Issue of
August 11, 1999
 
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Former civil rights
activists support King Papers Project with gift from
their firm
The Martin Luther King Jr.
Papers Project received a $25,000 grant from the Woodside
Summit Group, a Pleasanton-based systems integration
firm. The gift, presented at the project's offices July
28, will be used to enhance its website to include
materials designed for elementary, middle and high school
students.
"Our goal is to make
the resources of the King Papers Project accessible to
the broadest possible audience, including school-age
kids," said History Professor Clayborne Carson,
director of the project. "I also look upon this as
an opportunity for Stanford students to play a role in
educating younger students about the modern black freedom
struggle."
Related
Information:
G. Russell Curtis,
president and chief executive officer of the Woodside
Summit Group, called the relationship with the project
and his company "a kinship and a common cause. We
really feel blessed that we can be in a position to do
something like this," said Curtis, who recalled that
as a student at Fisk University in Nashville he
participated in sit-ins and boycotts. Betty Williams, the
company's communications manager, marched from Selma to
Montgomery with King when she was a student at Alabama
State University. She said she was "overjoyed"
when Carson presented the company with a proposal to
enhance the website. This is the second time the Woodside
Summit Group has supported the work of the King project.
Last year, the firm donated a $15,000 gift, Carson said.
In addition to serving as
a resource for university-level research scholars, the
King Papers Project is often called upon to provide
information to K-12 teachers hoping to provide materials
on King and the broader African American freedom
struggle, says Masud Shamsiddeen, an undergraduate intern
who serves as the project's webmaster and network
administrator. The K-12 materials would provide teachers
with curriculum guidelines as well as primary source
documents.
Masud
Shamsiddeen, foreground, webmaster at the Martin Luther
King Jr. Papers Project, will help create online
materials tailored for K-12 students. Ben Wheeler, a
summer intern from Columbia University, also is
cataloging research materials for the project’s
website.
Photo by
Linda Cicero
"Oakland school
teachers come down every year because they don't have
textbooks," said Shamsiddeen. By including materials
geared toward schoolchildren, the project will help
teachers to sidestep the financial and political
obstacles they often encounter when trying to order new
books, added Shamsiddeen, a junior history major who
started volunteering at the project after taking Carson's
course on the modern African American freedom struggle
his freshman year.
Ramón Saldívar, outgoing
vice provost for undergraduate education, noted that the
King Papers project has provided numerous research
opportunities for undergraduates like Shamsiddeen.
"That's the kind of thing we normally do with our
graduate students. The leadership at the King Papers
Project has provided a good model for how to do
that," Saldívar said.
"We're comparable to
the kind [of research opportunities] that students in the
sciences are able to get through working in labs,"
said Carson, who added that the project's goal is to have
materials available for school-age children by King's
birthday, Jan. 15. "I think it is the leading site
as a source of this kind of material, but I think that we
can do a lot better," he said. SR
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