On November 1, 2024 for the second anniversary of the Terry Buffington Foundation we were excited to announce another piece from the Terry Buffington Papers, the Eddie Brooks Tapes Stage Reading at Kenworthy PAC in Moscow Idaho.
Cultural Anthropologist Terry Buffington interviewed Eddie Brooks on November 18, 2010, in Tupelo Mississippi where Brooks gives a fascinating and powerful account of his involvement in the civil rights movement of the 1960s as a teenager.
In 1964 Eddie Brooks was a young African American teenager, age 17 who was born in the Mississippi Delta town of Marks, but grew up on the southside of Chicago. That same year Brooks was a high school student enrolled in the City of Chicago Public School system and became a member of the Civil Rights Movement, student organization, Friends of SNCC (Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee) who had a chapter at the University of Chicago.
During the 1964 Freedom Summer Campaign Brooks left Chicago and traveled to Mississippi to join SNCC where he became a Freedom Summer SNCC field organizer and a Freedom Summer teacher who worked and lived in West Point, Mississippi, Terry Buffington’s hometown.
Freedom Summer, or the Mississippi Summer Project, was a 1964 voter registration drive to increase the number of registered Black voters in Mississippi. Over 700 mostly white volunteers joined the blacks in Mississippi to fight against voter intimidation and discrimination at the poll.
Humanities Scholar Terry Buffington and Son, Kwasi Buffington performed the stage reading of the Eddie Brooks Tapes, from the Terry Buffington Papers 1952-2014.
Musical Act – Stephanie Anne Johnson https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XW8R7E3PWE&t=1s
Visual Artist – Abigail Nnaji https://www.abigailnnaji.com/
Special thanks to our sponsors and donors:
Inatai Foundation https://inatai.org/
CoCo’s Essentials https://www.cocosessentials.net/
Monarch Motel https://www.moscowmonarch.com/
Pullman ReMax https://www.remax.com/real-estate-agents/pullman-wa
Kenworthy PAC https://www.kenworthy.org/
