Memphis in Missouri: Movements that Molded America

Abstract

I perused the audio collections in the Crossroads Archive and discovered the short LeMoyne Owen's reflections on the Memphis Sanitation Strike. Fascinated, I researched the strike and found many parallels between the events of 1968 and an event I was more familiar with, the Ferguson unrest of 2014. I then did further research, exploring how the media's coverage of Ferguson was handled in contrast with the media coverage of the Sanitation Strike, reading about Black Lives Matter, and checking my facts regarding the development and achievements of the Civil Rights Movement. I then wrote a script that compared and contrasted the two protests, finishing the narrative with thoughts on how the media can provide better coverage and reconfirming the power of economic leverage as a method of protest to institutional racism. I recorded the script myself on garageband, editing out stutters, stumbles and hesitations. Using soundbites from the eMoyne reflections, oral histories, and a speech by Martin Luther King, Jr., I interspersed short audio clips with my recording to give it gravitas. I faded the audio in and out of each clip so the transitions were less jarring, saved the project, and converted it into an mp3. The majority of the time for this project was spent researching the topics, collecting sources, and then narrowing the information down to a fifteen minute segment. The script took three days, two to write it and another day to edit it. The recording itself and audio editing took a final two days.