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Object Description
Interview no. | U-0762 |
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 | 11 June 2011 |
Interviewee | Wells, Benjamin Calvin. |
Interviewee occupation | Farmers |
Interviewee DOB | Unknown |
Interviewee ethnicity | African Americans |
Interviewer | Stephens, Eric Jonas. |
Abstract | Mr. Benjamin Calvin Wells has worked in the farming industry for the vast majority of his life. Mr. Wells is also a descendent of several landowning African American families from the Magnolia community (Washington, Wells, Carter, and Jackson) located between Decatur and Miller county. Mr. Wells possesses an intimate knowledge of the land and farming practices and their changes over the past forty years. Mr. Wells' oral interview provides the reader with an understanding of many of the major changes that occurred in Southern agriculture from the 1950s until the 1970s, especially for small independent landowners. Mr. Wells' interview is vividly rich in discusses of the mechanization of Southern agriculture. Mr. Wells however, was unfamiliar with many of the federal and state funds and subsidies available to farmers, which is more than likely the resultant of the size of his family's farm. |
Citation | Interview with Benjamin Calvin Wells by Jonas Stephens, 11 June 2011 U-0762, in the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill |
Description
Interview no. | U0762_Audio |