Fast Food Race Rallies

Using a website to host our project was a fascinating experience. We feel that it let us portray the information in a way that a paper could not, as we were able to present our little tidbits of history in their original form. Hearing the audio, especially in context with text and photos about the events, is an entirely different (and more emotional) statement that we believe helps us connect with the past a little better. The website makes our topic just a little more fun and interesting, as we agreed that staring at page after page of black-on-white words can get quite tedious after a while. We instead engage the senses more—sights and sounds—rather than just the thoughts and imagination one must use when reading an essay.

 

As our topic expanded, so did our website. What had originally been planned as a history of a single event at a Krystal’s with a little bit of audio thrown in developed into an almost interactive experience. Now, audio fits in with words we wrote and quoted directly from the key players in the movement here in Atlanta. Images take you to videos where you can see the expressions and concerns of people like James Foreman and Ivan Allen Jr, and hear the way they speak and stress those things that are important to them. Their raw emotions have been preserved through the decades, and attempting to translate them to written word would be a crime.

 

Beyond being really fun, the website also let us skirt around some legal issues. It sounds cool and dangerous, but really, MARBL is just overprotective. If we had, for example, made a movie, we would have had to go to great lengths to get rights to things, download from strange websites, and probably fill out a lot more paperwork at the library. This way, video clips can be linked out to their original host site, copyrights can be maintained, and photos that we may or may not be allowed to use can stay protected (and keep us out of trouble). Our audio is not legal obtained either (Sara managed to befriend one of the MARBL librarians who gave us a copy), but it was such a necessary component to the telling of this story that we had to get our hands on it somehow. We wish that we had been able to use more of it, but a lot of it had to do with another rally, at a hotel, that was not relevant to our project; also, Anneliese's Python program was being slow and she was getting really tired of waiting on it to cut the audio into clips.

 

All in all, we found the research fascinating, as it is an extremely important series of events, occurring right at the heart of the Civil Rights Movement, and yet we had never heard of it before Sara spoke with the folks at MARBL. This was a huge learning experience for us, and we hope that you got something out of it as well!

 

Anneliese Holland and Sara Duvall