Access Granted, Perspectives Denied: Challenges to Telling the Stories of Desegregation in Southern Educational Institutions through Archival Data

Primary sources are at the heart of historical research, and in this age of digitized collections, accessing heretofore hard-to-find sources is easier than ever…except, as our panelists discovered, when one is researching institutional responses to racism. In the first part of the session, each of the presenters will share their experiences researching histories of school desegregation in the South. In the last part of the session, we will demonstrate, using one example (i.e., primary sources related to Autherine Lucy Foster, the first African American woman to attend the University of Alabama in 1956), how archival research can be used in the classroom to address current critical social justice issues.