“We’re on Fire”: Oral History and the Preservation, Commemoration, and Rebirth of Mississippi’s Civil Rights Sites

This article draws on my experience documenting the built landscape of the Mississippi Delta as part of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program’s annual fieldwork trip to Mississippi. Conversations between college students and civil rights activists reveal the heartbreaking fight to preserve and commemorate the movement on the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The struggle over the meaning of the civil rights movement, unfolding as period buildings deteriorate, is an extension of that movement. It calls oral historians, who archive and retell the meaning of these buildings, to the fore.