Contact: Maridith Geuder
Coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the historic Supreme Court decision ending school segregation, Mississippi State is providing an online resource for tracing the history of American civil rights.
An interactive presentation created by the university's John C. Stennis Institute of Government, "Civil Rights and African-Americans in the United States" provides a detailed chronology from the 1860s through the 1990s. Links are provided to numerous court decisions, legislation, personal correspondence, and other original sources.
(To begin, visit http://www.sig.msstate.edu/mainpage.fwx and follow the links under "educational" icon).
"We believe this will be a valuable resource for students and teachers of American history, because it traces a timeline that highlights major events, the personalities that shaped them, and related developments," said institute research analyst Stephen Williams.
Williams collaborated on the eight-month project with Craig S. Piper, assistant professor in the Congressional and Political Research Center, a part of MSU's Mitchell Memorial Library.
"We wanted to examine civil rights from its beginnings in the Emancipation Proclamation through contemporary events," Piper explained. "Every part of the timeline has sources for reference, as well as links that provide additional information."
The electronic resource provides a host of documents, including the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision ending the segregation of races at public schools, comments of then-U.S. Sen. John C. Stennis and, from the Congressional Record, a resulting 1956 document that became known as the "Southern Manifesto."
Signed by Stennis and 18 other senators, as well as 77 members of the U.S. House of Representatives, the manifesto protested what was termed the "unwarranted exercise of power by the court, contrary to the Constitution."
A 1923 Mississippi State graduate who served more than four decades in the U.S. Senate, Stennis donated his professional and personal papers in the 1970s to the library of his alma mater.
"He was a key political figure during a time of enormous change in our country," Williams observed. "The extensive collection housed in the Congressional and Political Research Center shows his evolution on many pivotal issues."
Drawing on the extensive Stennis collection, the new online reference provides a first-hand look at many events through the eyes of one of the nation's leading statesmen. Stennis' telegram to President Dwight Eisenhower following the Little Rock, Ark., schools desegregation and Eisenhower's response are among the highlighted documents.
"Because of our access to these documents, we're able to provide a rare glimpse into the political process," Piper said. "You see what the times were like, and that politics often requires the art of compromise."
The civil rights resource joins three earlier online interactive presentations developed by the Stennis Institute and the library's research center. They include "How Congress Works," "Public Policy," and "United States Involvement in the Middle East."
For more information about documents available in the CPRC, visit http://library.msstate.edu/congressional/collections.asp.
For more information, telephone Williams at (662) 325-6693 or Piper at 325-9355.