Vicksburg has a strong, singular presence at the nation’s premier archives, The Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, D.C.
It happened 10 years ago —in 2007 — when Vicksburg’s own Dr. Bettye Gardner arranged through The Jacqueline House a series of interviews with many who had been part of Freedom Summer in 1964.
The great value to those taking part was their lives and stories would be on record, a true oral history in the tradition of the griot, the African storyteller, who knows and hands down family history.
And all the participants received a compact disc of their own interviews to keep.
That initiative, called Storycorps Griot, had encompassed the nation in places like Harlem, Selma, and here.
Black families here had been strong and accomplished since the end of the Civil War. And especially in the early 20th century, blacks were the major economic force in Vicksburg with businesses, banks, and land ownership, which they themselves documented in a self-published work called Leading Afro Americans of Vicksburg, Mississippi (1908).
In the painful but proud memory of Rosa Griffin for her brother who finally came home from Korea 55 years after he’d gone, or in the odyssey of Lucia Hawkins, by herself going to New York City when she was just 13 years old, the stories of African Americans in Vicksburg comprise a powerful telling.
This past week, I happened across an opinion piece in The New York Times, which referenced these words of Guy Debord 50 years ago:  “All that once was directly lived has become mere representation.”
Life isn’t lived anymore, he said; it’s simply observed. His argument 50 years ago was that we were addicted to images. The Vicksburg voices at the Smithsonian counter that argument though.
When Bessie Richardson and Alfred Dillard, Jr. were married, there was no spectacle. They were both hard-working people. So they met at the Court House on their lunch hour and were married, then went back to work. It lasted.
So determined was she to become educated herself and a model to her children, she went every Saturday to Alcorn once-a-week to earn her bachelor’s degree. It took nearly eight full years.
And after that, she earned both her master’s and specialist’s degrees. It was something she did.
Lucia Hawkins, now in her 90s, became a genuine diva who debuted at Carnegie Hall, performed for presidents, and starred on Broadway. And when her husband, an off-duty New York cop, died trying to break up a fight, she survived and came back home without a pension because he had been off-duty. All of these things she did.
Henry Hunter was active during Freedom Summer in 1964 when he was part of many forays like the one when he was stopped by a cop at what is now the intersection of Highway 80 and 27, that brightly-lit and developed place that was then all darkness and trees.
The stories are endless, full of pride, and heroic.
And there are about 30 in all.

Yolande Robbins is a community correspondent for The Vicksburg Post. You may reach her at yolanderobbins@fastmail.com.