Summer 2002: Documenting The Mississippi Freedom Movement in the Tougaloo College Archives

In the summer of 2002, six students from Brown University and Tougaloo College joined a group of faculty and staff from each campus to conduct research in the Tougaloo College Archives. The project lasted 10 weeks; two at Brown in Providence, Rhode Island and eight at Tougaloo in Jackson, Mississippi. Funding for student and faculty stipends and travel and administrative expenses came from the Undergraduate Teaching and Research Assistantship Program at Brown; the Brown Dean of the College's Office; the Brown Provost's Office; and the Ford Foundation.

Students worked independently and as a self-directed group. They chose individual collections in the Tougaloo College Archives and spent days looking through boxes. The goal was to choose one hundred documents to place on a web site. The web site would serve as a teaching tool for courses on the Civil Rights Movement on both campuses.

The students wrote that "individuals selected the most informative, visually stimulating documents, which also appeared to be good teaching tools. So we looked for documents that would introduce or represent important issues in the Mississippi Freedom Movement." The researchers decided to use this name for their movement because it was the one that the activists of the time had used. After individual researchers chose documents, they presented them to the group which decided which were the most "inspiring." The group evaluated each document on its own merit and in relation to the overall project objective.

The student researchers explained that "each document we chose is exemplary of documents in the archives, representative of its individual collection, and stands as uniquely pertinent to the Mississippi Freedom Movement." The group excluded documents which were too personal or were easily accessible in printed collections.

Each researcher chose a theme to write about based on personal interest, their ideas about what would "speak to students who will access this site" and the theme's significance to the Mississippi Freedom Movement.

During the summer, students and faculty consulted often with the staff at Brown's Scholarly Technology Group who built a database to contain the information about the documents and would design the web site based on the chosen documents.

Academic Year 2002-2003: The Brown-Tougaloo Cooperative Exchange in the Brown University Archives

During 2002-2003, six students and two faculty members at Brown spent two semesters reviewing the records of the Brown-Tougaloo Cooperative Exchange held by the Brown University Archives located in the John Hay Library on the Brown campus. The students involved received course credit for their participation in this experimental "Group Research Project."

The group met weekly for the first several weeks to read about and discuss the Freedom Movement and how to do archival research. Students worked independently on topics they chose, each focusing on a set of documents. Danny Doncan (Brown '05) wrote:

I did extensive archival work . . . . besides weekly meetings and discussions with other group members, I spent approximately three hours each week at the John Hay Library reviewing the archives . . . documents worth noting included any information that provided insight into the thoughts of the founders, facilitators, or the participants in the Brown-Tougaloo exchange . . . I also kept quotes that might be useful . . . and made notes of any documents that should be put on the internet site. . . . Working directly from the archives allowed me to process the information on my own. This gave me a sense of clarity about what really took place and how people really felt about the Cooperative Exchange since it began in 1964. All of this revealed that the civil rights movement had more dimensions than I had thought existed.

We made one trip to Tougaloo to supplement what we found in the Brown University Archives by examining documents in the Tougaloo College Archives and the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. We have included some of those documents in the database as well.

Our work resulted in about 100 documents on-line; Professor Campbell's essay "The Brown-Tougaloo Cooperative Exchange"; and four cluster essays, by students, all based on the documents we found.