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    Join MTSU at City’s Juneteenth Celebration at Bradley Academy Museum 

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    A third grade class at Murfreesboro's Bradley Academy, circa 1941, stand with their teacher outside the building on Academy Street in this photo from the Bradley Academy Museum and Cultural Center collection. Bradley Academy was Rutherford County’s first school, opened in 1811 and including President James K. Polk among its pre-Civil War alumni. In 1884 it became the county’s first school for African American students and served children until 1955. In the 1990s, former students, teachers and other supporters helped restored the building from its decades of use as a maintenance building into the Bradley Academy Museum and Cultural Center. (photo courtesy of James Harding, the Center for Historic Preservation at MTSU and the Albert Gore Research Center from the Bradley Academy Museum and Cultural Center Digitization Project)

    Murfreesboro, Tenn.—MTSU will be helping Murfreesboro and Rutherford County mark Juneteenth in a special way, media friends: by offering community neighbors a chance to preserve and share their family’s stories as part of a wonderful new effort, the Middle Tennessee African American Oral History Project.

    This yearlong endeavor, funded as part of a new grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities shared among  our College of Liberal Arts, aims to “preserve family genealogy, record one’s relationship with their families, with their communities, and with the era in which they live,” according to Jason McGowan of our Albert Gore Research Center.

    McGowan is coordinating the project and will be on hand on Saturday, June 18, at theBradley Academy Museum and Cultural Center for Murfreesboro’s Juneteenth celebration to answer questions, distribute information and put guests at ease while he helps arrange to record their stories.

    More details about the oral history project are included in the story below. You also can download multiple images to accompany it at https://www.dropbox.com/sh/upw8x29fawj4y4x/AACB8Gc7Necdk1-zBdsTJqCNa?dl=0.(As always, cutline information is embedded in each image and included below.)

    We hope you’ll let your audience know about this opportunity to preserve their stories next Saturday with the Middle Tennessee African American Oral History Project so they can join us, and we hope you’ll be able to join Murfreesboro’s Juneteenth celebation, too! 

    If you’d like to talk more with Mr. McGowan about the project, let me know and I can help arrange it; you also can reach him directly via the contact information at the story’s end.

    Thanks for all you do for MTSU and the community, and have a great weekend!

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