"One of the tragedies of the way history is received is that it gets thinned into mythological renderings of great events - good guys, bad guys, epic battles, all frozen in time," says SIUC Associate Professor Jane H. Adams.

"With the Mississippi Project, we aim to apply the unique knowledge and access provided by our personal histories to more fully understand the civil rights movement and to create an account that is more complete, one that includes civil rights activists and segregationists, as well as people who were not active but whose lives were transformed through the movement," says Adams.

"It's important to understand that this is a multi-ethnic region. The color line also affected Catholics, Italians, Jews, Chinese, Syrians, and Choctaw. That's a key part of our project."

Adams and photographer D. Gorton, whom she married a year ago, first met in Mississippi in 1964. Then a 21-year-old junior at SIUC, Adams was one of thousands of white college students who went south that summer to help black Americans register to vote. Gorton, an Ole Miss student when James Meredith became its first black enrollee, was, in Adams' words, "the only white Mississippian to be a member of SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee)." A photographer for that organization, he spent most of his time documenting the civil rights struggle outside of Mississippi because of SNCC concerns for his parents' safety.

After Freedom Summer, Adams dropped out of school. She spent a year in Mississippi, working in the movement's Jackson office and organizing in the southwestern part of the state, then moved on to Chicago as an activist in the anti-Vietnam war movement. She later finished her schooling at SIUC, earned a doctorate in anthropology at the University of Illinois and began teaching in 1987 at her old alma mater, where her research has focused on rural life, history, politics and the economy in Southern Illinois.

Gorton, meanwhile, parlayed his SNCC photo skills into a career, eventually becoming staff photographer for The New York Times. He also photographed for Time-Life Inc. and the Washington Post Magazine.

Though they hadn't seen each other for ages, a mutual friend from their old student-activist days decided to do a little matchmaking a few years ago. "The rest is history," Adams said with a laugh.

This new partnership led the couple to think about other ways they might work together.

"My work has centered on understanding transformations in rural life, and I use oral histories as a part of that," Adams said. "D. has created extensive photo essays - he was managing editor for 'A Day in the Life of the Soviet Union' - and he has the ability to talk to just about anyone.

"We realized that the Southern civil rights movement was something we both knew a lot about, and we're both interested in the Web as a medium for making information more accessible, so we began looking at how we might put all that together."

The Mississippi Project grew from there. When complete, it will contain digital video interviews, still photos, home movies and documents both private and public, all archived and linked on the World Wide Web.

"In terms of the way we really learn - sight, sound, music, experience - the Web is the only way I know to bring it all together," Adams said.

"It also is a way to allow everybody, not just serious scholars, to have access to original source material - it won't wind up buried somewhere in (a library's) Special Collections, with no one knowing it's there."

So far, the project includes interviews with civil rights activist Alyene Quin, Chinese-American grocers Hoover and Freeda Lee, Jewish businessman Stanley Sherman and white private school founder Betty Furniss. In what may be the project's most striking interviews to date, Adams and Gorton focus on (white) Citizens Council leader Horace Harned, whose family owned the Rice plantation in Starkville, and Ruth G. Brent, a descendant of Rice plantation slaves and an acknowledged relative of Horace Harned.

"The color line was complex and ambiguous - because of these complicated relationships, everything wasn't just black and white," Adams said. "People usually knew who their relatives were."

They also are focusing on the backdrop against which this struggle took place.

"The lens through which the civil rights era has been viewed is mostly urban, where the south at the time was mostly rural," Adams said. "There are things city people don't understand about rural life, kinship, land ownership, class antagonisms, gender roles and religion and how these all shape local discourse and action.

"In addition, at the same time all this was occurring, the South's rural, agricultural economy was beginning to come apart. That transformation of rural life, which is what my work so far has been about, serves as the context for the civil rights era," said Adams. And then there's the fact that the state was ethnically and religiously diverse, which is also rarely recognized. The whole nature of that society has been invisible in the larger discourse."

Adams and Gorton are continuing to conduct interviews, make images and collect data - all with a sense of some urgency. Time is passing. One of the first people they interviewed, Alyene Quinn, has since died. If thoughts, memories and vantage points are not preserved, they, too, will die.

"We played a part in history in a direct way, something few people have the privilege of doing," Adams said. "There's a responsibility that comes with that."

Editor's, note: D. Gorton's photographers of the Deep South can be seen on his Web site at: www.dgorton.com.

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