BAY ST. LOUIS, Miss. — These voices “speak through time and space,” he promises, and it is true. They penetrate with the authority of earned perspective.

An oral historian named Louis Kyriakoudes gives us a true gift one mild night in February, Black History Month. And he let others do most of the talking.

In this town’s library, Kyriakoudes shares a fraction of the 450 oral histories that the University of Southern Mississippi has collected since 1971, in some cases capturing the vocal essence of civil-rights veterans stilled forever. You can hear them all for yourself on podcasts called Mississippi Moments, a partnership between the state’s public radio, USM’s Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage and the Mississippi Humanities Council.

Something about hearing actual voices is powerful stuff. People sometimes lie, but voices don’t. Imagine never having heard Kennedy’s Boston brogue, Roosevelt’s patrician patterns or Barbara Jordan’s god-like timbre. Voices make history real.

These particular voices hold no rancor, no bitterness, and sadly remind us that the truest thing William Faulkner ever uttered was this: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Lee Spearman of Bay Springs grew up in segregated Mississippi and matter-of-factly explains that during his youth nobody bothered to prosecute white men who killed blacks.

It was best for the perpetrators not to get caught, he allows, but if you killed a black man, “he deserved to be dead.”

The voice of Fannie Lou Hamer, the hymn-singing sharecropper who famously was “sick and tired of being sick and tired,” describes evocatively the life of Sunflower County day laborers who didn’t know until outsiders told them that they had the right to vote.

“If they had a radio, they’d be too tired (at night) to play it …”

When Fannie Lou Hamer failed at her first attempt at voter registration, her boss the plantation owner demanded she make no more such efforts. “I didn’t go down there to register for you,” she tells him. “I went to register for myself.”

It might have been easier for these activists to leave, to travel to the North, at least depart the Mississippi cotton fields for Memphis. But Unita Blackwell, who eventually became the first black female mayor in Mississippi, explains in simple language and eloquent voice: “We stuck it out. I love the South. I love the truth.”

James Meredith, who dared to integrate Ole Miss after the first man who tried was carted off to the state insane asylum, in a few words shares his battle strategy: “I did all my communicating … through the media. I ain’t never talked to the enemy without the public as a witness.” I loved that. The public as a witness. It explains the need for newspapers in five words.

There’s been a lot of back and forth about Hollywood’s loose history in the movie “Selma.” Well, here you hear directly from the principals, not from the academics or the movie-makers or through any other muffler. You hear from those who made the history that may be debated, fictionalized, embellished, but, with such efforts, never forgotten.

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Rheta Grimsley Johnson most recent book is “Hank Hung the Moon … And Warmed Our Cold, Cold Hearts.” Comments are welcomed at rhetagrimsley@aol.com.