Lines Were Drawn

Lines Were Drawn is a collection of oral histories primarily by white students who attended Murrah High School in Jackson, Mississippi, during the early years of court-ordered desegregation (1971–1973). The authors/editors attended Murrah during the period, and nearly four decades later began soliciting oral testimonies from among their former classmates through audio-recorded interviews, written responses to a questionnaire, and invited essays. In addition to classmates, they also interviewed former teachers, including Claiborne Barksdale, who participated in the project and provides a preface to the volume, and the former governor William Winter. The authors are not trained historians, and the narratives are presented without references to relevant theoretical and historical secondary literature. Teena F. Horn is a mother, dentist, and business woman; Alan Huffman is a journalist; and John Griffin Jones is a trial attorney. Their goal was not to influence the story telling—to the extent they believed possible—by their own bias and interpretations, resulting in diverse and contradictory stories. As Barksdale remarks in the preface: “This is not a top-down or bottom-up view, or a chronology, or even a history. It is inside-outside remembrance of what it was like for seventeen- and eighteen-year-old Mississippi children” (p. x

Archaeology · Art · Desegregation · Genealogy · Governor · Griffin · Literature · Narrative · Oral history · Swift · White (mutation · Classics · Educator Training and Historical Pedagogy · History · Oral History, Memory, Narrative Analysis · Race, History, and American Society