Contact: Maridith Geuder
STARKVILLE, Miss.--The first female leader of the Oktibbeha County NAACP is donating her personal papers to Mississippi State.
Material being provided by Dorothy Bishop of Starkville, whose work in the community began at age 17, will be housed in the special collections department of the university's Mitchell Memorial Library.
Bishop's papers join those of other African-American Mississippians, including Myrna Colley-Lee, Dr. Douglas Conner, Katherine Esters, Quincy Hilliard, Dr. Richard Holmes, Rosie Jackson, Ella Bardwell Ward, and Robert and Sadye Weir.
The Bishop Collection ranges from documents related to voter registration to NAACP member solicitation to fundraising and program planning. It adds to a growing body of personal and professional material that documents the post-Civil War lives of African-Americans and their contributions, said Mattie Sink, manuscripts coordinator for special collections.
"This donation will boost a collection that has great value to any student of the Mississippi civil rights movement," Sink said, adding that Bishop's contributions give personal insights into the modern history of the 462-square-mile county formed in 1833 and recognized for much of the 20th century as a dairy farming center.
Bishop served for 12 years as youth adviser for the county's Youth NAACP chapter before becoming the local civil rights organization's first woman president in 1993. For playing an active advocacy role in the community on a variety of issues, she earned a number of NAACP honors, including the 1994 Fannie Lou Hamer Award.
Sink said a library committee "has worked diligently over the last few years to acquire additional collections of African-Americans, focusing in particular on persons from Northeast Mississippi.
"The library's materials related to Starkville and Oktibbeha County have particular depth, with more than 100 separate collections, including the recently acquired Todd A. Herring Collection documenting the antebellum slave period," she added.
For more information about donating personal or organizational papers to Mitchell Memorial Library, contact Sink at 662-325-3848 or msink@library.msstate.edu.
For more information about Mississippi State University, see http://www.msstate.edu/.