This reading guide is a continually growing list of recommendations for those engaging with and producing digital historical materials with the Mississippi Delta National Heritage Area Civil Rights Heritage Archive. Reintroducing critical historical analysis to the process of historical production is a key theoretical underpinning of this Digital Storytelling Project. As Michel Rolph Trouillot writes in Silencing the Past, “the inequalities experienced by the actors lead to uneven historical power in the inscription of traces.”

Cautious steps must be taken to actively un-silence the history of economic exploitation in the Mississippi Delta. Dominant histories of the region conveniently suppress stories of social and economic resistance and community empowerment. Institutions that were created to maintain and strengthen plantation economic structures continue to operate in the Mississippi Delta. This guide, and this project as a whole, asks why that is. Why is the struggle for civil rights still ongoing? What is stopping civil rights from being fully realized? We aim to preserve stories of historical struggles against oppression while sharing reflections from these struggles that inform our present and future.

Reading theory and critical history is crucial. However, academic study never outweighs the vital importance of interpersonal interaction with living heritage communities. Theory can only take one so far. Let academic treatises and analyses inform your understanding of the region, but do not let them fully define it.

Our Digital Storytelling Project aims to re-personalize a part of shared human history. Oppressors selectively edit, suppress, and delete certain stories to serve their interests. History becomes violently separated from its human subjects. Alternative, critical narratives are vital to social change. Never forget that history is about humans and carried forth in their stories. Be vigilant in tracing histories back to their storytellers.

Compiled by Wayne Dowdy and

Theoretical Frameworks

• Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History by Michel Rolph Trouillot

• Discourse and Truth by Michel Foucault

• Capitalism and Slavery by Eric Williams

• The West and Rest by Stuart Hall

Historical books

• Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta by Clyde Woods

• I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle by Charles M. Payne

• I Don’t Like the Blues: Race, Place, and the Backbeat of Black Life by B. Brian Foster

• Divine Agitators: The Delta Ministry and Civil Rights in Mississippi by Mark Newman

• Remembering Emmett Till by Dave Tell

• Let the People Decide: Black Freedom and White Resistance Movements in Sunflower County, 1945-1986 by J. Todd Moye

• We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement by Akinyele Omowale Umoja

• Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement by Monica White

• Out in the Rural: A Mississippi Health Center and Its War on Poverty by Thomas Ward and H. Jack Geiger

• Dixie be Damned: 300 Years of Insurrection in the American South by Neal Shirley and Saralee Stafford

• Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi by John Dittmer

• The Rural Face of White Supremacy: Beyond Jim Crow by Mark Roman Schultz

• I’m Feeling the Blues Right Now: Blues Tourism and the Mississippi Delta by Stephen A. King

• Free the Land: The Republic of New Afrika and the Pursuit of a Black Nation-State by Edward Onaci

• Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America by Keisha N. Blain

• The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity by James C. Cobb

• Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory by David Blight

• South to America A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation by Imani Perry

Shorter Papers

• “Mississippi’s War Against the War on Poverty: Food Power, Hunger, and White Supremacy,” Bobby J. Smith

• “The Making of Appalachian Mississippi,” Justin Randolph, 

• “Planting a Seed is a Revolutionary Act”: A Blues Epistemology for the Anthropocene?”Jason Ludwig

• The Dimming Mystique of Mileson” W. Ralph Eubanks

• “Mississippi ‘Black Home’ by June Jordan

• “Somebody Done Nailed Us on the Cross:” Federal Farm and Welfare Policy and the Civil Rights Movement in the Mississippi Delta,” James C. Cobb (1990)

• “Exploiting the North-South Differential: Corporate Power, Southern Politics, and the Decline of Organized Labor after World War II,” Tami J. Friedman (2008)

• “Report from the Bahamas, 1982” June Jordan

• “Community development through reconciliation tourism: The behind the Big House Program in Holly Springs, Mississippi,” Jodi Skipper (2016)

• “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation,” Sylvia Wynter (1971)

Digital Storytelling

• Visual Storytelling: The Digital Video Documentary, Nancy Kalow

• “The 7 Elements of Digital Storytelling,” PBS

Oral History

• Oral History Best Practices

• Smithsonian - How to Do Oral History

• “Disrupting authority: The radical roots and branches of oral history”

• “The Radicalism of Oral History: Teaching and Reflection on War, Empire, and Capitalism”