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Object Description
Interview no. | U-0963 |
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 | 27 June 2012 |
Interviewee |
Bell, Sharon Burnett, 1943- Bell, Felicia, 1971- |
Interviewee occupation |
Teachers Technicians Farmers Automobile drivers |
Interviewee DOB | 1943; 1971 |
Interviewee ethnicity | African Americans |
Interviewer | Teague, Riva Brown. |
Abstract | Topics for the interview with Sharon Burnett Bell include the 20 acres her paternal grandmother owned; the approximately 342 acres her father, R.D. Burnett owned, including 110 that is still in the family; 226 acres sold to the Pear River Valley Water Supply to build the Reservoir but not without a fight; her father's days as a sharecropper and how her birth spurred him to become a landowner; her father's skill at hunting, shooting and dog training; why her father ended up paying twice for the first 20 acres he purchased; how her mother ensured that she and all her siblings at least received a 12th-grade education although schools in the area went only up to the 8th grade; descriptions of the houses she grew up in, ranging from a 3-room shotgun to a 4-bedroom home; how her father doing "public work" enabled the family to purchase more land, buy a truck and a tractor, etc.; why she stopped working in the field at an early age; her father's "earned respect" with whites in the community; and her father building a park and starting a semi-pro Negro League baseball team. Topics for the interview with Felicia Bell include her and her son's involvement in 4-H; raising sheep and plans to raise cattle; her grandfather giving each of his grandchildren a calf for them to do what they wanted with it (i.e. keep, sell for school clothes and supplies, kill for meat); the importance of living off the land and practicing healthy eating and sustainable agriculture; and what she’d like to see her children and their children do with the land in the future. |
Citation | Interview with Sharon Burnett Bell and Felicia Bell by Riva Brown Teague, 27 June 2012 U-0963, in the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. |
Description
Interview no. | U0963_Audio |