COMMUNITY
Before embarking on the journey from Oxford, Ohio, to Mississippi, Freedom Summer volunteers sing "We Shall Overcome." Photo courtesy of Miami University.
REVIVING BLACK HISTORY The small town of Oxford, Ohio, is rich with the history of Freedom Summer and the Black families that once held the town together.
O
BY MAYA MEADE
xford, Ohio, home to Miami University, has a history older than some of its buildings, one that continues to be unknown to outsiders, and even some residents. The town’s Black history, in particular, has rich and powerful roots that developed decades ago, and grew into the 1960s, when Freedom Summer took place on the university’s campus. Freedom Summer, formally known as the Mississippi Summer Project, started as a way to register Black voters in Mississippi. Jim Crow laws segregated Black and white voters in the South and allowed for discrimination and suppression at the polls and in daily activities. Both the Black and white volunteers received violent harassment from members of the Klu Klux Klan. In 1964, the Freedom Summer movement found a place to train its 800 volunteers: Miami University. Over 50 years since the Freedom Summer events, Oxford has made efforts to inform its citizens of its Black history. While working at Enjoy Oxford, the Oxford visitor’s bureau, Taylor Meredith recognized a demand for a Black history tour as visitors and locals grew curious about the town’s history. In response, she created the Oxford Black History
24
backdrop | Spring 2021
Tour, a year-long project that was completed and distributed in July of 2020. “I thought, ‘Who better than me?’ because I knew that I would handle it sensitively and do a good job,” Meredith says. Meredith didn’t grow up in Oxford and did not know much about Oxford’s Black history until she started researching for the tour. She found a lot of initial information for the project from the Smith Library, a local history research library housed within the Oxford Lane Public Library. “This history isn’t super readily available, like where you could just Google it,” she says. “As a Black person, I see how the accomplishments of Black people are constantly erased, and when you erase the accomplishments of an entire community, it’s so easy to further dehumanize them.” Lanny Hargraves, a long-term Oxford resident and an involved community member, was part of the Freedom Summer Project Oxford put together in 2014. The purpose of the Freedom Summer Project was to explain what it was like to grow up as an African American in Oxford. Hargraves says the Smith Library served as a link between the Oxford Community and the University to provide accurate information about
