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Object Description
Interview no. | U-0964 |
Restrictions | No restrictions. Open to research. |
Project | U.19. Long Civil Rights Movement: Breaking New Ground |
Project description | Interviews, 2011-2012, conducted for the Breaking New Ground: A History of American Farm Owners Since the Civil War project. This project was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and was coordinated by Adrienne Petty (of the City College of New York) and Mark Schultz (of Lewis University in Illinois) with assistance from Jacquelyn Hall. Interviews were conducted by two cohorts of research fellows and centered on African American farmers', landowners', and descendants' political, social, and economic experiences in the American South from the Civil War onward. |
Date | 6 June 2012 |
Interviewee | Cotten, Robert Lewis, 1951- |
Interviewee occupation |
Automobile drivers Farmers Woodworkers |
Interviewee DOB | 1951 |
Interviewee ethnicity | African Americans |
Interviewer | Teague, Riva Brown. |
Abstract | Topics for this interview include the history of the 163 acres a free slave gave the interviewee's grandfather, who was born 10 years after slavery ended; the freed slave owned about 1,000 acres. Other topics include how some of the property was used to benefit the surrounding black community and was eventually lost as a result; how all the property was used for various agricultural purposes; his grandfather's disdain for county extension agents and others telling him what to do with his land; his grandfather's belief in paying for everything in cash or bartering to avoid borrowing money from anyone; 80 acres the interviewee's father and uncle purchased after they left the military; technology upgrades in the early 1940s; how much of the 163 acres remains in the family; newly acquired land that represents the last owned by the aforementioned former slave; and the interviewee's vision for the future of the land. |
Citation | Interview with Robert Lewis Cotten by Riva Brown Teague, 6 June 2012 U-0964, in the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. |
Description
Interview no. | U0964_Audio |