The stories and archives shared here have been gathered from many sources. Currently, much of the content comes from the dissertation and book research of Heidi L. Dodson, who grew up in Sikeston, Missouri. This includes oral history interviews, some of which Dodson did as a graduate student while participating in a project called Breaking New Ground: A History of African American Farm Owners Since the Civil War. This NEH-funded project was led by historians Dr. Adrienne Petty and Dr. Mark Schulz.  

Most archival materials are in the public domain or are available for non-commercial use through institutions like the Library of Congress. Permission to use or quote from the Breaking New Ground interviews must be obtained from the Southern Oral History Program at the University of North Carolina. Copyright and use information is listed for each item. 

The photograph in the banner was taken by Jesse McKinley Schall for their MA thesis, The Negro in New Madrid County, completed in 1930. The original photo is labeled "Negro School, Portageville."

Heidi Dodson was most recently a postdoctoral scholar at the Penn State Humanities Institute.  She will be starting a new position as a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she will work on the Oklahoma Black Homesteader Project. Previously she was also a CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Scholarship at the University at Buffalo and Oral History Scholar-in-Residence at the Marian Cheek Jackson Center for Saving and Making History in Chapel Hill, NC. She completed her Ph.D. in history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2016.