he voices of the old south Baton Rouge community residents could have been lost over the years, but a decade of carefully composed interviews has preserved the history of generations.
The LSU Community-University Partnership gave 220 taped interviews from old south residents to the East Baton Rouge Parish Library System on Tuesday. The Carver Branch Library on Terrace Street near Highland Road will hold the tapes in a special section of the library.
Students at McKinley High School, just outside the gates of the University, have been partnering with students and professors from the College of Education, School of Social Work, and LSU Libraries every summer since 1995 to tell the history of the predominately-black community, which has been around since the early twentieth century. Graduate social work students transcribed the tapes on paper in 2004, creating a hard copy database of the area’s oral history.
Adolph Byrd, an interviewee who spoke at Tuesday’s donation ceremony, said he is most affected by how south Baton Rouge has grown.
“The growth of south Baton Rouge since 1935 is amazing,” said Adolph Byrd, who went to McKinley from eighth through 11th grade in the 1930s and 1940s. “I just ride around here and look. LSU used to be a few buildings, and now it’s like a city.”
Alicia Jenkins, English education senior who interviewed residents when she was a high school student at McKinley, said the student researchers had to be flexible when interviewing their subjects.
“We went wherever they wanted to meet – [McKinley High School], church, restaurants, wherever,” Jenkins said. “The hard part is over – getting interviews, coming up with questions.”
Katie Kennedy, a social worker who helped transcribe the interviews, said the students focused on different aspects of the community every summer.
“There were people out in the field [interviewing residents], and people behind the scenes,” Kennedy said of the effort.
Petra Munro Hendry, a professor in the College of Education, said the project gave high school students a special opportunity to get a more everyday knowledge of history.
“This community has an extremely rich history that needed to be documented,” Hendry said. “These students have been excluded from learning about the history of the community because it’s not in textbooks.”
The first four students to participate in the program in 1995 focused on McKinley Senior High School, the first publicly funded high school for black students in Louisiana. The school was built in 1926 and black students came from around the state and went home on the weekends. Student researchers interviewed former students about their school experiences as well as James Monroe Frazier, who was an influential principal at McKinley, Hendry said.
The students presented their research at the American Education Research Association’s conference in New York to professors from around the country.
Students discussed specific topics in their interviews with the residents, such as local businesses that thrived in the area, social organizations such as sororities and fraternities that knit the community together, political organizations such as the NAACP and the that church and religion played in the community.
Students also interviewed residents who participated in a bus boycott in Baton Rouge in the summer of 1953 in response to segregation on city buses. Bus drivers were ordered to comply with the law, and two drivers were suspended for not complying. Bus drivers went on strike for four days following the drivers’ suspensions.
A radio announcer announced a boycott of the city bus system on air June 19, 1953, and black boycotters began holding mass meetings to plan a carpool known as the Free Ride System. Boycotters collected money for gasoline for the carpool. The Rev. T.J. Jemison called off the boycott four days later.
Students interviewed key members of the boycott movement such as Jemison who, along with other black leaders, negotiated another ordinance that reserved the first two bus seats for white riders and the last two for black riders. Members of the black community objected to this new ordinance and wanted the boycott to continue. Joe Howard was arrested for sitting in one of the front two seats.
Hendry said she was impressed by the dedicatation she saw in the high school students year after year to complete the decade-long project.
“[The project] has given me a lot of faith in high school students in their ability to write and interpret history … they’re not just passive observers,” Hendry said.