Narrating Katrina Through Oral History
In the Fall of 2005, with special funding from the Provost, the Gore Center embarked on a project to record the experiences of people who evacuated the Gulf Coast region and came to Middle Tennessee and people from Middle Tennessee who served as volunteer responders.
To date, student volunteers and Gore Center staff have interviewed 53 people. Of these, eighteen were evacuees (six from Mississippi and twelve from Louisiana), five provided shelter for family members who were evacuees, one was a Murfreesboro resident attending Xavier University in New Orleans, one was a Mississippi Gulf Coast native attending graduate school at MTSU, and 28 were volunteer responders. Among the volunteer responders were MTSU staff and students, students at Middle Tennessee Christian School, the director of the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency, the Director of Disaster Relief for the Middle Tennessee Conference of the United Methodist Church, the Chief Executive Officer of the American Association for State and Local History, National Guard members, and a veterinary technician who volunteered at an animal shelter near the Mississippi Gulf Coast.
The Gore Center has signed on as an official partner with the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, sponsored by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, the Smithsonian Institution, and the University of New Orleans. We are in the process of digitizing our recordings and transcripts and submitting them to the HDMB for inclusion on their web site (http://www.hurricanearchive.org).
If you know of anyone who should be interviewed for this project, please contact Dr. Lisa Pruitt at lpruitt@mtsu.edu or Betty Rowland at browland@mtsu.edu, or call 898-2632.