A rough cut of NOPA member David Rae Morris’ “Yazoo Revisited,” a history of school desegregation and civil rights in Yazoo City, Miss, will be shown at the Alliance’s regular members meeting this Wednesday, July 25.
Morris’ Yazoo City project was partially funded by a Mississippi Humanities Council grant, applied for via the Photo Alliance.
The setting of “Yazoo Revisited,” is the hometown of Morris’ father, the late author and onetime Harper’s Magazine editor Willie Morris. The elder Morris wrote extensively about Yazoo City in works including his memoir “North Toward Home.” Another of his books, 1972’s “Yazoo: Integration in a Deep Southern Town,” concerned the desegregation of the town’s schools.
It was not his father’s writing per se that sparked the son’s project, however, but former Miss. Gov. Haley Barbour’s news-making comments in 2010 about the town’s Civil Rights Era history. More specifically, Barbour told the conservative Weekly Standard magazine that he did remember the era as being so bad for race relations.
The NOPA meeting will be held from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. on Wednesday at the Alliance gallery, located 1111 St. Mary Street in New Orleans.