Oral history.; Interview conducted on 06-11-1981 with Mr. Wilson Evans II (born 1924). Evans began his long career as a union leader in Gulfport in 1950, later becoming president of the union. This interview covers topics as diverse as his service...
Oral history.; Interview conducted on March 23, 1977 with Mr. Jimmy Swan. Swan was born in Cullman County, Alabama. He ran away from home when he was thirteen or fourteen and ended up in Wayne County, Mississippi. Swan sang in nightclubs and...
From the Belcher (Granville W. and Mary Caroline) Letters. Granville W. Belcher, a farmer from Martinsville, Henry County, Virginia, served in company F, 57th Virginia Infantry during the Civil War. Belcher writes to his wife, Mary Caroline, on...
Oral history.; Three interviews conducted on August 8 and 10, 1976 and October 19, 1976 with Jesse Boyce Holleman (born 1924). He served in the Mississippi House of Representatives from 1947 until 1953. At that time, he became district attorney for...
Oral history.; Maurice Guyton Turner was born on April 29, 1912, in Greene County, Mississippi. He graduated from Greene County Agriculture High School in 1932. After staying out of school for a year he worked in his brother's grocery store. He...
Twenty-page typescript of the diary of Jinny Glass, dated August 7, 1964, through August 25, 1964. Glass was a Freedom Summer volunteer from California who worked at the Palmer's Crossing Community Center, south of Hattiesburg, Mississippi.
Transcribed copy of a three-page letter from Jinny Glass to Zoya Zeman. Glass writes about her decision to go to Mississippi to work on the Mississippi Summer Project and discusses how the decision to go was hard to make because of her family....
A collection of eight interviews with participants in the Mississippi civil rights movement. The people interviewed discuss how they came to participate in the civil rights movement, their various activities, including voter registration, Freedom...
Oral history.; Three interviews conducted on October 23, 29, and 30, 1996 with Hollis Watkins (born 1941), the twelfth child of sharecroppers. Mr. Watkins was jailed for participating in the Woolsworth's lunch counter sit-in in McComb and a...
Oral history.; Ms. Frances Elkin Joyner was born on November 23, 1909, in Tupelo, Mississippi. She graduated from Tupelo High School and then attended National Park Seminary in Forest Glen, Maryland. She married Ernest Love Joyner, Jr. just...
A collection of interviews with African-Americans of the Mississippi Gulf Coast, circa twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, who knew Colonel John Robinson, an African-American pilot who was tapped by Ethiopian Emperor Haile Sellassie in the...
A collection of interviews with African-Americans of the Mississippi Gulf Coast, circa twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, who knew Colonel John Robinson, an African-American pilot who was tapped by Ethiopian Emperor Haile Sellassie in the...
Oral history.;Mr. F.W. Bishop was born on December 11, 1897, near Shaw, Mississippi. His family farmed in the Skene community before moving to Cleveland, Mississippi, in 1911. Mr. Bishop began his education in a one-room schoolhouse in Skene and...
Oral history.; Mrs. Edith Ruff Thomas was born on February 12, 1920. She grew up on a farm that became well-established, providing products throughout Tupelo. In 1936, she lived through the Tupelo tornado, and in 1937 she was graduated from Tupelo...
Materials in this collection were donated by William M. Colmer: First accession-1970. Additional information online at: http://www.lib.usm.edu/legacy/archives/m024.htm
Oral history.; Interview conducted on October 24, 1978 with Mr. Nathaniel H. Lewis at his home in McComb, Mississippi. Lewis was born in McComb, Mississippi. In 1928, Lewis and his father organized the McComb Independent Lodge NO. 846 of the...
Transcribed copy of a paper about racism in Mississippi during the 1960s. Follows the tribulations of college students who volunteered to register African Americans to vote during Freedom Summer. With regard to racism and white supremacy,...
Oral history.; Mr. Balfour William Ruff Sr. was born March 31, 1923, in Jackson, Mississippi. He moved to Tupelo at a young age and attended its public schools. For many years he operated the Ruff Dairy Farm, the first in the Tupelo area to...
Oral history.; Mr. Edward Sternberg was born on October 22, 1901, in Louisville, Kentucky. He was educated in private schools and graduated from Grady School, Louisville, in June 1915. He worked in a variety of jobs as a boy and began his first...
Oral history.; Interview conducted on May 14, 1996 with Frances Thornton Smith (born 1916). In 1971, the year that elementary schools were integrated, Smith volunteered to teach at Fair Elementary School, an African-American school in Pascagoula,...