Shannon Carter, Associate Professor of English Texas A&M University-Commerce RSA Seminar 2013, Historiography and the Archives:

Taking the Next Steps Dear RSA readers, What follows is the working draft of a book proposal, pulled together from applications for internal research grants received for a sabbatical (spring 2010) and other research support (including a research trip to the NAACP archives at the Library of Congress in September 2011). My aim is to provide an overview of the project, particularly the archival sites I plan to investigate. Im hoping to receive feedback that will help me think late the most promising path for structuring the massive amounts of data collected in the years since I originally began this project. I have spent the last few years studying locally circulated discourse designed to enact (or suppress) change in a rural university town, especially in the decades surrounding desegregation (1964). The project has yielded articles in CCC (Carter and Conrad, September 2012) and Community Literacy Journal (Carter, Fall 2012), an NEH Office of Digital Humanities grant (Remixing Rural Texas: Local Texts, Global Contexts1), and a string of internal grants. I have presented widely on this subject, and even developed a rather significant oral history collection from these conversations. There seems to be no end to what this set of writers, texts, and literacy scenes might yield. And, for me, thats the problem. I dont need help with archive navigation per se, nor even setting up a project. What I need help with is nailing down a couple of good options for this book project, which has actually been about six different book projects since I first outlined it for my sabbatical in 2010. Im so close to this project that everything seems significant: all the evidence, all the arguments, all the connections. The scholarship produced by seminar leaders has had a significant impact on my project throughout, so I think it not farfetched to assume that our time together will help me find my way through a maze of exciting possibilities toward concrete next steps. I am neither a graduate student nor a junior scholar, so I may not be the primary audience for this workshop. It is my first archival research project, however, and I'm stuck in all the glimmering details. I appreciate any guidance you have to offer. Looking forward to working with you all. Thanks in advance!

Shannon

See RRT at http://faculty.tamuc.edu/rrt. Extended discussion available in the White Paper for this project, which can be found at http://www.shannoncarter.info. In fact, thats the key reason I am getting this to you so late. The White Paper for RRT was due to NEH on 5/31/2013. Despite working on it steadily for some time, it wasnt ready to submit until almost midnight last night. Thus, I am just now getting this important document finalized to share with RSA participants.
1

Shannon Carter, PhD Associate Professor of English Title: Writing the Local: From Segregation to Desegregation in a Rural, University Town2 Keywords: local publics, rhetoric and composition, civic engagement, community engagement, community literacy, civil rights, desegregation, race relations, social protest rhetoric, conservative rhetoric, rural, rural literacies, community literacy, critical race theory, African American, neighborhood, critical race studies, critical regionalism Focus: local texts designed to establish and maintain local publics (see Warner) address perceived change (in the community, region, state, and/or nation), either to stop that change or help facilitate it on local levels circulate across university-community boundaries initiate, sustain, expand, or disrupt communication channels (see Carter) between historically marginalized populations and more powerful members of the local community The current project examines writing (and writers) making up a complex network of documents, agents, and agencies following the desegregation of a rural regional university about an hours drive from Dallas, Texas. Core texts for this analysis include the university presidents speech in June 1964 announcing desegregation at a mandatory meeting of all faculty and staff, including local responses to this announcement (newspaper articles, letters), as well as exchanges between university administrators and African American students initiated by student groups like the Afro-American Student Society of East Texas (ASSET, in 1968) and between city officials and residents of Norris, the historically segregated neighborhood in town, initiated by community groups like the Norris Community Club (established in 1973 by university students in partnership with Norris residents). Of particular concern are local, underrepresented texts by writers from groups historically excluded from public spaces. Goals: Complete final phase of systematic study toward understanding of rhetorical construction of race in local, rural contexts as expressed through key documents widely recognized as significant to racial justice at one of the two last public universities in Texas to integrate (East Texas State University in 1964). Presentations, scholarly articles, and book-length manuscript resulting from study will contribute to the field of rhetoric and composition by furthering understanding of civic engagement for racial justice enacted at local levels in rural contexts through texts circulated by local writers on behalf of local readers. Current project provides a critique of racial justice movement post integration by using desegregation at a rural teachers college in the south as a case in point. Contributes to the fields growing understanding of the ways in which readers and writers can enable, sustain, and--at timesimpede social change at local levels.3 Like Kelly Ritters recent To Know Her Own Story: Writing at the Woman's College, 1943-1963, the current project will attempt to preserve the local and resist the unifying principles of the national (U of Pittsburgh P, 2012). Abstract In 1964, staunch segregationist and university president James G. Gee was forced to desegregate East Texas State University (ETSU), one of the last two public colleges in Texas still upholding racial barriers.4

Also considering a title like Writing for a Change: Circulating Social Justice in a Rural University Town Ive written about the Norris Community Club, ASSET, desegregation, and other student activists like John Carlos elsewhere. For articles currently available, see Carter and Conrad (CCC, September 2012), Carter (CLJ, Fall 2012). Most of my work in this area lately has been for my digital humanities project, Remixing Rural Texas (see http://faculty.tamuc.edu/rrt). There you can find videos about these topics like A Clear Channel and John Carlos: Before Mexico City (to view these, scroll to end for urls). Extended discussion available in the White Paper for this project, which can be found at http://www.shannoncarter.info and is the key reason I am getting this to you so late. 4 The other was Sam Houston State University, where he had served as Dean before becoming ETSU president in 1947. SHSU desegregated in June 1964 as well.
3 2

The proposed project offers a rhetorical analysis of local responses to desegregation at this rural, regional campus established as private teachers college for the areas poor (white) farmers and merchants in 1889 (see Gold). Using critical race theory as the primary theoretical framework, the current study employs life history research and extensive use of archival materials to better understand the codes of cross-cultural conduct (Jones-Royster 2001) established by local writers promoting and sustaining important changes. The study attempts to theorize and interpret the local, not as a static object fixed in time and place but as a fluid, dynamic construct made meaningful through connections over time and space. Following in the tradition of life history research, the current project builds upon studies like Deborah Brandts Literacy in American Lives (Cambridge UP, 2001) and John Duffys Writing from These Roots: Literacy in a Hmong-American Community (U of Hawaii P, 2007, 2011), both of which rely on peoples descriptions of their own life experiences as these autobiographical accounts illuminat[e] something of their relationships to the social structures of their times and places, especially where literacy learning is implicated (Brandt 11, emphasis mine). When it comes to issues of access and higher education, literacy learning is most certainly implicated. Thus, the current study relies upon oral histories with writers who were actively and purposefully involved with changing material conditions for African American students entering this regional university following desegregation. Since regional universities define themselves as responsive to community needs, this study relies on oral histories and other artifacts documenting activist, institutional, curricular, and community efforts to change the material conditions for marginalized citizens who were not also university students. Approaching Writing for the Local as microhistory, I work from the premise that such a study of responses to desegregation in one university town offers a relevant case study for more general historical trends on much broader scales. This is especially important because, as David Gold explains in his study of our universitys earliest years, in a country with such a decontextualized educational system as the United States, national educational histories cannot be understood but in relation to the local communities in which trends both emerge and play out (152). Thus, the current study contributes to the scholarly conversations in literacy studies, rhetoric, and education by offering an in-depth portrait of this local context at this particular time--revealing shifting notions of community responsibility through race and access as these tropes played themselves out in a newly desegregated university. In fact, it is from the local that we can extrapolate lessons about race relations with national and even global implications. Project Description The current project examines writing and writers making up the complex network of documents, agents, and agencies surrounding the decade following the racial integration of a regional university in Texas (1964 to 1975). Part life history research, part microhistory, this project contributes to the ongoing conversations in literacy studies by working to understand the way writing works to both interrupt and sustain social injustices in local contexts. Throughout, the study illustrates the many ways local-global forces interanimate rhetorical events. Indeed, local writers and their texts come into being at a particular time and place, but rarely are literate interactions entirely local in origin or effect. Any literacy scene is an interaction framed by agents (human actors and inanimate objects), Deborah Brandt and Katie Clinton insist, with a capacity to travel, a capacity to stay intact, and a capacity to be visible and animate outside the interactions of immediate literacy events. Throughout, I will attempt to capture that very capacity so often missing from our disciplines increasingly significant studies of what Jacqueline Jones Royster calls literacy in its particulars. I examine race relations following significant, legislative intervention effectively disrupting the status quo at a state-supported teachers college that had served rural white men and women since it was established in 1889. No doubt much has changed since integration began, but a constant comparative perspective with those early years offers profound insight regarding present politics in terms of more contemporary arguments for inclusion like Affirmative Action and more specific equal educational opportunity programs. As one key scholar in critical race theory laments, . . . it may well be that the movement of American studies in the 21st century will be remembered for a pronounced skepticism toward the promise

of inclusion (Guiterrez-Jones 21). In fact, it is from the local that we can extrapolate lessons about race relations with national and even global implications. The key research questions driving this project are the following: What does it take to be an agent of change in local contexts, and how does the creation and circulation of texts function to enable social justice in a local contexts and over time? The individuals, institutions, and community organizations examined here were most certainly agents of change during the turbulent decade following integration, and their work led to a much less inequitable and far more just environment for African Americans and other historically oppressed minorities in our area. Even so, the change that occurred was rarely sweeping and there is no doubt that injustices and racial inequities remain here in East Texas, just as they do everywhere else in America. Throughout the current study, I focus on race as a trope, especially how one campus and surrounding community went about developing what Jacqueline Jones Royster calls codes for cross-cultural conduct that, like many such cultural codes, are never fixed nor ever completely satisfactory. In other words, communities without direct and frequent contact with one another (as with the policies of racial segregation and the Jim Crow laws permeating the South in the years before Civil Rights legislation) were without productive means for communication across communities. Power dynamics and the relative infrequency of cross-cultural communication before integration led to misunderstandings and other, much more significant complications. Critical race theory (CRT) emerged as a response to critical legal studies, a movement in legal thought that was, at least in its earliest iteration, a response to American domestic politics following civil rights legislation. Beginning in the 1960s with the work of legal scholar Derek Bell, CRT works from the premise that race is socially constructed and that this approach to race mattersespecially when it comes to establishing rights for historically marginalized groups like African Americans. Thus, CRT provides the theoretical lens through which I begin unpack race in this region at this time, especially as writers work both with and against this trope in order to create more productive codes for cross-cultural conduct and, in turn, promote social justice in ways this region had never before experienced. Any attempt to understand the factors enabling social change must address much more than those who appear to be leading such changes. Even a study of Martin Luther Kings influence on the civil rights movement must take into account layers upon layers of other agents, agencies, and additional factors likewise contributing to this important series of moments in American history (see Loeb 1999). Of course MLKs influence was monumental; however, individuals never affect change alone. In As If Learning Mattered, Richard Miller urges us to rethink agency. As he explains, to think of agency only as the ability to alter massive cultural structures, to shift the thinking of large numbers of people, or to perform any number of similarly grand feats of conversion is to effectively remove agency from the realm of human action (211). Thus I find it necessary to bring together several research methods to determine the ways in which change happened (and didnt) during one of the most turbulent decades in university history. During this time, East Texas State University (ETSU) began accepting African American students for the first time since it was established in 1889. Other firsts include the first African American faculty member (Talbot) and administrator (Ivory Moore in 1972). In the City of Commerce, organizations like the Norris Community Club were established (in 1973) to create, according to co-founder of the Club and long-time Norris Community resident Billy Reed, a direct line of communication between the African American citizens of Commerce and city governance (as well as university officials). By all accounts, this organization forged new trade routes (Brandt) and made even more productive use of existing ones, forcing the City to right inequities that continued to plague the Norris Community even as late as 1975, including a lack of paved roads and sewage and indoor plumbing. Using critical race theory as theoretical framework, the current study employs life history research and extensive use of archival materials (oral histories, newspaper accounts, minutes from meetings) to understand the codes of cross-cultural conduct established by writers at this time in promoting, enabling, and sustaining such important changes. My focus throughout is on local texts and important literacy

scenes. At the local Post Office in December of 1967, for example, John Carlosthe sprinter from Harlem best known for his part in the silent protest at the Mexico City Olympics in 1968picked up the latest issue of Track & Field News, read about the struggles of black athletes around the nation whose experiences echoed his own in Texas, and learned about the Olympic Project for Human Rights, an affiliation that would begin changing his life almost immediately. As Carlos explains in a recent interview, I was reading that at the same time I was living that in terms of social issues that were taking place at the time. I was living that at East Texas State University (Interview). At a smoke-filled common room at a dorm on the night of Martin Luther King, Jr.s assassination in April 1968, student activists on this recently desegregated campus began drafting a set of interrelated documents that established the AfroAmerican Student Society of East Texas (ASSET) and their Declaration of Rights, leading to unprecedented change across the campus and community. At the circulation desk at the university library in January of 1973, a conversation about inequities experienced by residents of Norris, the historically segregated neighborhood in town, inspired a set of interrelated documents that established the Norris Community Club and enabled its key work, providing what NCC members called clear channel of communication between the neighborhood, long excluded from the public spaces necessary for democratic deliberation, and the city officials, again leading to unprecedented change. The proposed project takes literacy scenes like these as starting points, drawing attention to the network of texts populating each scene. Following in the tradition of life history research, Writing for a Change builds upon studies like Deborah Brandts award-winning Literacy in American Lives, which rely on peoples descriptions of their own life experiences as these autobiographical accounts illuminat[e] something of [their] relationships to the social structures of their times and places, especially where literacy learning is implicated (11, emphasis mine). When it comes to issues of access and higher education, literacy learning is most certainly implicated. By the time ETSU finally integrated in 1964, every other public university in Texas had already done so. Thus, ETSU before during and after integration provides a productive lens through which to examine what Brandt calls existing trade routes for literacy acquisition and the forging of new trade routes. Thus, the current study will rely upon oral histories with writers actively and purposefully involved with changing material conditions for African American students entering ETSU following integration. Oral histories collected during the 1970s and again in the late 2000s will make up the bulk of my life history research, approaching oral history as a rhetorical event (Lucas, Radicals, Rhetoric, and the War, 2008). Since ETSU defines itself as a regional university responsive to community needs, the current study relies on oral histories, public documents (newspaper accounts, speeches, minutes from meetings) and other artifacts documenting activist efforts to change the material conditions for marginalized citizens who were not also university students--especially those located in the Norris Community. Here, I am deeply concerned with both Town and Gown, which seems especially appropriate here given that Texas A&M-Commerce, the Norris Community, and the City of Commerce were all established at around the same time and all exist within Commerce city limits. All three entities are intertwined and always have been, not unlike most regional universities and their towns as manifested across the country. Thus, the larger implications of this study respond to questions like the following: Historically, how has higher education responded to social change? In what ways does an institution of higher education facilitate social justice in the community it serves? In collaborations with other institutions making up that local context? The chapter-by-chapter outline for this manuscript follows. [NOTE: I am very unsure about the following chapter outline. I have multiple versions of it but ultimately decided to share with you the version I created back in 2009 as part of my proposal for Faculty Development Leave (which I was awarded for Spring 2010). Despite the fact that I have much newer, perhaps stronger versions available, I decided to go with this because it is the most fleshed out. I welcome any suggestions on this front as well.] Chapter 1: Theorizing the Local

This chapter introduces the goals, justification, larger implications, primary research methods, and theoretical framework informing the study--namely critical race theory (see especially Collins 2004 and Delgado 2001). Through oral histories with long-time residents of rural, African-American communities like the rural, remote East Caney (thirty miles east of Commerce) and the Norris Community (in Commerce city limits), I begin by tracing the regional economic, political, and material transformations surrounding ETSU in the decades during and immediately following integration. Coupled with archival research (including content analyses of local and campus newspapers), oral histories with generational cohorts will enable me to establish social trends, especially in terms of shifting technologies associated with and enabling writing (like grants, histories, organizational documents) that get things done and sustain established movements (see Ryder, 1965, and Lummis, 1987, for more on life history research). This chapter includes an extended discussion of the colleges historical relationship with the region as compared with other areas. Especially important in this respect will be William L. Mayo, the pioneering educator from the mountains of Kentucky to established this rural teachers college in 1889 and quickly made it integral to the community. On this latter point, I rely extensively on David Golds important work concerning our campuses earliest years and Mayos role in the community and in our disciplines history (Rhetoric at the Margins, 2009). Chapter 2: Race Matters This chapter works with tropes of race and access as revealed in public documents, archival materials, and other artifacts written and circulated in the region. I begin with an exploration race surrounding the installation and eventual removal of a city-owned sign posted at the entry point of an adjacent city in 1921. For the next fifty years, travelers making their way from Dallas, Texas, to Commerce were very likely to pass a 24-foot, electrified sign that read, Welcome to Greenville. Blackest Land. Whitest People. The sign wasnt removed until 1969, five years after ETSU integrated. I then explore the trope of race as revealed in letters, speeches, and other documents written by three university presidents before, during, and immediately following integration. Finally, I work to understand the trope of race as revealed in artifacts like the Commerce Journal, city planning documents, and, where available, minutes from City Council meetings. Also important here are oral histories with campus administrators and city officials, establishing, as accurately as possible, shifting notions of community responsibility and race as it manifested itself at city and university levels. It is my hope that a close reading of these artifacts through the theoretical framework critical race studies provides will establish a productive understanding of the general tenor surrounding mainstream discourse of race and race relations. Chapter 3: Documents of Change This chapter explores the trope of race through a close reading of relevant documents, and the next chapter continues this line of investigation through interviews covering the life histories of their authors. I begin with a close reading of key documents interrupting a long line or social injustices. These documents include official statements developed by student organizations like the African-American student organization AASSET (document of demands presented ceremoniously to President Halliday in 1965), an article in the student publication ETSU Special that caused a stir across campus by describing the deplorable conditions in which Norris Community residents were required to live, and the charter for the Norris Community Club, establishing this grassroots organization to open up a clear line of communication between the African American citizenry of Commerce and city and university officials. The first document (AASSET demands) is understood as interrupting social injustices by forcing campus officials to hire black faculty, allowing black students to live in previously segregated housing, making campus employment equally available to all students regardless of race, and bringing some aspect of Black Studies to campus. Within a mere handful of years, all AASSET demands had been met. Within a decade, the deplorable conditions of the Norris Community had improved significantly, largely by securing grants to pave the roads and install sewage, proper drainage, and indoor plumbing. Recognizing the important role played by layers upon layers of agents and conditions existing beyond and before the creation and dissemination of these documents, I work to locate and articulate ways to account for the success attributed to these documents. Chapter 4: Agents of Change

Whereas Chapter 3 focused on the documents of change, especially their impact, Chapter 4 will turn attention to the circumstances leading to and surrounding their creation. In that every document has a writer (or team of writers) and every writer has a relevant literacy narrative, the current chapter will rely largely on oral histories in an attempt to establish the role of the writer as an agent of change. Thus, this chapter will draw from the life history of Ivory Moore, the first African American administrator at ETSU, joining the university in 1972 to become Dean of the then-brand new Office of Minority Affairs. Now in his eighties, Moore wrote his first grant as a high school student in rural Oklahoma (for the Works Progress Administration) and, arriving at ETSU in the early 1970s, brought hundreds of thousands of dollars in grant monies to the African American community in this region, establishing bridge programs like Upward Bound at area high schools and academic support programs like Mach III (tutoring program), as well as public works for the Norris Community (paved roads, indoor plumbing, sewage). I will also focus on community leaders like Opal Pannell and Billy Reed, both of whom are long-time residents of the Norris Community, were founding members of the Norris Community Club and have remained actively involved in it, the Commerce chapter of NAACP, and other activist efforts ever since. Finally, I turn my attention to Harry Turnerone of the first African American students to attend ETSU and a longtime resident and historian of the Norris Community whose variety of self-published histories, a two-part autobiography, and regular community publications offer great insight into race relations in Commerce over the past fifty years. The current chapter explores tropes of access, race, responsibility, and social justice as revealed through a close reading of these individual life histories. Chapter 5: Listening for Change In her award-winning Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness (2005), Krista Ratcliffe establishes new codes for cross-cultural conduct across lines of race and gender. As she explains, [b]ecause gender and race are words, they function as do all words--not as transparent descriptors of thought that stipulate only dictionary definitions but rather as tropes (ie, rhetorical figures) that suggest multiple meanings (27). In the previous chapters, I hope I have established some of the layers and multiplicity of meanings embedded in the tropological function of race as constructed and lived in this area of Texas during the 1970s. As we threw open the doors of A&M-Commerce to accept, according to Present Gee at the time, all races, as long as they meet the standards, how did the campus and surrounding community make sense of this transition? In this concluding chapter, I use the framework established to Ratcliffe to explore the implications for this study, especially as it offers a real-world application for the codes for cross-cultural conduct Ratcliffe establishes. Finally, I look to possible, more contemporary implications for such codesespecially as embodied in recent efforts to listen rhetorically through interdisciplinary models like the Converging Literacies Center (CLiC). I describe CLiC efforts as what Eli Goldblatt calls writing beyond the curriculum, focusing on projects like work with area prison literacy programs and collaborative attempts to place a Texas State Historical Marker at the Norris Communitys oldest, largest, and arguably most influential congregation, Mt. Moriah Temple Baptist Church. Established in 1896, this church has been the site of much collective efforts for social justice. The majority of the writers discussed in previous chapters are members of this congregation, and a number of the previously unpaved roads in that community have been renamed for former leaders in Mt. Moriah. Also explored in this concluding chapter are interdisciplinary partnerships that might support existing trade routes for literacy acquisition and forge new trade routes (Brandt) where none yet existpaving the way for more writers than ever before. Methods for collecting and analyzing data described below approach race as a rhetorical construct (Critical Race Theory) established in part and over time through multiple trade routes (Brandt) forged and connected in public discourse at local levels. In doing so, this study treats race as a trope, especially with respect to understanding how one campus and surrounding community went about developing what rhetorician Jacqueline Jones Royster calls codes for cross-cultural conduct that, like many such cultural codes, are never fixed but shift over time and across users. Critical race theory (CRT) provides the theoretical lens for this investigation, establishing a critical frame for the research design that relies on close readings of archival materials to better understand responses and shifting codes for cross-cultural conduct as revealed through tropes of race and access, community responsibility and accountability. In short, I explore curricular outreach, programmatic responses, and community discourse in response to what President James G. Gee described in public speech announcing racial integration in 1964 as the inevitability of racial integration at one regional public university in the south. I instigate rhetorical construction

of race through life histories the existing trade routes (activist documents, letters, applications) and the complexity of forging new trade routes at this time of state-mandated integration in this particular region. In doing so, project answers larger questions like these: Historically, how has higher education responded to social change? In what ways does an institution of higher education facilitate social justice in the community it serves? In collaboration with other institutions making up that local context? These are questions that can be best answered at local levels when considered in national and global contexts. As David Gold explains in his award-winning study of our own universitys earliest years, in a country with such a decontextualized educational system as the United States, national educational histories cannot be understood but in relation to the local communities in which these trends both emerge and play out (152). This is no less true of educational histories than it is of histories and trends of text use and production in public discourse like the ones under investigation here. Procedure for Accomplishing Goals: Previous phases of current research project have included data collection, coding and content analysis of relevant primary source materials (Texas A&M-Commerce Special Collections, Northeast Texas Digital Collections) coupled with oral history interviews with local representatives from community and university (also coded and analyzed for recurring themes). Project combines archival research with research involving Human Subjects. IRB approval received in 2010, covering data collection phases involving human subjects. Funding provided by Graduate School would enable researcher to compare findings from rhetorical analysis of local texts with relevant archival materials at state and national levels. Funding requested for travel to the Center for American History, at the University of Texas at Austin and the Library of Congress in Washington DC. Research at the Center for American History will take place primarily among the Sam Rayburn Papers and other Congressional Papers covering periods under investigation. After coding and analyzing relevant materials located in the Center for American History, especially correspondence and other texts about campus under investigation and key administrators, research will identify relevant paths for content analysis in National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Archives at the Library of Congress in Washington DC. Procedure for unit comparison based on physical communicative link discovered in content analysis of local artifacts. Procedure for accomplishing goals above requires a constant comparative perspective of relevant discourse across local, state, and national levels. Paths selected for constant comparative perspective determined by physical communicative link established by evidence of informal and formal communications between university administrators, students, and community organizers at congressional levels and with NAACP investigators and other representatives. [NOTE: I am also very eager to find a place for my work with the controversial general education program established in 1957 by James G. Gee, the same segregationist who was forced to desegregate ETSU. It is definitely related, as the curriculum emphasized citizenship training built largely upon the mental hygiene movement so much a part of the scene at the time. Heres my proposal for CCCC. Speaker 2: Un/American Standards at "The South's Most Democratic College" As Deborah Brandt has argued, WWII shifted the nation's approach to mass literacy from an abstract, moral imperative to "an actual resource needed for the production of war." Indeed, wartime connected literacy instruction to a democratic ideal as never before, one that continued into the postwar years. Speaker 2 will illustrate these connections at the local level via one southern, regional teachers college during its years as "The South's Most Democratic College" under president James Gee's leadership (1947-1966). This presentation traces Gee's responses to standards increasingly driven by "official" imperatives, especially the Texas Education Agency mandate for broader based instruction in the liberal arts. In response to this mandate, Gee oversaw a general education program based on values supporters insisted were "core to all human experience." Local dissent was widespread, diverse, and exacerbated by Gee's leadership style. His approach was a major departure from the previous administration, which David Gold has characterized as rogue leadership in opposition to national trends, a tradition to which the local public had remained fiercely loyal since the institution's establishment in 1889. Speaker 2 will trace critical race narratives emerging from this controversy, especially how they illustrate emerging struggles following Civil Rights legislation

and Gee's resistance to this campus' eventual integration, again by state mandate and not without local controversy. That complete presentation is available at www.shannoncarter.info Working Bibliography (abbreviated list) Afro-American Student Society of East Texas (ASSET), Declaration of Rights. D. Whitney Halladay, University President Papers, collection (Afro-American Affairs). James G. Gee Library, Department of Special Collections, Texas A&M University-Commerce, Texas. Anderson, Tom. Carlos Hedges On Joining Up with Boycotters. East Texan 6 Dec. 1967: 1; 8. Print. ---. Negro Athletes Refute Statements. East Texan 8 Dec. 1967: 1; 8. Print. Brandt, Deborah, and Katie Clinton. Limits of the Local: Expanding Perspectives on Literacy as Social Practice. Journal of Literacy Research 34 (2002): 337-356. Print. Brooke, Collin. Discipline and Publish: Reading and Writing the Scholarly Network. Ecology, Writing Theory, and New Media: Writing Ecology. Ed. Sid Dobrin. New York: Routledge, 2012. 92105. Print. Carlos, John. Interview with Shannon Carter. James G. Gee Library, Department of Special Collections, Texas A&M University-Commerce, Texas. Forthcoming. ---. Racing the Local, Locating Race: Rhetorical Historiography through the Digital Humanities. Conference on College Composition and Communication. The Riviera Hotel, Las Vegas, NV. 16 Mar. 2013. Panel discussion. ---. The John Carlos Story. The Kojo Nnamdi Show. WAMU, Washington, D.C. 4. Oct. 2011. Web. 14. Nov. 2011. ---. The Silent Protest: Open Hands, Closed Fists, and Compositions Political Turn. Conference on College Composition and Communication. Las Vegas, NV. 13 Mar. 2013. Featured Session. ---. Graduate Ceremony, Spring 2012. Keynote. LionsMedia. June 18, 2012. Retrieved June 20, 2012. Video. Carlos, John, and Dave Zirin. The John Carlos Story. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2011. Print. Carter, Shannon. A Clear Channel. Remixing Rural Texas: Local Texts, Global Contexts. Converging Literacies Center (CLiC). Video. Aug. 2012. Web. 2 Aug. 2012. ---. A Clear Channel: Circulating Resistance in a Rural University Town. Community Literacy Journal 7.1 (September 2012): 111-33. Print. ---. Writing Democracy in the Engaged University: A CLiC White Paper May 2011. Retrieved June 15, 2011. Web. Carter, Shannon. John Carlos: Before Mexico City. Remixing Rural Texas: Local Texts, Global Contexts. Converging Literacies Center (CLiC). Video. March 2012. Web. Carter, Shannon and Kelly Dent. "East Texas Activism (1966-68): Locating the Literacy Scene through the Digital Humanities." College English, Special Issue on Rhetorical Historiography and the Digital Humanities (September 2013), Guest Edited by Jessica Enoch and David Gold. Invited. Carter, Shannon, and James H. Conrad. In Possession of Community: Toward a More Sustainable Local. College Composition and Communication 64.1 (2012): 82-106. Print. Carter, Shannon, Jennifer Jones, and Sunchai Hamcumpai. Beyond Territorial Disputes:Toward a Disciplined Interdisciplinarity in the Digital Humanities. Rhetoric and the Digital Humanities. Ed. Jim Ridolfo and William Hart-Davidson. U of Chicago P. Under contract. Coogan, David. Community Literacy as Civic Dialogue. Community Literacy Journal 1.1 (Fall 2006): 95-108. Web. Cushman, Ellen. The Struggle and The Tools: Oral and Literate Strategies in an Inner City Community. Albany: SUNY Press, 1998. Print. Corbett, Edward P.J. The Rhetoric of the Open Hand and the Rhetoric of the Closed Fist. College Composition and Communication 20.5 (1969): 288-96. Print. Donahue, Patricia and Gretchen Felsher Moon, eds. Local Histories: Reading the Archives of Composition. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007. Donehower, Kim, Charlotte Hogg, and Eileen Schnell. Rural Literacies. Southern Illinois UP, 2007. Print. Duffy, John. "Letters from the Fair City: A Rhetorical Conception of Literacy." CCC 56.2 (2004): 223-250. Print. Edbauer, Jennifer. Unframing Models of Public Distribution: From Rhetorical Situation to Rhetorical Ecologies. Rhetoric Society Quarterly. 35.4 (2008): 5-24. Print.

Flower, Linda. Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois Press, 2008. Print. Gee, James G. University President Papers, collection 2008.28, James G. Gee Library Special Collections, Texas A & M University-Commerce. Gold, David. Remapping Revisionist History. College Composition and Communication 64.1 (2012); 15-34, Print. Gold, David. Rhetoric at the Margins: Revising the History of Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1873-1947. Southern Illinois UP, 2008. Halladay, D. Whitney. Statement Before the Student Senate. D. Whitney Halladay, University President Papers, collection (Afro-American Affairs). James G. Gee Library, Department of Special Collections, Texas A&M University-Commerce, Texas. Hawk, Byron. College English as Network. College English 75. 4 (2013): 436-43. Print. Houck, D. W. (2010). Textual recovery, textual discovery: Returning to our past, imagining our future. In Parry-Giles, S. P., & Hogan, J. M. (Eds.). Handbook of rhetoric and public address (111-32). Walden, MA: Blackwell. Houck, D. W., & Dixon, D. E. Introduction: Recovering womens voices from the civil rights movement. In Houck, D. W., & Dixon, D. E. (Eds.). Women and the civil rights movement, 1954-1965 (pp. ix-xxvii). Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2009. Eagles, C. W. Toward new histories of the civil rights era." Journal of Southern History 66.4 (2000): 815-848. Jarratt, Susan C. Classics and Counterpublics in Nineteenth-Century Historically Black Colleges. College English 72.2 (Nov. 2009): 134-159. Print. Kate, Susan. Activist Rhetorics and American Higher Education, 1885-1937. Southern Illinois UP, 2001. Print. Lucas, Brad E. Oral Historys Turn: Archival Thinking and the Divine Views of the Interdialectic. Issues in Writing 17.1-2 (2007-2008): 25-49. ---. Radicals, Rhetoric, and the War: The University in the Wake of Kent State. New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Pennycook, Alastair. Language as a Local Practice. New York: Routledge, 2010. Print. Powell, Douglas Reichert. Critical Regionalism. Rice, Jenny. Distant Publics. Rivers, Nathaniel A., and Ryan P. Weber. Ecological, Pedagogical, Public Rhetoric. College Composition and Communication 63.2 (2011): 187-218. Print. Stowers, Carlton. Carlos Hits Prejudice: East Texas Sprinter May Join Boycott. Dallas News 3 Dec. 1967; B3. Tave, Joe. Interview with Shannon Carter and Kelly Dent. 27 Mar. 2013. James G. Gee Library, Department of Special Collections. Texas A&M University-Commerce, Texas. Forthcoming. Warner, Michael. Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books, 2005. Print. Wilkison, Debra. Eyewitness to Social Change: The Desegregation of East Texas State College. M.A. thesis, East Texas State University, 1990. Print. Wilkison, Kyle Editor, "James H. Conrad: The Making of an Oral Historian." The Sound Historian 12 (2009): 1-17. Wikison, Kyle and David Cullen, Eds. The Texas Left: The Radical Roots of Lone Star Liberalism. Texas A&M University Press, 2010.

Relevant Publications (etc) Publications Carter, Shannon, and James H. Conrad. In Possession of Community: Toward a More Sustainable Local. College Composition and Communication 64.1 (2012): 82-106. Print.

This article summarizes various applications of oral history interviews at local sites to represent the writing of underrepresented groups. The co-authors (a rhetorician and an archivist) discuss the important disciplinary implications for tending to the local, especially at sites where formal archives are hard to come by, offering three principles for sustaining the local by combining research design with archival development. Carter, Shannon. A Clear Channel: Circulating Resistance in a Rural University Town. Community Literacy Journal 7.1 (September 2012): 111-33. Print. This article offers an extended treatment of two social justice efforts in a rural university town as historical examples of civic engagement with contemporary implications for Writing Democracy and similar projects. The article begins with an analysis of local activism initiated by John Carlos in 1967 while he was still a student at our university and the year before his heroic, silent protest against racism with Tommie Smith at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. The author then turns to a linked effort five years later by local activist MacArthur Evans, a university student from Chicago. In 1973, Evans and other university students established the Norris Community Club (NCC) in partnership with residents of Norris, the historically segregated neighborhood, to provide what they called a clear channel of communication between Norris and city officials. Both were successful, albeit it in very different ways. The author uses a clear channel as both the object of study and interpretive lens to examine these local efforts and their many implications for today. Forthcoming Carter, Shannon and Kelly Dent. "East Texas Activism (1966-68): Locating the Literacy Scene through the Digital Humanities." College English, Special Issue on Rhetorical Historiography and the Digital Humanities (September 2013), Guest Edited by Jessica Enoch and David Gold. Invited. This article suggests ways the digital humanities can help researchers capture the local and global forces that interanimate local literacy scenes. As a concrete example, we offer Remixing Rural Texas and the way this digital tool works to capture a targeted literacy scene: the civil rights efforts of two African American students on a recently desegregated campus in 1967-1968. RRT features an 18-minute documentary about these efforts, remixed almost entirely from existing archival materials, and a data-source annotation tool that connects the local literacy scene to global events. Concludes with an extended treatment of local stakeholders and the way RRT enables more sustainable, reciprocal, and participatory partnerships with local communities. Carter, Shannon, Jennifer Jones, and Sunchai Hamcumpai. Beyond Territorial Disputes: Toward a Disciplined Interdisciplinarity in the Digital Humanities. Rhetoric and the Digital Humanities. Ed. Jim Ridolfo and William Hart-Davidson. U of Chicago P. Under contract. This chapter suggests the digital humanities is uniquely positioned to serve what Charles Bazerman calls "the disciplined interdisciplinarity of writing studies" (RTE, 2011), providing unprecedented access to multiple disciplines to answer our field's key questions about writing and writers. Identifies two DH approaches, insisting the most common one (DH as situation) is also the one least compatible with this objective; challenges rhetoric and composition to instead approach DH as a situation enabling Bazerman's disciplined interdisciplinary. Concludes with an extended treatment of their NEH ODH-funded project "Remixing Rural Texas" as a concrete example of the latter approach.

Digital Humanities Project Remixing Rural Texas: Local Texts, Global Contexts url: <http://faculty.tamuc.edu/rrt/> White Paper available at http://www.shannoncarter.info

Remixing Rural Texas: Local Texts, Global Contexts demonstrates a visualization tool for archival research on local, underrepresented texts by writers from groups historically excluded from public spaces. The RRT prototype consists of two components: (1) a documentary about student activism for racial justice in a rural university town (1967-1968), remixed almost entirely from archival materials, and (2) a data source annotation tool that foregrounds relevant geographical and temporal elements as well as the original context of all source materials. The project makes strategic use of oral history interviews for the recovery, interpretation, preservation, and delivery of forgotten, contested, or otherwise underrepresented stories about local activism for racial justice. Throughout, RRT illustrates concrete ways historically marginalized populations in under-resourced, understudied areas can change our understanding of rhetoric's past. Documentaries Carter, Shannon. John Carlos: Before Mexico City. Remixing Rural Texas: Local Texts, Global Contexts. Converging Literacies Center (CLiC). Video. Mar. 2013. Web. 3 May 2013. [10 min.] url: <http://www.youtube.com/remixingruraltexas> and <http://faculty.tamuc.edu/rrt/localglobal.html> John Carlos is best known for his part in the Silent Protest alongside fellow medalist Tommie Smith at the Mexico City Olympics in 1968. This video contextualizes that global rhetorical event by describing what helped lead to this historic moment. In other words, what happened BEFORE Mexico City? Using archival materials, the video helps explain what the protest was designed to do and how it was interpreted, how he got involved with the Olympic Project for Human Rights, calls for the boycott, the conditions of racism that his actions responded to, his childhood in Harlem, his experiences as a young college student on a recently desegregated campus in Texas, and how he learned to use his athletic talents to promote social justice. Video originally created to serve a Shannon Carter's introduction for John Carlos's Featured Session at CCCC 2013 entitled "The Silent Protest: Open Hands, Closed Fists, and Composition's Political Turn," which Carter helped bring to her field's flagship conference based on her extensive work with Carlos and other activists with links to her university (see session description at http://www.ncte.org/cccc/conv/speakers#Carlos). To listen to Carlos's presentation at this event, check out Episode 8 of This Rhetorical Life (http://thisrhetoricallife.syr.edu/episode-8-asilent-protest-with-john-carlos/). Credits: Created by Shannon Carter, with much help from research team especially Adam Sparks (video editing). Video builds directly from earlier work by Jennifer Jones, Kelly Dent, and Sunchai Hamcumpai. For a list of artifacts included in the remix itself, as well as scholarship referenced, check out "Before Mexico: Credits and Creative Rights" at http://raceinthedh.wordpress.com). Carter, Shannon. A Clear Channel. Remixing Rural Texas: Local Texts, Global Contexts. Converging Literacies Center (CLiC). Video. Aug. 2012. Web. 2 Aug. 2012. [18 min.] url: <http://www.youtube.com/remixingruraltexas> and <http://faculty.tamuc.edu/rrt/remix.html> Synopsis: documentary about East Texas activism in 1967-1968, remixed from primary source materials (oral histories, images, video), native audio and video, and a range of scholarly and contemporary texts. This narrative remixes collective memories of 1968 drawn from existing source materials to explore attempts by local African American student activists in a newly desegregated university to communicate about race in ways that promote social justice during one of the most turbulent years in our nation's history. Credits: Writer, Shannon Carter; Researchers, Kelly Dent, Jennifer Jones; Video Editor, Adam Sparks; Production Assistance, Sunchai Hamcumpai and Adam Sparks; Narrator, Shannon Carter. Also features John Carlos, Joe Tave, Belford Page, and other local African American students and citizens. In Development Still Searching (16:04 minute) documentary remix about desegregation at East Texas State University, drawing from primary source materials (oral histories, images, video), native audio and video, and a range of scholarly and

contemporary texts Synopsis: Remixed almost entirely from existing scholarly and primary source materials, this video builds upon a first-person account of archival research from the perspective of Jamar Mosley, an African American student athlete struggling to find images of other student athletes in the historic photos of this campus. His assignment was a remix of existing artifacts designed to tell a meaningful, purposeful, personally relevant, locally significant story (see assignment description at Resources). The story Mosley told for this assignment in an undergraduate writing course taught by Carter (PI) articulates through images and text the "absent presence" of race Catherine Prendergast has identified common in most any composition classroom. Mosley's original remix ("I Searched for Myself") inspired the current one ("Still Searching"). The latter version was created for this larger digital humanities project about desegregation in region. "Still Searching" expands Mosley's narrative through a wide range of scholarly and primary source materials to help explain why he was unable to find representations of African American athletes in the local history collections earlier than 1964, the year desegregation reached this campus--and why that absent presence still matters. A rough-cut of the 16-minute long video is available upon request, revisions are currently under construction and will be available to the public shortly. Until then, please see the trailer either with or without annotations. Credits: Writers, Shannon Carter, with Jennifer Jones and Kelly Dent; Video Editor, Adam Sparks and Christina Clay; Production Assistance, Sunchai Hamcumpai; Narrator, Noah Nelson. Also features Ivory Moore, McArthur Evans, Larry Matthis, Allen Hallmark, Opal Pannell, Billy Reed, Joe Tave, and other area African American citizens and students.

A Clear Channel: Part II is currently in development. This 10-minute remix will focus on an activist group that builds upon the successes of ASSET, extending related benefits to residents of Norris, the historically segregated neighborhood in town (see Carter, A Clear Channel). The second part of this brief documentary will feature the Norris Community Club (NCC), a partnership established in 1973 between university students and local African American citizens to represent Norris, the historically segregated neighborhood in a rural university town. Focuses on NCCs key accomplishments and challenges, especially with respect to Ivory Moores role as a founding member and liaison to both the city and the university. Narrative unfolds through primary source materials (oral histories, images, video), native audio and video, and a range of scholarly and contemporary texts. Credits: Writers, Shannon Carter, with Jennifer Jones and Kelly Dent; Video Editor, Adam Sparks; Production Assistance, Sunchai Hamcumpai; Narrator, Noah Nelson. Also features Ivory Moore, McArthur Evans, Larry Matthis, Allen Hallmark, Opal Pannell, Billy Reed, Joe Tave, and other area African American citizens and students