Fannie Lou Hamer’s America Website Included In New Black Digital Mapping Project
DECEMBER 15, 2023 – HARRISONBURG, VA – An educational website dedicated to the life and legacy of civil rights icon Fannie Lou Hamer has been included in the new online research and networking tool, Mapping the Black Digital and Public Humanities.
JMU graduate students Bailey McInturff, Ava Jacobs, and Emma Gentry work on finalizing the text for the Mapping project’s homepage in April 2023.
The project, an interactive and searchable map of digital and public humanities projects relating to Black history and culture, was initiated in 2022 by an interdisciplinary group of faculty, students, and library professionals at James Madison University (JMU) in Harrisonburg, Virginia. The group saw the need to make Black digital and public humanities projects more visible to other practitioners and the public.
“The map and website offer ways for scholars and general audiences to find and make connections among the various projects,” said Mollie Godfrey, one of the organizers. “And it contains a growing number of data visualizations that enables visitors to note trends in Black digital and public humanities work, identify gaps, and potentially seed future interventions.”
Godfrey, Associate Professor of English and African, African American and Diaspora Studies at James Madison University, said the site is already recognized by Black Studies scholars as an important resource, and its developers regularly update the map with new projects and the project’s future expansion and sustainability. The site draws on important existing resources such as the Colored Convention Project’s Black Digital Humanities Projects and Resources Google Doc and the Reviews in Digital Humanities journal.
The various sections available on the official Fannie Lou Hamer’s America Website and Educational Resource Center.
The Fannie Lou Hamer’s America website launched in August 2019 and was developed by Fannie Lou Hamer scholars, authors, and historians Maegan Parker Brooks, of Willamette University, Davis Houck, of Florida State University and webmaster Pablo Correa of the University of Saint Joseph. Brooks, Houck, Correa, and several Mississippi educators developed and designed the site’s K-12 educational resource, Find Your Voice, dedicated to the Mississippi-sharecropper turned civil rights activist.
The centerpiece of the project, a 90-minute documentary, Fannie Lou Hamer’s America, aired on PBS and WORLD Channel in February 2022. The website was then relaunched featuring content about the film and its production, along with the existing K-12 curriculum, and other Hamer-related archival and research materials. Organizers are adding a digital museum and library.
Hamer’s niece and project director of the website, Monica Land, said the purpose of the site is similar to that of the new mapping tool, in addition to providing a centralized and dedicated site to the late activist and humanitarian with continual research and archival information being added for students, researchers and the general public.
“We are very excited and honored to be included in this invaluable research tool,” Land said. “Our goal is to share all the research information we have found with everyone, and to continually add to this database as we find more materials on Fannie Lou Hamer. And working with the team at Mapping the Black Digital and Public Humanities will help us to do that.”