps towards completion.
The OPOV project does all content production in Google Drive. Here is the OPOV Profile Log to keep tract of profiles through the steps towards completion.

Step 5: Workshop profile draft with project team

The first draft of every profile is workshopped with the One Person, One Vote project team (made up of 4 undergrads, 2 graduate students, and the project manager). As a group, we suggest how profiles can better convey their central theme, make sure that the person’s story is readable and compelling, line edit for clunky writing, and go through the primary sources.

Step 6: Send to Visiting Activist Scholar for editing

All of the revised profile drafts go the Visiting Activist Scholar for a final round of editing. Charlie Cobb, a journalist and former SNCC field secretary, is our first Visiting Activist Scholar. He helps bring the profiles to life in ways that only someone who was a part of the movement can. Charlie adds details about events, mannerisms of people, and behind-the-scene stories that never made it into history books. While the project team relies on available primary and secondary sources, the Visiting Activist Scholars adds something extra to the profiles on the One Person, One Vote site.

Step 7:  Voila!

Profiles goes through one last proofreading and polishing. Then come 2015, the will be posted on the One Person, One Vote site and the primary sources will be embedded and linked to from the Resources section of the profile pages. Voila!

 

 

Behind the Scenes, Projects, Technology

Digital Tools for Civil Rights History

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The One Person, One Vote Project is trying to do history a different way. Fifty years ago, young activists in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee broke open the segregationist south with the help of local leaders. Despite rerouting the trajectories of history, historical actors rarely get to have a say in how their stories are told. Duke and the SNCC Legacy Project are changing that. The documentary website we’re building (One Person, One Vote: The Legacy of SNCC and the Struggle for Voting Right) puts SNCC veterans at the center of narrating their history.

SNCC field secretary and Editorial Board member Charlie Cobb.
SNCC field secretary and Editorial Board member Charlie Cobb. Courtesy of www.crmvet.org.

So how does that make the story we tell different? First and foremost, civil rights becomes about grassroots organizing and the hundreds of local individuals who built the movement from the bottom up. Our SNCC partners want to tell a story driven by the whys and hows of history. How did their experiences organizing in southwest Mississippi shape SNCC strategies in southwest Georgia and the Mississippi Delta? Why did SNCC turn to parallel politics in organizing the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party? How did ideas drive the decisions they made and the actions they took?

For the One Person, One Vote site, we’ve been searching for tools that can help us tell this story of ideas, one focused on why SNCC turned to grassroots mobilization and how they organized. In a world where new tools for data visualization, mapping, and digital humanities appear each month, we’ve had plenty of possibilities to choose from. The tools we’ve gravitated towards have some common traits; they all let us tell multi-layered narratives and bring them to life with video clips, photographs, documents, and music. Here are a couple we’ve found:

This StoryMap traces how the idea of Manifest Destiny progressed through the years and across the geography of the United States.
This StoryMap traces how the idea of Manifest Destiny progressed through the years and across the geography of the U.S.

StoryMap: Knightlab’s StoryMap tool is great for telling stories. But better yet, StoryMap lets us illustrate how stories unfold over time and space. Each slide in a StoryMap is grounded with a date and a place. Within the slides, creators can embed videos and images and explain the significance of a particular place with text. Unlike other mapping tools, StoryMaps progress linearly; one slide follows another in a sequence, and viewers click through a particular path. In terms of SNCC, StoryMaps give us the opportunity to trace how SNCC formed out of the Greensboro sit-ins, adopted a strategy of jail-no-bail in Rock Hill, SC, picked up the Freedom Rides down to Jackson, Mississippi, and then started organizing its first voter registration campaign in McComb, Mississippi.

Timeline.JS: We wanted timelines in the One Person, One Vote site to trace significant events in SNCC’s history but also to illustrate how SNCC’s experiences on the ground transformed their thinking, organizing, and acting. Timeline.JS, another Knightlab tool, provides the flexibility to tell overlapping stories in clean, understandable manner. Markers in Timeline.JS let us embed videos, maps, and photos, cite where they come from, and explain their significance. Different tracks on the timeline  give us the option of categorizing events into geographic regions, modes of organizing, or evolving ideas.

The history of Duke University as displayed by Timeline.JS.
The history of Duke University as displayed by Timeline.JS.

DH Press: Many of the mapping tools we checked out relied on number-heavy data sets, for example those comparing how many robberies took place on the corners of different city blocks. Data sets for One Person, One Vote come mostly in the form of people, places, and stories. We needed a tool that let us bring together events and relevant multimedia material and primary sources and represent them on a map. After checking out a variety of mapping tools, we found that DH Press served many of our needs.

DH Press project representing buildings and uses in Durham's Hayti neighborhood.
DH Press project representing buildings and uses in Durham’s Hayti neighborhood.

Coming out of the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill’s Digital Innovation Lab, DH Press is a WordPress plugin designed specifically with digital humanities projects in mind. While numerous tools can plot events on a map, DH Press markers provide depth. We can embed the video of an oral history interview and have a transcript running simultaneously as it plays. A marker might include a detailed story about an event, and chronicle all of the people who were there. Additionally, we can customize the map legends to generate different spatial representations of our data.

Example of a marker in DH Press. Markers can be customized to include a range of information about a particular place or event.
Example of a marker in DH Press. Markers can be customized to include a range of information about a particular place or event.

 

These are some of the digital tools we’ve found that let us tell civil rights history through stories and ideas. And the search continues on.

Conferences

Freedom Summer 50th Anniversary

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SNCC workers Lawrence Guyot and Sam Walker at COFO (Council of Federated Organizations) office in Gulfport, Mississippi. Courtesy of www.crmvet.org.
SNCC workers Lawrence Guyot and Sam Walker at COFO (Council of Federated Organizations) office in Gulfport, Mississippi. Courtesy of www.crmvet.org.

Fifty years ago, hundreds of student volunteers headed south to join the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s (SNCC) field staff and local people in their fight against white supremacy in Mississippi. This week, veterans of Freedom Summer are gathering at Tougaloo College, just north of Jackson, Mississippi, to commemorate their efforts to remake American democracy.

The 50th anniversary events, however, aren’t only for movement veterans. Students, young organizers, educators, historians, archivists, and local Mississippians make up the nearly one thousand people flocking to Tougaloo’s campus this Wednesday through Saturday. We here at Duke Libraries, as well as members of the SNCC Legacy Project Editorial Board, are in the mix, making connections with both activists and archivists about our forthcoming website, One Person, One Vote: The Legacy of SNCC and the Fight for Voting Rights.

Mississippi Freedom Summer 50th Anniversary. Courtesy of Freedom50.org.
Mississippi Freedom Summer 50th Anniversary. Courtesy of Freedom50.org.

This site will bring together material created in and around SNCC’s struggle for voting rights in the 1960s and pair it with new interpretations of that history by the movement veterans themselves. To pull this off, we’ll be drawing on Duke’s own collection of SNCC-related material, as well as incorporating the wealth of material already digitized by institutions like the University of Southern Mississippi, the Wisconsin Historical Society’s Freedom Summer Collection, the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, as well as others.

What becomes clear while circling through the panels, films, and hallway conversations at Freedom Summer 50th events is how the fight for voting rights is really a story of thousands of local people. The One Person, One Vote site will feature these everyday people – Mississippians like Peggy Jean Connor, Fannie Lou Hamer, Vernon Dahmer, and SNCC workers like Hollis Watkins, Bob Moses, and Charlie Cobb. And the list goes on. It’s not everyday that so many of these people come together under one roof, and we’re doing our share of listening to and connecting with the people whose stories will make up the One Person, One Vote site.