“A healthy community is an informed community, and my job is to promote, educate, and preserve Black American history [and our] contributions to this country.” – Terry Buffington
Professor Terry Buffington carries Mississippi with her–through her archives, her teaching, and her unwavering devotion to telling the truth about Black America. A sixth-generation Mississippian, oral historian, anthropologist, and activist, Buffington now lives in Pullman, Washington, where she serves as a humanities scholar at Washington State University.
She is also the president and founder of the Terry Buffington Foundation, home to the Terry Buffington Papers, a globally accessible digital archive housed at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill documenting the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement.
Her guiding philosophy is simple and profound:
“When an old person dies, with us goes the library.”
For Buffington, preserving memory is not academic. It’s a mandate.
Buffington’s activism began young. Raised in the Jim Crow South, she was shaped by a community that moved in unity and collective purpose. She remembers the closeness of those early bonds and the way solidarity fortified them against fear.
“All of us went to church together. We were baptized in the same churches. Our parents knew each other. We moved as a group.”
It was within that rooted, interwoven community that she joined SNCC as a teenager–marching, organizing, and stepping into the heart of Freedom Summer. She insists it wasn’t bravery that guided them; it was belonging, conviction, and an unspoken understanding of what was at stake.
“We weren’t being brave–we were doing what was right,” she says.
Buffington speaks of Ella Baker with deep reverence, describing her as one of the movement’s sharpest strategists. She sees Baker as the mother of the modern Civil Rights Movement and remembers how young Black men in Mississippi “opened the door for Dr. King to come into Black communities” at a time when fear made many adults hesitant.
Her foundation and her archive are an extension of that calling.
Buffington’s archive streams worldwide, giving students, researchers, and communities access to oral histories of Black Mississippians who shaped the Civil Rights Movement. She emphasizes that digital documentation is more than preservation–it is power.
“Digitizing history is not about nostalgia,” she says. “It’s about survival.”
For Buffington, digital tools are simply new vessels for an ancient Black tradition: storytelling as liberation.
At Washington State University, she teaches digital technology and culture, oral tradition, activism, and interdisciplinary Black literature. Her classroom becomes a living museum–elders Zoom in to share firsthand testimony, students produce documentary films, and history breathes. Her curriculum has incorporated literary giants such as James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison. But she also challenges her students directly:
“If you haven’t studied history up to 1877, you can’t connect what’s happening now with what happened in my generation.”
Her curriculum is not just about learning–it’s about seeing, recognizing, and naming the patterns that persist.
Buffington sees the fractures in today’s youth–fractures caused by curriculum erasure, broken transmission of generational wisdom, and digital overload that disconnects students from human guidance.
Her message to young people is clear: “Find your passion.”
She urges cultural curiosity as personal responsibility and reinforces that if you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.
She also warns that activism without strategy is dangerous. She teaches her students how to plan, how to think, how to analyze movements, and how to identify trustworthy leadership. And she grounds that lesson in lived reality:
“When we went to jail, we knew how we were going to get out.”
She tells the stories that schools won’t. And she reminds them that community–not institutions–must lead the work of teaching Black history:
“Being an activist is not always holding up a sign. There are so many other ways.”
Holding the Narrative
For decades, Buffington has brought culture-bearers into her classrooms and communities–folk singers, authors, artists, and SNCC veterans. In February, the Urban Bush Women, a world-renowned dance company with roots in movement-based storytelling, will appear for a powerful performance at the Kenworthy PAC in Moscow, ID on February 13.
Her life’s work has always been about preservation and access. First in Mississippi. Now in the Pacific Northwest.
“If we don’t tell our story, someone else will–and they will get it wrong.”
Her recent recognition–the 2025 Eastern Humanities Washington Award in the category of Lifetime Accomplishments in the Humanities–affirms what Black communities have long known: our stories are primary sources; we are truth tellers and truth keepers. Terry Buffington herself is an archive. A library. And she is still writing.
Visit the Terry Buffington Foundation online at terrybuffingtonfoundation.org.