All winners will be recognized at the annual Public Humanities Awards event to be held Friday, Feb. 12, 2016, at the Old Capitol Museum in Jackson. Nomination forms for Public Humanities Achievement Awards are available on the Mississippi Humanities Council website.  For more information call 601-432-6752.

As the month of October continues, the MHC's annual Humanities Teacher Award prog

Sunita Sharma, with MHC Director Stuart Rockoff, receives teh 2015 Humanities Teacher Award for Mississippi Delta Community College.

ram is just getting started. Every year, the MHC celebrates outstanding humanities teachers at each of the state's colleges and universities during the months of October (National Arts & Humanities Month) and November. In return for their honor, the award recipients are asked to give a lecture on a humanities subject during October or November. These programs-totaling more than 30 in all-take place throughout the state and offer Mississippians a unique experience to hear free lectures on a wide range of humanities subjects. All of the programs are free and open to the public.
For a full list of award winners and program dates, find them on our website. And for updates from many of the lectures, check out our Facebook page, where we try to post a photo from as many of the lectures as our staff and board members can attend!

The two final family reading programs for 2015 were completed during October. The first of these, a Prime Time Family Reading Time program, was held in partnershi

MHC Speakers Bureau presenter Jerry Jenkins uses tribal drums to enhance a storytelling session at the Commonwealth Village Apartments.

p with Springboard to Opportunities at the Commonwealth Village Apartments in Jackson, with give-away books provided by a grant to the MHC from the Community Foundation of Greater Jackson and support from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities via a Shell Oil grant. Our storyteller/drummer, Jerry Jenkins, was paid for by a grant from the Mississippi Arts Commission.

The second program was a Luciérnagas (bilingual, Spanish/English) Family Reading Program, held at the M.R. Dye Public Library in Horn Lake. Due to the program's perennial popularity, this is the sixth consecutive year for "Lucie'" in this location. The latest spinoff appears to be the makings of a first annual DeSoto County Latin American Heritage Festival schedule September 2016.

For Shirley Hanshaw, Starkville's civil rights movement may have lacked the turmoil and violence iconic of other Southern communities in the 1960s, but the struggle toward racial equality still left emotional and psychological scars.

Now an associate professor of English at Mississippi State University, the Oktibbeha County native and 1965 graduate of then-segregated Henderson High School remembers using tattered, cast-off textbooks, looking out the window as she passed several white campuses during long bus rides to her own school, and being relegated to enter local businesses through the back door.

"It was demoralizing," Hanshaw said. "Everything was second- or third-best. When I was an elementary school student, it didn't really dawn on me; but as time wore on, it became apparent that I was being treated like a second-class citizen."

Hanshaw is one of five panelists who will speak as part of a community forum from 6:30-8:30 p.m. Oct. 29 at the Hilton Garden Inn. The event will recount the civil rights era in Mississippi, specifically Starkville. Funded by the Mississippi Humanities Council, the forum, "A Shaky Truce: Civil Rights Struggles in Starkville, MS, 1960-1980," is a collaboration between the university's history department and MSU Libraries. The public is invited to attend the free event.

Other panelists will include Michael Vinson Williams, dean of social sciences at Tougaloo College in Jackson; Stephanie Rolph, a professor at Millsaps College in Jackson; Chris Taylor, president of the Oktibbeha County chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; and project staff member Nick Timmerman, a graduate student in history at MSU.

The forum also will debut a digital history website on Starkville's civil rights movement, with interviews compiled by a team led by associate professor of history Judy Ridner, and assistant professors Hillary Richardson and Nickoal Eichmann with MSU's Mitchell Memorial Library. So far, Richardson said, the project team has compiled interviews with 16 participants - including forum panelists Hanshaw and Taylor - with hopes to grow that number over time. Dr. Richard Holmes, the first African American to enroll at MSU, also provided an interview for the project.

At this week's forum, Richardson added, others who lived in Starkville during that era can record their stories for publication on the project's website.

With Starkville's NAACP chapter forming in 1969 and public school desegregation following in 1971, Richardson said the project tells Starkville's story of persistence.

"It was successful in terms of it being 'peaceful,' in a sense, but it was very slow to happen," she added. "Starkville's civil rights movement is sort of defined by its lack of physical violence, but there's a more nuanced and personal story to tell."

As the website develops, Ridner said she hopes it becomes a prominent teaching tool in high school and college classrooms across Mississippi as they study the civil rights era, as well as by scholars researching the movement.

"We'd like to make Starkville's story better known because we believe it's important," Ridner said. "From what we're seeing so far in our research, Starkville seems to offer an alternative model to that of the Delta, the region most civil rights scholars study when they look at Mississippi's movement."

Hanshaw left Starkville after graduating high school in 1965 and returned 40 years later to join MSU's faculty. While she acknowledges the progress made toward racial equality in Starkville over those four decades, she hopes the civil rights project helps "explode the myth" that Starkville's progress came smoothly and without cost. She also hopes it reveals that the struggle isn't necessarily finished.

"I see a great deal of potential for the future," she said. "There's more progress to be made."

On November 5, the University of Southern Mississippi will host a special program in conjunction with the art exhibit featuring photographs from photographer Ed Wheeler during his time spent on oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. The program, titled "The Photographer as Participant Observer: Ed Wheeler and the Gulf Oil Rigs, 1981-1985" will more closely examine Wheeler's photographs and stories during his time on oil rigs photographing the workers and capturing a look at Southern oil rig culture.

The program will include Dr. Joe Millichap, Professor Emeritus of English at Western Kentucky University, who will begin the discussion by introducing several of Wh eeler's photographs as both documents and works of art and will discuss the importance of photography to Southern culture in historical and literary terms. Chuck Cook, News Content Advisor at USM's School of Mass Communication and Journalism and a former student of Ed Wheeler, will give a multimedia presentation on Wheeler's works and situate the oil rig photography within Wheeler's overall photography career. The accompanying exhibit will be on display from October 1-December 15.

There is no cost for the public to attend. The program will take place at Cook Library Exhibit Gallery, USM Campus, Hattiesburg beginning at 4 p.m. For more information, please contact Denise DeCesare Ross, 601-266-5087 or diane.ross@usm.edu.