Carbondale, IL — Throughout the mid-’60s, Jane Adams and D. Gorton campaigned tirelessly for civil rights in the South. Now a professor of anthropology at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale (SIUC), Adams and her husband D. Gorton, a professional photographer, recently collaborated on a video that profiles four very different veterans of the race wars. “Race: Mississippi” took shape on the couple’s Power Mac systems using Final Cut Pro. The 23-minute program has become the centerpiece of Adams’ “America’s Diverse Cultures” class at SIUC, and helps modern-day students grasp the importance of this volatile and critical time in American history.

Adams and Gorton have long been passionate about the need for racial equality. Gorton, a native of Greenville, MS, was the only white Mississippian to join the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the leading Southern student organization in the 1960s civil rights movement. Eventually marrying and settling in Illinois, Gorton and Adams never lost their zeal for addressing societal inequities.

During the summer of 2000, the pair embarked on a research project that would reexamine the civil rights era in Mississippi. Gorton and Adams brought along still and video cameras as well as their Power Mac computers with Final Cut Pro to capture their material. The resulting scenes are at times eerie, anger inducing, and inspirational, but always compelling.

“We believe that seeing and hearing our subjects adds a richness and complexity to their testimony,” Adams says. “We were also aware that many of the veterans of the southern movement were aging, and their voices were rapidly being lost. But with the help of digital video and tools like Final Cut Pro, we were able to create a piece that has provided the basis for lively and thoughtful discussion of the complexities of race, and of the civil rights era.”

Four Very Different Perspectives
“Race: Mississippi” opens with an educated male’s Southern drawl speaking over the titles. While viewers naturally imagine the narrator to be a member of the white landed gentry, they are soon surprised to find that the voice belongs to Hoover Lee, a Chinese-American grocer. Raised in the Delta, Lee relates his experiences growing up as a person of color in the South. His wife, Freeda, also recalls her days as the first non-white student at Mississippi State College for Women, now known as Mississippi University for Women.

Adams and Gorton also interviewed Horace Harned, formerly a Mississippi state legislator and still an unrepentant white supremacist, and Betty Furniss, a staunch separatist who also founded an all-white private school. Rounding out the video are comments from Alyene Quinn, a cherished leader of the civil rights movement in Mississippi.

Notes Adams: “We knew Alyene when she owned a café during the ‘60s. She died in the summer of 2001, so we were really lucky to get her memories down on tape! We realized the various ways that all of these people defined race, and their experience of the color line, would be useful — even electrifying — in a course I had designed for our undergraduate core curriculum.”

Production Hits the Road
Gorton and Adams conducted their interviews in makeshift “studios” set up in motel conference rooms near their subjects’ homes, using a chroma-key (green-screen) background and special lighting to attain the standards needed for streaming video. All footage was shot with a Canon GL1 camera with a Rover Beachtek XLR adapter and two Sony lavalier microphones, and a JVC GY-DV500 DV Camcorder with an Audiotechnica shotgun mike and an additional Sony lavalier.

The pair kept log sheets of each day’s interviews and footage, as well as all “B-roll” (shots of various locales that help establish the look and feel of the video). Each evening, Adams and Gorton reviewed that day’s work.