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Landmarks of American History and Culture Workshop

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Landmarks of American History and Culture Workshop Landmarks of American History and Culture Workshop One Place, One Time: Jackson, Mississippi, 1963 July 14-19, 2013 and July 21-26, 2013 Welcome to our webpage, and thank you for your interest in our Landmarks of American History and Culture Workshop, an opportunity generously provided through funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and jointly sponsored by the Eudora Welty Foundation and Millsaps College. This workshop will be held on the campus of Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, a city that experienced some of the most transformative and understudied moments of the civil rights movement. We believe that “One Place, One Time” will provide all of us with new ways of understanding the complex intersections of race and power, cultural change and resistance, institutions and individuals, and will further provide us with ways of making these intersections vivid for our students. The workshop will focus upon Jackson, Mississippi, and will coincide with the 50th anniversary of the murder of Medgar Evers, a native Mississippian and NAACP field secretary. Evers’s murder was a catalyst for racial change, and the local and national events that surrounded it captured the tensions and conflicts between the civil rights campaign and its detractors. In our summer 2013 workshop, we will be able to observe the struggle, the tragedy, the triumphs, and the legacy of an emblematic place and moment in American history. The Sights Workshop participants will walk along Capitol Street, where students from Tougaloo College braved violence in conducting a 1963 sit-in at the local Woolworth store, and visit Farish Street Baptist Church where Mississippi children gathered that same year to march for change. We will visit the Medgar Evers House, the site of the civil rights leader’s life, work, and murder. Jackson’s Smith Robertson Museum offers exhibits about African American history in Mississippi and in the South. The Eudora Welty House, a bequest from Welty to the state of Mississippi and a National Historic Landmark, is one of the most intact literary houses in America in terms of authenticity. Interpretations of the house offer profound insight into the creative process of this major American writer and provide a sense of Welty’s personality and values, the values that prompted her to call for integration and to write so powerfully about the tragedy of Evers’s death in “Where Is the Voice Coming From,” a story that puts readers in touch with a time of tremendous upheaval and sacrifice. A visit to the historic Tougaloo College, the site of the youth movement that was the wellspring of the Jackson Movement, will help participants experience the complexities of the civil rights movement in profound ways. The Sources The Jackson, Mississippi, locale offers a multitude of research opportunities for exploring the life of Medgar Evers, its cultural impact, and the oppressive atmosphere of 1963. The papers of Medgar Evers and Eudora Welty are housed at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, and the papers of Margaret Walker Alexander, including her journals from 1963, are available at Jackson State University’s Margaret Walker Center. The files of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission are open for research at the Mississippi archives and can be accessed online. Archival materials of particular interest may be the Evers correspondence from 1963, Welty’s revisions of her story “Where Is the Voice Coming From,” Alexander’s journals from 1963, and the Sovereignty Commission files on Evers, Alexander, Millsaps College, and Tougaloo College. In addition, during the summer of 2013 in Jackson, there will be a number of special tributes to Medgar Evers, including public commemorations during the five days prior to and on the 50th anniversary of his death. The Mississippi Museum of Art will unveil portraits of Evers and his wife Myrlie and will mount an exhibition of other related works of art. The Department of Archives and History will have a special exhibition of items from its Evers holdings, and the Smith-Robertson Museum will open a new Evers exhibit. As a result, in 2013, the Jackson setting will be a particularly compelling site for a Landmarks of American History and Culture Workshop. In addition, the workshops will give you the opportunity to meet and talk with: • Medgar Evers’s widow, Myrlie Evers-Williams, who was herself an important figure in the Jackson Movement and who later became the first woman to chair the NAACP; • Edwin King, the man who was chaplain at Tougaloo College in 1963 and who worked alongside Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Bob Moses, and other civil rights leaders; • Jerry Mitchell, the newspaper reporter who introduced Evers's life, work, and death to a new generation of Jacksonians, initiating the third and final trial of Byron de la Beckwith, Medgar Evers’s murderer. The Scholars We will also benefit from the scholarly analysis provided by Evers’s biographer Michael Williams; by civil rights historians Leslie McLemore and Robert Luckett; by literary scholar Peggy Prenshaw; and by us. Suzanne is a biographer of Eudora Welty and a student of her work; Stephanie is the author of an upcoming book focusing on the benighted white resistance to the civil rights movement and on the conservative southern politics that resistance spawned. The workshops will thus focus upon the actual sites where intersections between race and power occurred in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1963, with historians’ treatments of those intersections both literal and metaphoric, and with firsthand accounts of that momentous time. In addition, our workshops will go beyond the actual and the historic to explore works of art inspired by Medgar Evers’s life and death, to examine the ways those works of art have helped the state and the nation to grieve, to cope with loss, and to move beyond tragedy toward reconciliation. .
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