Oral History Interviews

Follow

• 

  An Oral History with Liz Stagg of the Oxford Farmers' Market

  Liz Stagg and Victoria De Leone

  Liz Stagg and her husband Frank Coppola owned and operated The Farmers' Market Store for 12 years. It was a small store in Oxford, MS that offered local produce, meats, dairy, and other food items. Her husband passed away in 2015, and Liz closed the store in October 2016. I was trying to understand how Liz saw her place in the community, and what drove her to open, and close, the store.

  This oral history was conducted as a final project for Catarina Passidomo’s class on Southern Foodways in the Fall of 2016.

• 

  Oral History of Eddie Lee Webster, Jr. (Part 1 of 2)

  Eddie Lee Webster Jr. and Chet Bush

  Eddie Lee Webster, Jr. is a resident of Marks, MS in Quitman County who participated in the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign sponsored by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

• 

  Oral History of Eddie Lee Webster, Jr. (Part 2 of 2)

  Eddie Lee Webster Jr. and Chet Bush

  In this second of two interviews, Webster shares about his childhood and the people who surrounded him growing up. Webster reflects on life in the rural areas of Quitman County near Lambert, MS. Webster shares about the woman who raised him, Arizona Bradford, a godmother who legally adopted Webster and his brother and sister. Bradford also raised five other children.

• 

  Myrlie Evers-Williams: Memory, Space, and the Civil Rights Museum

  Myrlie Evers-Williams, Andy Harper, and Becca Walton

  In 2013, the Southern Documentary Project conducted an oral history interview with Myrlie Evers-Williams on a range of topics for the film The Toughest Job: William Winter’s Mississippi and the Farish Street Project.

  Evers-Williams is activist, journalist, and former head of the NAACP. In 1963, her husband, Medgar Wiley Evers, was gunned down by white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith in their driveway in Jackson as she and their children waited inside to welcome him home.

  In this interview, Evers-Williams discusses her feelings about seeing the Mississippi State Fairgrounds, where police incarcerated and brutalized civil rights protesters in 1963. The Fairgrounds are just down the hill from the site of the new Mississippi Civil Rights Museum and Museum of Mississippi History, which opened December 9, 2017.