Remixing Rural Texas

Remix

A Clear Channel: Part I is a short (18:16 minute) documentary about East Texas activism in 1967-1968, remixed from primary source materials (oral histories, images, video), native audio and video, and a range of scholarly and contemporary texts.

Synopsis: A brief documentary about the complexity of communicating about race relations in America, drawing attention to this this issue as it played out in one local context (a rural university town) at a particularly complex time (after 1964, as the first African American students set foot on this campus that had been segregated since 1889) and featuring two student activists and their local efforts to enact change: John Carlos (ETSU, 1966-1967), a Harlem native best known for his part in the Silent Protest alongside fellow medalist Tommie Smith at the Mexico City Olympics in 1968, and Joe Tave ETSU 1965-1969), a political science major from one of the area’s segregated communities who helped establish a remarkably effective student advocacy group in 1968 (Afro-American Student Society of East Texas), ushering in unprecedented change across the campus and the community.

This narrative remixes collective memories of 1968 drawn from existing source materials to explore attempts by local African American student activists in a newly desegregated university to communicate about race in ways that promote social justice during one of the most turbulent years in our nation's history.

Credits: Writer, Shannon Carter; Researchers, Kelly Dent, Jennifer Jones; Video Editor, Adam Sparks; Production Assistance, Sunchai Hamcumpai and Adam Sparks; Narrator, Shannon Carter. Also features John Carlos, Joe Tave, Belford Page, and other local African American students and citizens.

The Archives, Remixed

By “remix” we mean a narrative sequence established by stitching together artifacts originally created for other purposes. The stories are those shaping our interpretations of local texts (ASSET’s “Declaration of Rights ,” for example). The artifacts include the images, documents, newspaper articles, correspondence, oral histories, and other relevant items from the university archives combined with archival and public domain materials housed elsewhere and, more often than not, the personal archives donated by local citizens.

The Local Literacy Scene

When John Carlos and Joe Tave arrived at East Texas State University (ET), the community had just begun the process of desegregation. Jim Crow’s impact remained strikingly present in everyday life across this sparsely populated area an hour east of Dallas, just as it did most everywhere across the American South at that time. Continue reading...

The Remix, Deconstructed

The remix offers the initial layers of the story. However, the narrative choices we made when organizing the archival materials necessarily feature only part of the story told. The data-source annotation framework expands the story much further than is possible in the remix alone.