Two Ole Miss documentary studies students conduct an interview on location for a project. A new gift from UM alumnus Berkley Hudson will allow the Center for the Study of Southern Culture to bring professional documentarians to campus to work with students. Submitted photo
Alumnus Berkley Hudson provides resources for visiting documentarians
by Tina H. Hahn
Using documentary studies to train the next generation of storytellers holds such importance to Berkley Hudson that he has gifted the University of Mississippi an endowment to bring visiting documentarians to campus.
Hudson, an Ole Miss alumnus and associate professor emeritus of the University of Missouri School of Journalism, has given $60,000 to enable the UM Center for the Study of Southern Culture to invite documentarians to work with students.
“In a 21st-century world now awash in a torrent of visual images, this project serves as a template for anyone interested in their own family stories and community stories, regardless of where they live,” Hudson said.
“It’s a template for how to look, slow down and discover what visual images can teach us – researchers, students or ordinary citizens. And it’s a template for conversations with our grandparents, our children and our neighbors about the role that photographs play in documenting our lives.
“I hope my gift inspires students with their own projects. In many ways, my project started when I was a student at the University of Mississippi, studying everything I could about the American South.”
His project of four decades has involved preserving, researching, exhibiting and publishing the Jim Crow-era photographs of Columbus photographer O.N. Pruitt.
Pruitt once photographed Hudson, a Columbus native, and his family. Hudson and four boyhood friends – Jim Carnes, David Gooch, Mark Gooch, and Birney Imes – acquired Pruitt’s 142,000 negatives in 1987. They transferred them for safekeeping in 2005 to one of the nation’s foremost repositories of the American South, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill‘s Southern Historical Collection.
Hudson created a National Endowment for Humanities traveling photographic exhibition, which is slated to come to the University Museum in 2027, and the companion book, “O.N. Pruitt’s Possum Town: Photographing Trouble and Resilience in the American South,” published by UNC Press in partnership with Duke University‘s Center for Documentary Studies.
“I want students to realize that photographs can play a very important role in unlocking stories about who we are and who we have become,” Hudson said. “Documentarians try to explain the world around us, where we’ve been and where we’re going.
“I also hope my gift will signify the importance of funding and support for the humanities broadly and UM’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture specifically. The center long has been a powerhouse incubator. Its alumni travel the world, telling stories that need to be told about the American South.”
Katie McKee, the center’s director, expressed gratitude for Hudson’s support.
“Professor Hudson is an accomplished documentarian in his own right, and even before he visited the university as part of the SouthTalks lecture series to discuss his ‘O.N. Pruitt’s Possum Town,’ we were admirers of his work,” McKee said. “Thanks to his generosity, we will now have the resources to bring students into close and regular contact with professional practitioners of the documentary arts, exposing them to a wide range of models for their own storytelling.”
The emeritus professor and journalist earned a bachelor’s degree from Ole Miss before obtaining a master’s degree from Columbia University and a doctorate from North Carolina.
“Each university holds a special place in my heart,” he said. “But I especially treasure my long-standing connections with the Center for the Study of Southern Culture.
Before completing his doctorate in mass communication and folklore in 2003, Hudson was a journalist for 25 years, including at the Los Angeles Times. He wrote articles about the center’s work for the Times and for the Providence Journal in Rhode Island.
He also wrote four entries for two of the center’s projects: The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture and the Mississippi Encyclopedia.
Hudson lives in Chapel Hill with his wife, storyteller Milbre Burch.
To make a gift to the Dr. Berkley Hudson Visiting Documentarian Endowment, send a check, with the fund’s name written in the memo line, to the University of Mississippi Foundation at 406 University Ave., Oxford, MS 38655, or gifts can be made online here.
