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Mississippi Freedom Project


The Mississippi Freedom Project (MFP) is an archive of oral histories collected by the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida. The ongoing project contains 100+ interviews online and focuses on interviews with civil rights veterans and notable residents of the Mississippi Delta. The collection centers on activism and organizing in partnership with the Sunflower County Civil Rights Organization in Sunflower, Mississippi.

SPOHP director Paul Ortiz began conducting oral history field work in the Mississippi Delta in 1995 as a graduate research coordinator of the National Endowment for the Humanities-sponsored "Behind the Veil: Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow South" project at the Center for Documentary Studies, and maintained a relationship with the Sunflower County Civil Rights Organization, a local civil rights veteran group. Since 2008, the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program has traveled to the Delta on annual research trips with undergraduate students, graduate students, and program staff for the Mississippi Freedom Project to collect oral histories of the local movement. In 2014, SPOHP returned to the Delta on its annual trip for 50th anniversary celebrations honoring movement veterans of Freedom Summer from June 23–29.

During the trip, the Mississippi Freedom Project conducts oral history interviews in partnership with the Sunflower County Civil Rights Organization, and frequently works with research allies including the McComb Legacies Project, Friends of Justice, Fannie Lou Hamer Civil Rights Museum in Belzoni, MS, the United Food and Commercial Workers Union in Belzoni, Museum of African American History in Natchez, MS, Emmett Till Historic Intrepid Center, Sunflower County Freedom Project, and Civic Media Center, as well as George A. Smathers Libraries at the University of Florida.

The Mississippi Freedom Project research team is guided in their research by lifelong civil rights activist Margaret Block, who grew up in Bolivar County and worked with SNCC throughout the Delta with leaders including Stokely Carmichael, Amzie Moore, Fannie Lou Hamer, Bob Moses, Hollis Watkins, and her brother, Sam Block, during voter registration drives and citizenship school initiatives. Block is the main leader and instructor for SPOHP's MFP tour of the Delta, frequently speaking at panel events and leading driving tours of historical sites that are significant to the movement and Mississippi history, including Mound Bayou, Dockery Plantation, Indianola, MS, Ruleville, MS, sites surrounding Emmett Till's death in Tallahatchie County, and others, including Winterville Mounds.


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