Crossroads to Freedom (review)

Crossroads to Freedom is a multimedia digital archive sponsored by Rhodes College “to promote and support conversations in our community” about the civil rights movement in Memphis. It accomplishes this goal and more. At the core of the Web site is a collection of over seventy recently conducted oral histories, all of which are in digitized video format. All videos are accompanied with transcriptions, where the text moves with the speaker. The site is well-organized and uncluttered, and it has an excellent search capability, which is particularly useful for mining its collection of transcriptions.

The home page features three of its collections. The first is simply a digitized collection of articles from the black newspaper, Memphis World. While this may be of little original value to historians, it allows students to become easily acquainted with an important source previously found only on microfilm reels. The second feature of the homepage is a collection of oral histories entitled “Educators and Civil Rights,” which offers the unique perspectives of teachers who taught during the various phases of the civil rights movement in Memphis. The third feature is a digitized collection of the papers of Judge Russell B. Sugarmon, a civil rights lawyer and activist. While students may be interested in its selective collection of documents, particularly state and national campaign memorabilia from the 1960s and 1970s, an interview of Sugarmon himself that supplements the collection is its most valuable asset. The interview focuses on the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) lawyer’s legal and political life, and adds texture and nuance to the narrative of the civil rights movement in the city.

In many ways, the collections not featured on the home page are the most intriguing. Collections of interviews in sections entitled “Music and Civil Rights” and “Religion’s Presence in the Movement” offer particularly well-conducted interviews. Moreover, the collection of digitized manuscripts and oral histories surrounding the “Hoxie 21” are an underpromoted highlight of the site. Two years before the integration of Little Rock Central High School, a group of twenty-one black students were admitted to an all-White, rural Arkansas high school in Hoxie. The Hoxie 21 collection makes a significant contribution by providing a plethora of primary sources surrounding the neglected story of school integration in the small town. The site features a wide array of digitized copies of manuscripts that range from memos by civil rights leaders like Roy Wilkins and Thurgood Marshall to handwritten letters from concerned parents to teachers. Like other collections on the site, the most important contribution of the Hoxie 21 section is its oral histories. Interviews feature lawyers, teachers, children (White and Black), and even a bus driver who were all involved in the high school’s integration.

Crossroads to Freedom is not a site without flaws, however. Individual transcriptions are divided into thematic sections (with longer interviews split up into upwards of twenty parts), and the viewer must click on each section individually to see the text. This interface for viewing transcripts may visually appear sleek or cutting edge, but ultimately it is frustrating to the researcher hoping to see the transcript in its entirety and not subdivided into multiple parts. There are also minor inaccuracies that can be found with even a cursory analysis of the transcripts. The last name of the son of Kennedy confidant and journalist John Seigenthaler, for example, is spelled “Siggonthal” in one transcript. In another, the interviewee clearly responds to a question by saying “No, no,” but the transcription reads “You know.” Such inaccuracies are common, however, to anyone familiar with oral history transcripts, and should not distract from an otherwise well-produced Web site.

With its vast collection of digitized newspaper articles and manuscripts, which have long been available to historians, the site may ultimately be most useful to students unacquainted with archival research. Though the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., obviously plays a central part in the memory of many Memphis activists, the oral histories demonstrate...