SPOHP Undergraduate Research Coordinator Oliver Tesluma and undergraduate Political Science major, as well as SPOHP alums Assistant Professor Jessica Taylor of Virginia Tech and George Washington University doctoral student Candice Ellis, presented papers at the 8th National Civil Rights Conference, which took place on June 17-20, 2018 in Meridian and Philadelphia, Mississippi. This year’s conference theme was “Lets Rise, Advocate, Educate and Cooperate.” Their papers were presented during a panel presentation entitled, Recording Civil Rights History: the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program (SPOHP) and the Mississippi Freedom Project.
Telsuma’s paper, “Evaluating the Effects of Oral History and Civil Rights Activism in the Mississippi Delta Since the 1950s,” incorporated research methods he learned while working with the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program, which, he notes, “emphasizes community collaboration and decolonized leadership structures to conduct effective and sustainable research.” Telsuma’s scholarship contextualizes information collected from the Mississippi Delta region, while evaluating elements of these research methods as organizing tools for better understanding the ways in which power structures can work alongside marginalized communities to empower them, from the Freedom Summer to the Black Lives Matter Movement.