Executive Director's Message

While our grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is funding for-credit courses at three Mississippi prisons, we see the next step in this work as building a coalition of institutions and stakeholders to expand these educational initiatives into a coordinated, sustainable statewide program.

In addition to the life-changing impact of this work on the students, I was energized by this virtual convening because it’s a great example of how the MHC operates. We do not teach the courses or offer credits; instead, we have worked in the background, enlisting new educational partners, working with the staff of the Mississippi Department of Corrections, and garnering national funding to support the work. We are not aiming to become the Bureau of Prison Education, but rather we are a catalyst and convener of those partners who understand we are much more effective working together. This “turned-outward” philosophy guides much of the Council’s work. Working with others is central to what we do.

Of course, one of the drawbacks of working behind the scenes is the impact of the Mississippi Humanities Council can remain hidden. While my natural tendency is not to worry too much about this, it does create a challenge when we ask people for donations. A few weeks ago, we sent our fall fundraising mailing, asking for financial support for our prison education program. One of the wonderful effects of the Mellon grant is that it has sparked interest from other prisons to have college courses in their facilities. Currently, we have plans to expand these programs to two additional prisons and community colleges, which is beyond the budget of our Mellon grant. Yet we are committed to finding the resources to support this expansion.

Our ultimate vision is to make these educational opportunities available in every prison facility in the state, working with Mississippi’s high-quality network of community colleges and institutions of higher learning. We need your help to do this. With your support, we can meet the demand to expand this program to other prisons around the state. Most importantly, we can bring the benefits of higher education and the humanities to more incarcerated students. Your investment in this work will help us change lives through humanities education.

Click here to support this important work. Thank you!

The Mississippi Humanities Council, Mississippi Community College Board, Mississippi Public Universities-Institutions of Higher Learning, and the Woodward Hines Education Foundation, which provided funding, sponsored “Changing Lives: The Potential of Higher Education in Mississippi Prisons.” Participants shared ideas during breakout sessions, which will in turn fuel discussions by the four convening partners as they search for the best way to promote this work. Leaders from 12 community colleges, four senior colleges, and 11 nonprofit organizations joined the meeting.

To learn more about this work or share about current higher education in prison programs, please contact MHC project coordinator, Carla Falkner.

The MHC recently added a new speaker to our speakers bureau, Tracy Carr. Carr currently serves as Library Services Director at the Mississippi Library Commission and has been at MLC since 2004. With her more than 20 years of library expertise, her presentation provides a fun but informative take on Mississippi through the lens of newspaper headlines.

Carr’s talk, titled “Wanted—1,000,000 Frogs: Weird and Wonderful Things found in Old Mississippi Newspapers" demonstrates how we can use “old news” to learn what was important and interesting to the generations before us, what trends came and went, and how attitudes changed over time. Deeper analysis can show how easy it was to shape the public’s perception of events, and what power a journalist had in the days before fact-checking and accountability. Learning what information people had about an event or person helps us understand why people behaved in certain ways during specific times.

Carr holds a bachelor of arts in English from the University of North Texas, a master of arts in English from Mississippi State University, and a master of library and information science from The University of Alabama.

If you’re interested in hosting a speakers bureau presentation, visit the MHC website or contact Molly McMillan.

The Walter Anderson Museum of Art (WAMA) has launched a series of exhibits and programs exploring concepts of grief and mourning through the lens of nature and the Southern land. Entitled Mississippi Elegy: Southern Depictions of Life and Death and supported with a grant from the Mississippi Humanities Council, the goal of the project is to provoke dialogue about the ways Southerners reckon with inevitable demise.

“Death is an inescapable yet still misunderstood phenomenon; one that unites all cultures and speaks to the most elemental character of what it means to be human,” says Julian Rankin, WAMA executive director, discussing the theme of Mississippi Elegy. Unfortunately, as contemporary media exposure to death grows, many of us try to distance our everyday life from end of life, he says. “(Yet) death, when experienced personally and communally rather than statistically, remains a powerful tool for understanding cultural identity and belonging, especially because Southerners across lines of race and class have such nuanced and authentic ways of mourning, grieving, and remembering.”

Included in the exhibit are Walter Inglis Anderson’s memento mori (Latin, “remember that you must die”) artworks and contemporary Mississippi artist Jason Bouldin (Skull, Ash Wednesday pictured above), alongside objects from the University of Mississippi Museum’s collections. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue of essays related to the elegy theme and a series of community dialogue programs examining individual and communal expressions of death which ultimately celebrate life.

Accompanying programs with humanities scholars, subject experts and museum partners address death and grieving through subjects such as art history, music, foodways and literature.

The exhibit, Bearing Witness: Southern Visual Elegies, opened Aug. 21 and will remain on display through Feb. 14, 2022. The first in a series of related public programs will take place Sept. 27 at 5:30 via WAMA Facebook Live, entitled “Folk Art & Memory with Melanie Antonelli.” Antonelli, director of collections and exhibitions at the University of Mississippi Museum, will discuss various objects from the University of Mississippi Museum loaned to the WAMA exhibition, including the other-worldly paintings of Theora Hamblett and Luster Willis, photographs of gravesites by Walker Evans and Al Clayton and three-dimensional works by Sulton Rogers and Howard Finster. The virtual conversation is free to the public, but registration is required here.

For details about future programs in the Mississippi Elegy series, visit www.walterandersonmuseum.org.

The Mississippi Humanities Council invites nominations for its 2022 Public Humanities Achievement Awards, which honor outstanding contributions in public humanities.

Nominations will be accepted for Humanities Scholar Award, Preserver of Mississippi Culture Award, Humanities Partner Award, Educator Award, and Cora Norman Award.

The Council began issuing Achievement Awards in 1993 to recognize individuals and organizations that have supported the Council’s work through public programs across the state based in the branches of learning concerned with human thought and relations, such as history, literature, culture, values, and ideas. All Mississippians are invited to make nominations for these awards. Nominations are reviewed by a panel, which selects the year’s awardees.

“The Public Humanities Achievement Awards bring statewide attention to individuals or institutions in Mississippi that have made significant contributions to the humanities or who have led exceptional public humanities programming in Mississippi,” said Dr. Stuart Rockoff, executive director of the Mississippi Humanities Council.

All awards will be presented at the Mississippi Humanities Council’s 2022 Public Humanities Awards Gala and Friday, March 25, 2022, at the Old Capitol Museum in Jackson. Recipients of the 2022 Humanities Teacher Awards, which pay tribute to outstanding faculty in traditional humanities fields, will also be honored.

Nomination forms for Public Humanities Awards may be found online at www.mshumanities.org. For information call 601-432-6752.

The Mississippi Humanities Council is funded by Congress through the National Endowment for the Humanities to provide public programs in traditional liberal arts disciplines to serve nonprofit groups in Mississippi.

In 2018, the National Building Museum opened an exhibition exploring the causes and impacts of eviction, based on Matthew Desmond’s award‐winning book Evicted. The exhibition, which runs through October 3, 2021, presents sobering statistics and personal stories, challenging adults and youth to face the enormity of a difficult subject, while providing context and a call to action.

The 29th Annual Mississippi Delta Tennessee Williams Festival seeks to build on last year’s successful virtual festival with a hybrid in-person socially distanced festival that will stream all the programming on two web platforms. This year’s theme is on the exchange of culture, history, and music along the Mississippi River, from the Delta to New Orleans, using Willliams’ A Streetcar Named Desire as the organizing hub for performances, presentations, and workshops.

Voice From the Sit-In: Mississippi Delta Movie Premiere

On March 10, 1969 52 students were arrested at the Black Students sit-in and spent the night at Parchman Penitentiary. This film tells the story of the sit-in from the perspectives of four students, as told to current Delta State students. The event will take place at the Bologna Performing Arts Center, and will consist of a screening, Q&A, and reception.

During this presentation, Jim Woodrick explores the hidden history of some of the South’s most beloved (or despised), including Mississippi State’s “Bully,” the origin of the LSU Tigers and, of course, the story behind the Ole Miss Rebels.

Touching on the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi, Dr. Dennis Mitchell explores segregation as a complex, local system open to negotiation for much of its history and how local Mississippians did most of the work to end segregation rather than the more heralded outsiders, who have received much of the credit in the past. Mitchell traces the evolution of religion including what some historians term the "civic religion" of the Lost Cause, making the case for Mississippians to adopt a new perspective on their past.