A History of Accomplishment
Throughout its history the Southern Humanities Media Fund has supported promising
programs that address critical issues for Southern culture and American society
at large. The SHMF – which is supported by the state humanities councils of Arkansas, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia – usually awards grants in the early stages of production, lending
momentum to a project’s development through both our endorsement and funding.
A majority of the media programs we support are nationally aired and many have
received special honors and awards.
Among SHMF projects recently presented by PBS are American Creole: New Orleans Reunion (2005), which follows New Orleans' cultural rebirth through the steps of a rising star of jazz who finds his sidemen scattered by Katrina, his
flooded-out Mom sleeping on his couch, and his 8-year-old grandson clamoring to
join the band; Scottsboro: An American
Tragedy (1996) , the story of the struggle of five innocent young men for their lives
and the landmark legal battle that divided Americans along racial, political,
and geographic lines; Stranger With A Camera (1995), which premiered at the 2000
Sundance Film Festival, a reflexive program that explores the factual and cultural
circumstances surrounding the 1967 murder of Canadian filmmaker Hugh O’Connor
by landlord Hobart Ison in Letcher County, Kentucky; Settin’ the Woods
on Fire (1994), the story of the life and times of firebrand politician George Wallace,
feared as a racist demagogue, respected as a politician who spoke his mind –
winner of the Special Jury Award at the Sundance Film Festival, named Best Television
Documentary Script by the Writer’s Guild of America, and given a Golden Gate
Award at the San Francisco Film Festival.
Celebrating its seventeenth year, SHMF has granted over two million dollars to underwrite fifty-seven media
projects. Among the first projects we sponsored was Freedom
on My Mind, a feature-length film on the 1961-’64
Mississippi Voter Registration Project that would go on to
win the Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary at the Sundance
Film Festival (1994). Freedom also won the Erik Barnouw
Award of the Organization of American Historians (1995) and
was nominated for a 1994 Academy Award.
In its second year, the Fund supported Saturday Night, Sunday Morning,
a one-hour film on evangelical preacher and blues singer Gatemouth Moore; this
program received top honors at the American Film and Video Festival and at the
San Francisco and Chicago international festivals. Also receiving major SHMF support
was At the River I Stand, which focused on the Memphis sanitation strike
of 1968 – the event that culminated in the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther
King, Jr. Nationally aired on PBS and named Best Documentary at the Sinking Creek
Film Celebration, this film became the first Media Fund project to receive the
Erik Barnouw Award (1994).
More recently, Public Radio International broadcast an SHMF-supported radio
series, Remembering Slavery, featuring WPA recordings of ex-slaves discussing
their personal experience of slavery and emancipation. Tell About the South,
a three-part series on the history of modern Southern literature, was nominated
Best Documentary Series by the International Documentary Association. PBS nationally
presented Fund-supported Oh Freedom After While, which focused on the leader
of an extraordinary 1939 roadside demonstration by Missouri Bootheel sharecroppers.
A Faulkner Radio Centennial, a three-part SHMF radio series featuring dramatizations
and interviews, brought the writer’s short stories to a national public radio
audience. And Raise the Dead, an SHMF-sponsored program on the life and
community of a Southern Pentecostal minister, was named Best Independent Film
at the 1999 New England Film Festival.
Among forthcoming SHMF-funded productions are video projects on the legacy
of the Nat Turner rebellion of 1831, the cultural significance of stew-making
in communities throughout the South, the story of Nashville music-making as seen
through the eyes of the men and women who write the songs, the changing landscape
and society of Appalachia from prehistoric times to the present, the history of
African Americans and their struggle to sustain and enfranchise their communities
during the era of Jim Crow, and a study of social dynamics in an economically
depressed Tennessee community working to come to terms with an influx of migrant
laborers.
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