A Storytelling Training Ground: Oral History in the Journalism

A STORYTELLING TRAINING GROUND: ORAL HISTORY IN THE JOURNALISM CLASSROOM by ROXANNE FOSTER Jacqui Banaszynski, Project Committee Chair Mary Kay Blakely Berkley Hudson DECEMBER 2013 Acknowledgements Thank you Jacqui Banaszynski, my committee chair and advisor, for truly caring about me as a person, for encouraging me to let my passion carve out a different path for me to travel upon and for continually pushing me to expand my limited view of journalism. Thank you Mary Kay Blakely for your incredible generosity, for the many impromptu conversations that made me think deeper about my future work and for seeing the potential in my writing. Thank you Dr. Berkley Hudson for asking big questions, for making me think about the larger possibilities and for offering feedback from your oral history experiences throughout the course of this project. ii Table of Contents ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................. ii Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................ 1 2. PROJECT OVERVIEW AND FIELD NOTES ........................................... 5 Project paperwork ......................................................................................... 7 Project participant flyer ................................................................................. 9 Sample letter of invitation ........................................................................... 10 Project overview invitation letter insert ...................................................... 11 State Historical Society release form .......................................................... 12 Participant summary form ........................................................................... 13 Oral history interview questions list ........................................................... 15 Weekly field notes ...................................................................................... 20 3. EVALUATION .......................................................................................... 80 Evaluation letter from Jeff Corrigan ........................................................... 85 4. PHYSICAL EVIDENCE Summaries and audio logs: Allen, Charles ............................................................................................. 86 Blackmore, Charley .................................................................................. 106 Brown, Marva Jo ....................................................................................... 139 iii Bush, Mary ................................................................................................ 167 Horrell, Barbra .......................................................................................... 178 Kelly, John C. ........................................................................................... 213 Nunnelly, Jim ............................................................................................ 239 Ridge, David ............................................................................................. 265 Turner, James ............................................................................................ 286 Turner, Sandra ........................................................................................... 299 5. ANALYSIS Overview: Oral history in the journalism classroom ................................ 324 Article: A Storytelling Training Ground ................................................... 331 APPENDIX A. PROJECT PROPOSAL ........................................................................... 348 B. SUPERVISOR LETTER ......................................................................... 382 C. CHANGES TO ORIGINAL PROPOSAL ............................................... 383 D. PROFESSOR INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPTS ........................................ 384 iv Introduction When I entered the University of Missouri’s journalism master’s program in the fall of 2011, all I knew was that I wanted to learn more about the art of storytelling. I’d just returned to the U.S. from South Africa after spending three years working with women and children whose lives were greatly impacted by abuse, neglect and the devastation of HIV. Many of the people I met had powerful stories to tell that spoke to the greater issues facing South Africa as a nation. Most felt it was pointless to share them because they were, after all, just one of many who had experienced injustice and were struggling to survive. Who would listen to them anyway? What difference would sharing their stories make? What would their communities think of them if they knew the truth? I came into the program with a very limited idea of what journalism was and how it could help prepare me to share the stories of the people I meet in my travels and social justice work. All I knew was that I was interested in storytelling – especially the kind where you got to know the person intimately enough that you understood, to a certain degree, the essence of who they are and how their past experiences shaped them. The News Reporting and Writing class during my first semester was my formal introduction to the world of journalism. I quickly learned that I didn’t want to be a news journalist and wondered if I’d entered the wrong field of study. Stories had to be “newsworthy” or they weren’t worth pursuing. Information was pushed out as fast as possible. Deadlines had quick turnarounds that always made me feel like I’d missed something vital. The pressure-cooker environment frequently stopped all of my thought 1 processes. I hated the inverted pyramid and couldn’t write a decent lede. Daily news reporting just wasn’t a good fit. As I flirted with the idea of supplementing my business degree with a master’s in Strategic Communications, my professors, peers and family encouraged me to pursue a path of exploration that moved me away from traditional news journalism and towards in-depth, creative nonfiction. The courses I selected represent a patchwork approach to learning what I feel are the more interesting aspects of journalistic storytelling. I chose writing classes that focused on immersion reporting and extensive interviewing in order to produce narratives around a particular topic. In the summer of 2012, I conducted research for Jacqui Banaszynski that focused on the art of interviewing to learn more how journalists draw out stories and information from interviewees. I took photojournalism and convergence classes to learn to think visually and aurally and to recognize when stories beg to be told in multiple mediums. I was also introduced to the field of oral history. While working on a story for the Columbia Missourian, I attended a library event and witnessed how three older black women captivated the attention of an entire room of people with their stories of discrimination and distrust with medical professionals in Columbia during the 1960s. That led me to talk to my print editor, John Schneller, about doing some sort of long-term project centered on segregation and black Columbia. He suggested that I do an oral history-based story about the integration of public schools in the 1960s. At the time, the construction of Battle High School was high on the paper’s agenda at the time due to issues regarding zoning, busing and scheduling. There was also some debate about the 2 name of the school, which was given in honor of Dr. Muriel Battle, a black educator whose own children integrated one of the local elementary schools. She and her husband, Eliot Battle, spent over 40 years working with Columbia Public Schools. Not long after, I was introduced to Studs Terkel’s work in Jacqui Banaszynski’s Public Insight Network Reporting class. A couple of my grad school friends who’d written stories on Douglass High School for the Missourian then introduced me to the feisty group of women who were among the last class to graduate from the school before it closed in 1960. I realized that conducting an oral history of school integration for my journalism master’s project could easily become a reality. From May through August 2013, I interviewed 11 people who were students during the desegregation process in Columbia. My goal was to collect and preserve the memories of a diverse group of people – black and white – who experienced the city’s endeavor to join two racially segregated communities in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling. I wanted to dig deep into the exploration of this moment in history and find out what stories lay there, untouched. I also wanted to experience and examine, first-hand, the intersection of journalism and oral history; to explore what aspects they have in common, how they differ and what could each potentially learn from the other? To take things a little further, for the analysis portion of my master’s project, I interviewed five professors from various programs around the country who use oral history in their curricula – either as an approach or end product. I wanted to understand 3 the value journalism professors who used oral history methods were placing upon the intersection of these two fields. My core research questions were: 1) How are university journalism educators using oral histories in their teaching curricula? 2) Why are university journalism educators using oral histories in their classrooms? (I’m still amazed at the fact that I was able to do all of these things in the span of three months.) In the future, I’d

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