Alcorn receives grant for oral history project
The Mississippi Humanities Council (MHC) has awarded a grant to Alcorn State University for an oral history project entitled, “Alcorn in the 1960s: A Collection of Oral Histories.”
The grant proposal was submitted to MHC by a committee within the Department of English and Foreign Languages at Alcorn comprised of Mrs. Kathleen Keys, Dr. Peter R. Malik and Dr. Anne-Marie Obilade.
The project will consist of interviewing and recording individuals who were undergraduates at Alcorn during the 1960s. The interviewees will be queried on topics such as academics, fraternity/sorority life, athletics, fashion and civic participation.
“Currently, we are in the process of contacting Alcorn alumni who graduated from the university in the years from 1960 to 1969 and asking them to participate,” said Dr. Malik, who is the director of the project. “We will then contact those graduates who respond and arrange for them to be interviewed.”
Once the interviews are collected, they will be professionally transcribed at the University of Southern Mississippi with copies of the tapes and of printed interviews going to each participant. The master tapes will remain at the USM library, where they will be permanently archived. A copy of the tapes and printed interviews will also be placed in the Archives/Special Collections Department at Alcorn’s J. D. Boyd Library.
The project was made possible by a grant from the Mississippi Humanities Council, through support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any view, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities or the Mississippi Humanities Council.
