Acknowledgments and Contributors

Many historical collections as well as individual works have been used by the creators of this interactive website to chronicle the history of the Fayette County civil rights movement. Minnie Harris Jameson, the sister of Viola McFerren and wife of Harpman Jameson, served as secretary for the Original Fayette County Civic and Welfare League (OFFCWL) for approximately 46 years. She was the guardian of the organization's correspondence, photographs, newspapers articles, and newsletters. In 1995, using a grant awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Daphene R. McFerren, the daughter of John and Viola McFerren and niece of Minnie Jameson, gathered the OFCCWL primary source materials and donated them to the Special Collections/ Mississippi Valley Collection Department of the University of Memphis Libraries.

The Fayette County collection includes original interviews with Fayette County activists conducted by Robert Hamburger for his book, Our Portion of Hell: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement in Fayette County, Tennessee (Links Books: New York 1973). In 2002, Hamburger, who as a University of Chicago student worked for several weeks with the Fayette County activists in 1965, and Daphene McFerren coordinated the videotaping of interviews with many leaders and activists of the Fayette County movement. Portions of these videos were used in the documentary, Freedom's Front Line: Fayette County, Tennessee (2008), which has been broadcast numerous times on public television, WKNO-TV, Memphis. Many of the video clips of activists appearing on this website were excerpted from these videotaped interviews. The Fayette County Collection continues to grow as activists, now living across the nation, add their records, interviews, and creative works to this archive.

Sasha Arnold, a master of arts student in the Department of English at the University of Memphis, provided outstanding and substantive organizational and content design contributions to the site and was responsible for day-to-day management of the development process. Errol Rivers, Jr., a Ph.D. student in the Department of English at the University of Memphis, provided an immeasurable amount of dedication to the project by fact-checking, editing, rhetorically analyzing, and developing content for the Tent City website and its related materials. Dr. Loel Kim, associate professor of English at the University of Memphis, has worked tirelessly over the last several years to supervise the creation of this website and bring it to fruition. Daphene McFerren, director of the Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change at the University of Memphis, provided Hooks Institute resources and wrote content, including the essay in the Historical Overview section, for this website.

Dr. Richard Saunders, who wrote his dissertation on the history of the Fayette County Movement and received his Ph.D. from the University of Memphis, donated his meticulous timeline of national civil rights events and detailed description of events in Fayette County as described in his dissertation, Encouraged by a Little Progress, Voting Rights, Place, and Conflicting Liberalisms In Tennessee's Fayette and Haywood Counties, 1958-1964 (2012).

Debra Turner shaped the design and accessibility of the website and served as the webmaster and liaison between the project and the university's online system. The contributors to this interactive, historical website hope that it will encourage those who review its contents to question how the continued struggle for human and civil rights both in the United States and abroad can be advanced through individual and collective commitments to create a more just world.