By Jim Beaugez

Special to The Post

In the lead-up to Vicksburg’s bicentennial in 2025, a new project called Vicksburg Voices will reach into the city’s past to tell stories of the people who helped shape its present. 

Vicksburg Voices is the local focus of a $150,000 grant recently awarded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The funding is part of the organization’s Culture of Health Prize Alumni Storytelling Cohort, a national initiative supported in Warren County by Shape Up Mississippi, the city of Vicksburg, and United Way of West Central Mississippi.

“This initiative will allow both residents and visitors to celebrate our history while also questioning and deepening our understanding of it,” says Linda Fondren, executive director of the Catfish Row Museum and Shape Up Mississippi.

Fondren said the series will focus on themes such as health and wellness, economic empowerment, cultural heritage, and education, including the history of the Rosenwald Schools, where young African Americans were able to gain a more rigorous education than was widely available to them in the early 20th century.

Established by philanthropist Julius Rosenwald and educator and activist Booker T. Washington to raise the standard of education in Black communities, more than 5,000 Rosenwald Schools were built across 15 states.

Mississippi had the second-largest number of Rosenwald Schools, and Warren County native and educator John H. Culkin secured funding to build more than 20 schools while serving as the county’s superintendent of education in 1918. The Rosa A. Temple High School, a segregation-era institution, will also be featured in the series.

Intergenerational storytelling workshops will bring together seniors and young people to share their stories in a public setting, with a goal of combining them to create a “knowledge tree” sculpture where the leaves are engraved with quotes from the participants. 

“Placing the knowledge tree in one of our city parks will help everyone appreciate how far we’ve come over the past 200 years,” Fondren said.

Another project will involve working with the Vicksburg National Military Park to share stories of Peter Crosby, the first African American sheriff elected in Warren County, as well as the role the U.S. Colored Troops played in Vicksburg’s history. These and other remembrances will be shared through a memorial marker and a series of interpretive signs.

Vicksburg Mayor George Flaggs — who learned to read and write in part by memorizing historical plaques in the park so he could tell his parents the stories — said it is incumbent upon current citizens to tell the “missing parts” of the city’s history, such as the role of the Black soldiers during the siege of Vicksburg in the Civil War.

“What I want is to be able to tell the whole story and tell the truth about everything involved in the last 200 years,” Flaggs said. “So therefore I can put the past behind me and move forward, and hopefully I can make this place a better place and give everybody a pathway forward.”

The United Way of West Central Mississippi, which supports 15 area nonprofits targeting issues in the areas of health, financial stability, education and support services, is on board, as well.

“The United Way can serve as the voice for our community and/or the connecting link between the individuals in our community who work on the front line to address the challenges affecting the health determinants of our community,” said Executive Director Michele Connelly.

“With this funding, we’ll be able to engage more community members in storytelling initiatives, allowing their voices to be heard and their experiences to be shared,” Fondren said. “This is crucial because it helps us all understand the challenges we face and the progress we’re making together.”