How Public Humanities Works: The Freedom Now! Web Site

by Mark Nickel

On January 7, 2005, forty-one years after the beating and shooting deaths of three civil rights workers, authorities in Mississippi filed murder charges against 79-year-old Edgar Ray Killen.

Killen pleaded not guilty, but his arrest and arraignment instantly resurrected powerful emotions attached to that frightful time and place in 1964. Anger, hatred, violence, bigotry, courage, fear, despair, resolve - all of it was suddenly real again.

In that same year, and against that same backdrop, Brown University and Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi, established a rare and sometimes rocky partnership aimed at positive change and social progress. An odd marriage by most accounts, it is still intact.

For the past three years, a dozen students and faculty at Brown and Tougaloo have been at work on a public humanities project, scanning and transcribing hundreds of items from archives at both schools. Those materials, now organized into a Web site that has just gone live, tell two stories: the story of the civil rights struggle, and the story of a partnership between two very dissimilar institutions.

There are photographs of Bobby Kennedy, Ralph Bunche, Medgar Evers, Charles Evers, and others visiting the Tougaloo campus; of Medgar Evers' funeral; of marches; of Brown faculty in Tougaloo classrooms; of Tougaloo faculty leading seminars. There are hand-written letters expressing almost indescribable mortal fear, including one written on prison toilet paper. There are student essays, letters to the New York Times, sound recordings, a senior thesis on the fight by African American women for significant roles in the civil rights movement, and other materials.

"The Web archive was designed for use in classrooms and organized along the lines of materials in the Library of Congress," said Susan Smulyan, associate professor of American Civilization, who was the lead faculty member on the project. "The power is not in the graphics, but in the content of the documents themselves."

The project began as an attempt by Brown and Tougaloo students to document the Freedom Summer with materials in the Tougaloo archives. "But research begets more research," Smulyan said, and the students soon expanded the project to include the history of what was officially called the Brown-Tougaloo Cooperative Exchange.

"We learned again how history matters," Smulyan explained, "and about how things that may have happened decades ago are never really gone."

Faculty members James Campbell, associate professor of Africana studies, American civilization and history at Brown, and Ernie Limbo, associate professor of history at Tougaloo College participated in the project. Brown's Scholarly Technology Group assisted with the Web site development.