Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis: There are certain names from the civil rights movement of the 1960s most everyone knows.
Anthropologist, educator and social activist Terry Buffington, of Pullman, is making sure others’ stories, particularly those working out of Mississippi at the time, are remembered as well.
One of those individuals is Eddie Brooks, whose work in 1964 as a 17-year-old field organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Buffington’s hometown of West Point, Miss., is documented in an interview Buffington conducted and recorded in 2010.
Buffington will perform a table reading drawn directly from that interview this weekend at Pullman’s Gladish Community and Cultural Center, with her son Kwasi Buffington, a University of Idaho graduate student, in the role of Brooks.
“Had it not been for young Black teenage boys, it would have been a difficult task for the 1964 freedom campaign,” Buffington said, referring to the Freedom Summer voter registration drive for which Brooks volunteered.
The recording makes up part of the Terry Buffington Papers, which document her anthropological work with Black men who came of age during the civil rights movement in her hometown, Buffington explained. The body of work includes 740 items and 21 audio cassettes, dated 1952-2014, and is archived at the Wilson Special Collections Library, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel-Hill.
“We were all born during the ’20s, the ’30s and my generation, the ’40s,” she said, of the civil rights figures she documented. “These are the people I grew up with, I went to church with, were family friends.”
Buffington said her project is driven by the imperative to ensure the details of those times aren’t lost when the era's participants are gone, the last generation of Americans who remember what it was like to attend schools segregated under Jim Crow laws and the struggle to change that.
“My role is to educate, is to inspire people,” she said, noting her hope is that people leave the “Eddie Brooks Tapes” reading with ideas “beyond talk” and take action.
“If we don't understand history, we are going to repeat the same mistakes,” she said.
Stone (she/her) can be reached at mstone@inland360.com.
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IF YOU GO
WHAT: “Born Under Jim Crow: The Eddie Brooks Tapes” table reading, presented by Terry Buffington Productions
WHEN: 7:30 p.m. Feb. 17-18 and 2 p.m. Feb. 18-19.
WHERE: Gladish Community and Cultural Center, 115 NW State St., Pullman.
TICKETS: $18-$20 at gladishcommunity.org/tickets.
OF NOTE: The material is suitable for middle and high school-age students through adults. Those interested can listen to the tapes at tinyurl.com/ye8pvfmc.
