What Are Civil
Rights Today?
Welcome to the Mississippi Delta National Heritage Area Civil Rights Heritage Archive’s Digital Storytelling Project website. We hope that your critical understanding of the Civil Rights Movement flourishes through this interactive experience. Below, you will hear directly from African American women in the Mississippi Delta who continue the Movement each day through their work. We ask that you not only bear witness to their words, but internalize them, sit with them, and allow them to guide your historical memory and current actions. Despite the magnitude of the strides taken and the shoulders on which they stand, their work is far from over.
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Dr. Mary Frances Dear-Moton
Dr. Mary Frances Dear-Moton is the daughter of Clarksdale, MS-based civil rights organizer Rachel Parker-Dear. Dr. Dear-Moton founded the Family and Youth Opportunities Division in Clarksdale, and continues her mother’s legacy on issues of civil rights and equality.
Reena Evers-Everette
Reena Evers-Everette is the daughter of noted civil rights activists Medgar and Myrlie Evers. Today, she carries their legacies forward as the executive director of the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Institute in Jackson, Mississippi.
Why continue the tragedy of difference?
Never Let them know you’re coming.
Amanda Dear-Jones
Amanda Dear-Jones, Dr. Dear Moton’s daughter, is the President of Family and Youth Opportunities Division. After traveling the world for 15 years, she returned to Clarksdale, where she advocates for her community, following in her grandmother and mother’s footsteps.
My grandmother marched
so my mom could run.
My mom ran so I could fly.
I fly so my kids can soar.
Malika Polk-Lee
Malika Polk-Lee is the executive director of the B.B. King Museum in Indianola, MS. She joined the museum in 2012. Malika serves on the executive board of the Association of African American Museums. Her ongoing projects center on uplifting the local Indianola community through educational programming.
TRY IT AND SEE.
THAT'S WHY A PENCIL HAS AN ERASER.
The Legacy of rachel Parker dear
Rachel Parker Dear was an impactful civil rights activist in Clarksdale, Mississippi. She served as a member of the NAACP, worked in the Clarksdale school system, and acted as a community leader in the Silent Grove M.B. Church. In addition to her own efforts, she was a cousin to noted civil rights leader, Dr. Aaron Henry. This video features her family, Dr. Mary Frances Dear-Moton, Amanda Dear-Jones, and Archie Buford, as they remember her legacy.
Keena Graham
Keena Graham is the Superintendent for the Medgar and Myrlie Evers National Monument in Jackson, Mississippi. She is a public historian from Tuscaloosa, Alabama. For more than two decades, Keena worked to expand diversity capacity at the U.S Department of Interior. She previously worked at the U.S Fish and Wildlife Service and as a National Park Service Ranger for 16 years at five different sites across the country.
These were ordinary people doing extraordinary things;
houses like this need to be preserved to let you know that the power is with the people.
Pamela Junior
Pamela Junior is motivational speaker, historian, and women’s activist. After serving as the inaugural director of the first state-sponsored civil rights museum in the nation, she now leads the Two Mississippi Museums. As director of both museums, she shares the stories of Mississippi with audiences all over the world.
If we keep saying their names,
we’re lifting them up.
Linda fondren
Linda Fondren is the executive director of Catfish Row Museum in Vicksburg, MS. She also owns and manages Shape Up Sisters, a fitness company for women. Linda was chosen as a Top Ten CNN Hero of the Year in 2010. She works to educate her local community on nutrition, exercise, and healthy living.
People find themselves in other people’s stories.
