This series contains interviews conducted for three different projects: A.001. Bass-De Vries interviews (original deposit, appendix, and additional interviews) for The Transformation of Southern Politics: Social Change and Political Consequence Since 1945; A.002. Southern Liberalism interviews by John Egerton; A.003. North Carolina Politics interviews.
The Bass-De Vries group of interviews includes discussions with political leaders, journalists, editors, party officials, political scientists, campaign directors, union officials, civil rights leaders, and congress people from Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. These interviews were conducted as part of a study of politics in the South between 1945 and 1974 that resulted in The Transformation of Southern Politics: Social Change and Political Consequence Since 1945 (Basic Books, 1976). Some of these interviews are exclusively related to the impact of the civil rights movement, black political participation, the rise of the Republican Party, and the results of industrialization and urbanization. Others include information on a broad range of events and movements.
Interviews with leaders of regional importance, civil rights activists, and those persons who exercised political power over long spans of time are of particular interest. Also included are a group of interviews, largely conducted by the Southern Oral History Program (SOHP) and other University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC Chapel Hill) groups, that expand on those collected by Bass and De Vries. Among these are in-depth biographical memoirs of national figures, regional commentators, state party leaders, and local officials. In addition to discussing political issues, each interview aims at revealing the forces that shape the lives of public people--family culture, childhood experiences, education, self-concepts, and early political involvements. The process of political decision-making is also examined.
Bass and De Vries interviewed more than 300 respondents from 1973 through 1975. Through a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Southern Oral History Program provided transcripts for 215 of the most important interviews. Some of these interviews are exclusively related to the themes in The Transformation of Southern Politics: the impact of the civil rights movement, black political participation, the rise of the Republican Party, and the results of industrialization and urbanization. Others include information on a broad range of events and movements. Interviews with leaders of regional importance, civil rights activists, and those persons who exercised political power over long spans of time are of particular interest.
Jack Solomon Bass (1936- ) is a political reporter. He received a B.A. degree in journalism from the University of South Carolina and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. From 1966 to 1973, he served as Columbia, S.C., bureau chief for the Charlotte Observer. He is the author of Porgy Comes Home: South Carolina After 300 Years (1972) and other books. Walter De Vries (1931- ) is a political consultant. He received his Ph.D. degree in political science from Michigan State University. From 1962 to 1967, he was executive assistant to Governor George Romney of Michigan. Since 1973, he has served as associate professor in the Institute of Political Sciences and Public Affairs at Duke University. He is also director of the North Carolina Institute of Politics.
The additional interviews expand on those collected by Bass and De Vries through in-depth biographical memoirs of national figures, regional commentators, state party leaders, and local officials. In addition to discussing political issues, each interview aims at revealing the forces that shape the lives of public people-family, culture, childhood experiences, education, self-concepts, and early political involvements. The process of political decision-making is also examined. Most of these interviews were conducted by the Southern Oral History Program and students and faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
These interviews were conducted in late 1990 and early 1991 by John Egerton as part of the research for a book on the post-World War II era and the opportunities that era presented for positive action on civil rights. Many interviews are with individuals who were involved in various ways in the civil rights struggle. In the interviews, Egerton focused on the interviewees' careers between 1945 and 1950 and their opinions of various individuals, institutions, and events. Some topics covered extensively include the New Deal and Franklin Roosevelt, the University of North Carolina and Frank Graham, the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, and the Brown decision. Researchers should note that, at times, much of the discussion concerns Egerton's thesis about the time period and the interviewee's reaction to that thesis.
These interviews are part of a North Carolina politics project begun in 1994 aimed at understanding how North Carolinians have dealt with the changes that have transformed the state since the Great Depression. The overarching themes of the interviews are the realignment in North Carolina party politics and the Republican reemergence; the evolution of African American political activity in North Carolina since the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965; the evolution of women's political activity in North Carolina since the 1960s; and the centrality of cultural and social politics in the state's political contests and debates in the same time period. These projects were launched with a gift from Walter Royal Davis which enabled the Southern Oral History Program and the Academic Affairs Library to establish the Davis Oral History Fund. The other projects focus on University history; women's leadership and grassroots activism; business history; the broadcast media; and memory and community studies.
Project coordinator for the North Carolina politics project is William Link of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. The majority of the interviews were conducted by Joseph Mosnier, a graduate student in history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Other interviews were conducted by Jonathan Houghton as part of his dissertation research on the history of the Republican Party in North Carolina or by Howard Covington and Marion Ellis. The overarching themes of the interviews, particularly those by Mosnier, are the realignment in North Carolina party politics and the Republican reemergence; the evolution of African American political activity in North Carolina since the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965; the evolution of women's political activity in North Carolina since the 1960s; and the centrality of cultural and social politics in the state's political contests and debates in the same time period.
This series contains recordings of biographical interviews conducted by the staff of the SOHP and others, intended to address the contemporary dearth of personal letters and diaries written by notable citizens. Interviews with educators, business leaders, political activists, professional workers, authors, and artists, as well as with homemakers, tobacco workers, and domestic servants, are included. Although biographical in nature, the interviews may also concentrate on specific events or periods in which the respondent was involved. In some cases there is more than one interview with a given individual, each relating to a different aspect of his or her career. Included is a series of interviews relating to African-American communist Hosea Hudson.
The collection of biographical interviews is an ongoing project of the Southern Oral History Program. This project seeks to restore the balance personal letters and diaries, which are becoming increasingly scarce, once brought to the public record, by interviewing notable men and women in North Carolina and the southern region. Interviews with educators, business leaders, political activists, professional workers, and authors and artists are included in this series.
The interviews have been conducted by the program staff and by students and faculty whose research in southern history utilized oral sources. The interviews are biographical in nature, although they may concentrate on specific events or periods within the lifetime of the respondent. In some cases there is more than one interview with an individual, each covering a different aspect of his or her career. A biographical sketch is often filed with each interview, or with the first interview if there are several for one individual.
This series contains recordings of biographical interviews conducted by the staff of the SOHP and others, intended to address the contemporary dearth of personal letters and diaries written by notable citizens. Interviews with educators, business leaders, political activists, professional workers, authors, and artists, as well as with homemakers, tobacco workers, and domestic servants, are included. Although biographical in nature, the interviews may also concentrate on specific events or periods in which the respondent was involved. In some cases there is more than one interview with a given individual, each relating to a different aspect of his or her career. The collection of biographical interviews is an ongoing project of the Southern Oral History Program. This project seeks to restore the balance personal letters and diaries, which are becoming increasingly scarce, once brought to the public record, by interviewing notable men and women in North Carolina and the southern region. Interviews with educators, business leaders, political activists, professional workers, and authors and artists are included in this series. The interviews have been conducted by the program staff and by students and faculty whose research in southern history utilized oral sources. The interviews are biographical in nature, although they may concentrate on specific events or periods within the lifetime of the respondent. In some cases there is more than one interview with an individual, each covering a different aspect of his or her career.
The collection of biographical interviews is an ongoing project of the Southern Oral History Program. This project seeks to restore the balance personal letters and diaries, which are becoming increasingly scarce, once brought to the public record, by interviewing notable men and women in North Carolina and the southern region. Interviews with educators, business leaders, political activists, professional workers, and authors and artists are included in this series. The interviews have been conducted by the program staff and by students and faculty whose research in southern history utilized oral sources. The interviews are biographical in nature, although they may concentrate on specific events or periods within the lifetime of the respondent. In some cases there is more than one interview with an individual, each covering a different aspect of his or her career.
Some of these interviews were conducted by Michael O'Brien as part of his research for The Idea of the American South (1978).
Interviews with residents of Wilmington, N.C., focus on the racial violence that erupted in February 1971 following the boycott of and demonstrations against the city's still segregated schools in the city.
Interviews with African Americans in northern Durham County, N.C., focus on daily life, folk beliefs, and medical practices.
William T. Moye conducted interviews with Charlotte, N.C., politicians in 1974 and 1975 for his dissertation, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Consolidation: Metrolina in Motion (UNC Chapel Hill, 1975).
Tapes, transcripts, and other materials relating to Hosea Hudson (1898- ), African American Communist Party member, labor organizer, and author of Black Worker in the Deep South (1972). The tapes were recorded and transcribed between 1976 and 1978 by Nell Irvin Painter, in connection with The Narrative of Hosea Hudson: His Life as a Negro Communist in the South (Harvard University Press, 1979), which covers Hudson's life from 1917 to 1947.
Alicia Rouverol conducted this interview with Alice Jett Butler for a final project in a women's history course, 1991.
Interviews were conducted from 2014 onward by SOHP staff and outside researchers. Individuals discuss their life stories.
Notable North Carolinians is an ongoing project to interview men and women in North Carolina who have made significant contributions to business, the arts, education, and politics.
Interviews are with men and women in North Carolina who have made significant contributions to business, the arts, education, and politics.
Interviews on religion and politics in North Carolina were conducted by Bruce Kalk, a graduate student in history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Interviews on the development of Research Triangle Park were conducted by graduate student Mary Virginia Jones.
Funded by a University Research Grant, these interviews focus on the Pearsall Plan for school desegregation in North Carolina, which was proposed by Thomas Pearsall.
Funded by the Kenan Foundation, interviews center on the life of William Rand Kenan, who made numerous contributions to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill through various Kenan family trusts.
Funded by a grant from the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, the Women in Politics interviews are with women who have been prominent in North Carolina political life including women legislators, women mayors, women judges, and women state administrators.
Funded by a grant from the North Carolina Humanities Council, interviews were conducted by the staff of the Raleigh Historic Properties Commission with older members of the Raleigh, N.C., community. Interviews focus on Raleigh's history, especially that of its African American community, and significant architecture within the traditionally black communities.
As part of their legal training, law students at the University of North Carolina School of Law conducted interviews with prominent North Carolina attorneys and judges during spring semester, 1992. These interviews were undertaken as part of a course taught by Walter H. Bennett, Jr., associate professor of law. Bennett himself conducted the interview with James B. McMillan. The interviews were subsequently transcribed at the Law School and donated to the Southern Oral History Program Collection.
Interviews were conducted by Ben F. Bulla for his biography of B. Everett Jordan. The book titled Textiles and Politics: The Life of B. Everett Jordan: From Saxapahaw to the United States Senate was published in 1992 by Carolina Academic Press. Bulla interviewed family members, friends, political associates, business associates, and employees of Jordan.
Interviews were conducted between 1998 and 2000 as part of the Friday Fellows Leadership Interview Project by the Wildacres Leadership Initiative. This project was part of the William C. Friday Fellowship for Human Relations. The Friday Fellows describe the Leadership Interview Project as "...a program devoted to creating a new generation of leaders for North Carolina." By interviewing active leaders of North Carolina, they hope to spread the advice and wisdom these people have to offer. In addition, certain interviewees were encouraged to nominate "committed North Carolinians ... [for] a two year period of education and reflection on the challenges facing our North Carolina."
Interviews with with Henry Toole Clark, Jr., the first Administrator of Health Affairs at the University of North Carolina, were conducted by Frances Weaver between 1990 and 1998. During his tenure, the University's Division of Health Affairs grew to be one of the major university medical centers in the United States. In addition to his work at the University of North Carolina, the interviews chronicle Clark's childhood in Scotland Neck, N.C.; student days at the University of North Carolina; medical education at the University of Rochester; years as a tuberculosis patient at the Trudeau Sanatorium; and experience as a medical intern at Duke University Hospital. Toole discusses his work as director of the Vanderbilt University Hospital, consultant to the National Institutes of Health on the development of regional medical programs, director of the Connecticut Regional Medical Program, and consultant to health programs in Puerto Rico, the Netherlands, Jamaica, and elsewhere. His interviews also explore his time as faculty member at Yale University and the University of Connecticut and leadership role in Chapel Hill, N.C., community.
Katharine Parker Freeman and L. E. M. Freeman (Lemuel Elmer MacMillan Freeman) were recorded between 1970 and 1978 talking about their lives, discussing the Bible, telling stories, and singing songs from South Carolina. The Freemans were residents of Raleigh, N.C. L.E.M. Freeman was originally from South Carolina. He was a Baptist minister and taught religion at Meredith College and at Shaw University. Katharine Freeman started the home economics department at Meredith College, then resigned from teaching after her marriage. The Freemans were active in promoting racial integration from the early 1940s through the 1960s. They were members of Pullen Memorial Baptist Church and of the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen.
Interviews were conducted between 1996 and 1999 by Martin Clark, Walter Campbell, Steven Channing, and John Wilson of the Helms Documentary Project in Durham, N.C. Interviews explore former North Carolina United States Senator Jesse Helms's childhood, family life, and political career. These ten videotaped interviews are closed indefinitely.
Ethelene McCabe Allen (b. 1934) grew up in a tenant farming family in Johnston County, N.C., and Wayne County, N.C. Although she was an excellent student, she left school at age 16 to marry a small proprietary farmer and helped him farm the family land. At age 22, she began working as a sewing machine operator at the Jerold Manufacturing Co. in Smithfield, N.C., while continuing to help her husband on the family farm. Her husband became a pipe fitter and welder on construction projects, while continuing to farm part-time. After receiving her G.E.D. by exam and completing an associate's degree in college transfer classes at Johnston Community College, Allen worked as a technician at Fieldcrest Cannon in Smithfield, N.C., and at Raychem and Tyco Corp. in Fuquay-Varina, N.C. She had four children and was active in the Burnell Baptist Church as a Sunday school teacher and Girls Auxiliary leader. She volunteered with the North Carolina Bluebird Society to educate and encourage North Carolinians to help save the eastern bluebird by building bluebird houses and establishing and monitoring bluebird trails.
These interviews, conducted by her daughter Barbara C. Allen, survey her family life; social relationships; educational experiences; perspective as a woman in rural southern life and southern Baptist religious experience; her travels across the United States, Canada, and Ireland; her views on the environment, child rearing, gender roles, race, population growth and changing demographics; and her experiences as a laborer in her local area's evolving farming and manufacturing economies. Also included is one interview with Minnie Allen Lee, the interviewer's paternal aunt.
These interviews were conducted by Jack Fleer during the course of his research for his 2007 book, Governors Speak. The interviews are with former North Carolina governors James E. Holshouser, James B. Hunt, James G. Martin, Terry Sanford, and Robert W. Scott. The interviews discuss their political careers, including decision making, campaigns, and policies.
These interviews were conducted in rural areas of North Carolina for the 50th anniversary in 1985 of the Rural Electrification Administration. The project of the North Carolina Association of Electric Cooperatives explored the impact electricity had made in the daily lives of rural people. Respondents described ways they completed household and farm chores heated their homes, read and studied at night, and performed other everyday tasks before electricity. Most respondents also discussed the origins and development of their local electric cooperatives.
Interviews focus on the growth and development of organized labor in the American South and explore labor movements in mills, mines, agriculture, and the food service industry. Themes include strikes, life in mill villages, anti-unionism, and the relationship between organized labor movements and civil rights and social justice movements.
Interviews, conducted by the staff of the SOHP, focus on the growth and development of organized labor in the southeast from 1940 to the present. Respondents include leaders of textile unions in the southeast and contain much information on individual strikes, organizing tactics, problems within the unions, and difficulties with mill owners. Some respondents speak generally about life in mill villages. Many of the interviews deal with labor education because the interviewees had entered the labor movement after college through working in union labor education departments.
Interviews, conducted by George William Hopkins for his dissertation The Miners for Democracy: Insurgency in the United Mine Workers of America, 1970-1972 (UNC Chapel Hill, 1976), focus United Mine Workers union in West Virginia between 1970 and 1972 and explore the union's internal problems and the issues that spurred the creation of the movement.
These interviews were conducted in a neighborhood in St. Louis, Mo., by Gary Ross Mormino for his dissertation The Hill Upon the City: An Italo-American Neighborhood in St. Louis, Missouri, 1880-1955 (UNC Chapel Hill, 1977). Many are life histories that include information about the respondent's work, and thus reveal a wide range of community interests and activities.
Interviews focus on the UNC Foodworkers' strikes against the UNC Food Service in February-March 1969 and against SAGA Food Service in November-December 1969. The respondents include food workers, members of the Black Student Movement, members of the Southern Student Organizing Committee, and other students, mediators, lawyers, faculty members, and university officials. The interviews establish the role of each respondent in the events and address issues of race, class, and gender that were raised by the strike. Other topics that are addressed include student protests in the 1960s, university-town relations, and the university's position in state government. These interviews focus on the University of North Carolina foodworkers' strikes against the University of North Carolina Food Service, February-March 1969, and against SAGA Food Service, November-December 1969. The participants in the strikes were primarily African American women, although many university groups ultimately became involved.
The individuals interviewed include foodworkers, members of the Black Student Movement, members of the Southern Student Organizing Committee, and other students, mediators, lawyers, faculty members, and university officials. The interviews establish the chronology and role of each participant and address the issues of class, race, and gender raised by the strikes. Other topics include student protests in the 1960s, university-town relations, and the university's position in state government. With one exception, these interviews were conducted by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill students as part of their work in History 103 (The Theory and Practice of Oral History) in 1974-1975. The exception is a 1979 interview by Derek Williams for his master's thesis, "It Wasn't Slavery Time Anymore: Foodworkers' Strike at Chapel Hill, Spring, 1969" (UNC Chapel Hill, 1980).
These interviews were conducted by Robert Rodgers Korstad, Lisa Hazirjian, Karl Korstad, and Lane Windham between 1976 and 1998. For the most part, the interviewees are people who were employed by the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company (RJR) in Winston-Salem, N.C., in the first half of the 20th century, especially during the 1940s. Many of the RJR employees were organizers, leaders, or members of the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural, and Allied Workers of America (FTA) Local 22. Other interviewees are employees who were not involved in Local 22 and who may have opposed the union. Also interviewed are RJR officials and FTA organizers who were not RJR employees, but who worked with Local 22 during the 1940s. There is a special focus on the work stoppages and strikes of 1943 and 1947. The purpose of this series of interviews was to understand the organization and actions of Winston-Salem's FTA Local 22; the living conditions in the African American community in Winston-Salem in the early 1900s through the 1940s; and the role played by the Communist Party in local events during this time. Interviews conducted by Lane Windham focus on FTA Local 10 in Greenville, N.C. Local 22 leaders and organizers were heavily involved in the organization of Local 10.
These interviews were used in the following works:
Griffin, Larry J. and Robert Korstad, Class as Race and Gender: Making and Breaking a Labor Union in the Jim Crow South, Social Science History 19 (Winter 1995): 425-454.
Korstad, Robert, Daybreak of Freedom: Tobacco Workers and the CIO, Winston-Salem, NC 1943-1950, (Ph.D. dissertation, UNC Chapel Hill, 1987).
Korstad, Robert and Nelson Lichtenstein, Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Movement, Journal of American History 75 (December 1988): 786-811.
Korstad, Robert Rodgers, Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
Windham, Lane, Greenhands: A History of Local 10 of the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural and Allied Workers of America in Greenville, NC 1946 (honors thesis, Duke University, 1991).
Interviews conducted by University of Washington at Tacoma professor and author Michael K. Honey between 1981 and 1998 as part of his research on southern labor and civil rights. This project focuses on the close relationship between labor organizing and the civil rights movement in Memphis, Tenn., and elsewhere in the South from the 1930s through the 1970s and 1980s. Many interviewees, black and white, were workers, organizers, and rank and file union members at the Firestone Tire and Rubber Plant in Memphis, Tenn.; others, especially Myles Horton (E-0177) had close ties to the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tenn. Among other interviewees are life-long social justice and labor activists such as Hosea Hudson (E-0178). Topics include race relations at the Firestone plant before and after integration, red-baiting and other challenges unique to organizing in the South, women's experiences in industrial work and labor organizing, and occupational hazards at the Firestone plant.
These interviews were used in the following works:
Honey, Michael, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers (Champaign: The University of Illinois Press, 1993).
Honey, Michael, Black Workers Remember: An Oral History of Segregation, Unionism, and the Freedom Struggle (Berkeley and Los Angeles: The University of California Press, 2002).
Honey, Michael, Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2007)
Some interviews include Mike Honey's notes and partial transcripts. The quality of these documents may be poor because of file conversion from older word processing formats.
Interviews with members of the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen (FSC) were mostly conducted from 1983 to 1985. The FSC was originally called the Younger Churchmen of the South, and first met in May 1934 at Monteagle, Tenn. As an interracial and interdenominational Christian organization, it worked closely with such groups as the NAACP and the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith for the improvement of social conditions in the rural South. The interviewer was Dallas A. Blanchard, who received funding for the project from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. Interviews deal with the interviewees' participation in the FSC and with their previous and subsequent activities.
Interviews in this series focus on women's participation in movements for social change. The idea for a series of interviews with southern women originated with Jacquelyn Hall's study, Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women's Campaign Against Lynching (Columbia University Press, 1979), which looks at the role of women in the anti-lynching movement of the Depression decade. Other interviews, financed by a 1974 Rockefeller Foundation grant to the Southern Oral History Program, expanded this focus to include labor relations, race relations, and reform movements.
Many of the earlier interviews in this series deal with the experience of southern women in the critical period between the women's suffrage movement of the 1920s and the feminist movement of the 1960s. The individuals interviewed were active participants in many reform movements during this period. The interviews particularly explore the interaction between the women's private lives and their public activities.
Many of the women interviewed were born between 1890 and 1910. Thus, they matured politically during the 1930s, the era of the Great Depression, labor organization, and New Deal reform. They are from various social classes and are of different races. Many of the women can be grouped into three categories: women involved in labor and workers' education movements either as students or as teachers; black and white women active in the civil rights movement; and women who, in addition to their contributions to these reform movements, also pursued professional careers. A great number of them were affiliated with the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, the Women's Division of the Southern Methodist Church, the Young Women's Christian Association, or the Southern Summer School for Women Workers.
Interviews focusing on women's participation in movements for social change. Many deal with southern women active in reform movements between the 1910s women's suffrage movement and the 1960s feminist movement. These interviews explore the interaction between the private lives and public activities of women representing various social classes and races. Interviewees include women who were involved in labor and workers' education movements; black and white women active in the civil rights movement; and women who, in addition to their contributions to these reform movements, also pursued professional careers. Many were affiliated with the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, the Women's Division of the Southern Methodist Church, the Young Women's Christian Association, or the Southern Summer School for Women Workers.
Included in this series are interviews with women who attended medical school during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Interviewees discuss medical training, perceptions of themselves as minority students and professionals, and patients' and male colleagues' perceptions of and reactions to women physicians. Also included are interviews that relate to black and white women involved in the civil rights movement in Atlanta, Ga., between the 1940s and 1990s. Interviews for a project on North Carolina women's leadership and grassroots activism explore the experiences of notable women leaders. The project seeks to redefine leadership to encompass women's efforts in grassroots movements, especially in environmental movements, community development, and self-help organizations. Included are five interviews conducted in the late 1990s by Holloway Sparks with three lesbian activists living and working in North Carolina. Twenty-five interviews conducted by Alicia Rouverol are with Native American women leaders and leaders of grassroots organizations. Interviews conducted by Barbara Allen are with women who grew up on tenant farms and worked during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s at the Jerold Plant in Smithfield, Johnston County, N.C. An interview with Kay Yow, women's basketball coach at North Carolina State University is also included.
Seven interviews with women who attended medical school in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. The interviewees completed training in psychiatry, pediatrics, obstetrics, gynecology, orthopedic surgery, public health, and general practice. These interviews explore numerous topics including feelings about undertaking medical studies, perceptions of themselves as minority students and professionals, and patients' and male colleagues' perceptions of and reactions to women physicians. The American Women in Medicine interviews were conducted by Sara Fowler for a 1974 independent study project under the direction of Jacquelyn Hall.
Seven interviews conducted by Kathryn L. Nasstrom for her dissertation, Women, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Politics of Historical Memory in Atlanta, 1946-1973 (UNC Chapel Hill, 1993). The six African American women and one white woman interviewed were involved in various phases of the civil rights movement in Atlanta, Ga. Interviewees discuss their civic and political work and Atlanta's social and political climate during the mid twentieth century.
Begun in 1994, this project is one of six projects aimed at understanding how North Carolinians have dealt with the changes that have transformed the state since the Great Depression (other projects focus on University history; North Carolina politics; business history; broadcast media; and memory and community studies). These projects were launched with a gift from Walter Royal Davis that enabled the Southern Oral History Program and the Academic Affairs Library to establish the Davis Oral History Fund.
Interviews explore the experiences of notable women leaders. The project seeks to redefine leadership to encompass women's efforts in grassroots movements and organization, especially in environmental movements, community development, and self-help organizations.
Included are five interviews conducted in the late 1990s by Holloway Sparks with three lesbian activists living and working in North Carolina. Sparks, a doctoral student in the Department of Political Science at UNC Chapel Hill studied the dissident practices of activist women and the role of political courage in enabling activism and dissent.
Twenty-five interviews conducted by Alicia Rouverol are with Native American women leaders and leaders of grassroots organizations. Interviews conducted by Barbara Allen are with women who grew up on tenant farms and worked during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s at the Jerold Plant in Smithfield, Johnston County, N.C. An interview with Kay Yow, women's basketball coach at North Carolina State University is also included.
An interview by Pamela Grundy with Kay Yow, women's basketball coach at North Carolina State University is also included.
Many of the other interviews were conducted as a class assignment by undergraduate students in a class called Women in American History, which was taught by Jacquelyn Hall at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the fall of 1994. Others were done by class members in an oral history class at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the spring of 1995.
Two interviews relating to women who worked at the Jerold Plant, a sewing plant set up in 1954 in Smithfield, N.C., by the Jerold Corporation. The plant produced high quality garments. Interviewees recount their experiences growing up in tenant farming families in Johnston County, N.C., and working as sewers and supervisors in the Jerold Plant from the 1950s until it closed in the early 1980s. The interviews were conducted by Barbara Allen.
Interviews, conducted between 1979 and 1981 by Emily Herring Wilson, for her book Hope and Dignity: Older Black Women of the South. Overall, Wilson interviewed more than forty older black women in North Carolina and selected twenty-seven for inclusion in the publication. The interviewees include gospel singers, midwives, teachers, ministers, college professors, civil rights organizers, artists, and musicians.
Interviews for Perspectives on Industrialization: The Piedmont Crescent of Industry, 1900-1940 project funded primarily by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The project focuses on the impact of industrialization in seven main areas: Badin, Burlington, Bynum, Catawba County, Charlotte, and Durham, N.C., and Greenville, S.C. Other interviews are with individuals from Carrboro, Greensboro, Gastonia, and Marion, N.C., and several interviews pertain to the textile workers' strike in Elizabethton, Tenn., in 1929.
Topics include the development of various industries in these regions, especially textiles, tobacco, hosiery, and furniture and the experiences of workers in these industries and in various facets of their daily life, including health, recreation, religion, family, education, and financial hardships.
The interviews for this region document the transformation of a rural area into a company town, Badin, N.C., which was dominated by the Aluminum Company of America (ALCOA). The transformation began with the construction of a dam across the Yadkin River by the Whitney Reduction Company, founded by George Whitney of Whitney and Stephenson, a Pittsburgh brokerage house. After Whitney went bankrupt in 1907, a French company, L'Aluminum Francaise, continued construction of the dam and built an aluminum plant. In 1914, the company sold its holdings to Andrew Mellon, who formed the Tallassee Power Company, a subsidiary of ALCOA. Originally a sparsely settled area, the influx of convict construction crews and black and Italian laborers had a major impact on the social and economic structure of the community.
The people interviewed discussed these changes and the effects on their lives. Several of the interviewees recalled the original rural character of the area and the construction of the dam, aluminum plant, and the company town of Badin. Union activity is also an important topic of discussion in these interviews. The vote for affiliation with the Aluminum Workers of America in 1940 was especially significant because it was the first time in the South that a union won certification in a company-owned town. Race relations are another issue explored. Discrimination at work and in the town, living conditions, and union participation are all topics of discussion.
The Badin interviews were conducted in 1979 by Southern Oral History Program staff member Rosemarie Hester under the sponsorship of the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources. The project culminated in the production of a video documentary, Aluminum Town. Although the study of Badin was not originally part of the Piedmont industrialization project, these interviews were included in the series because Badin's development contrasted with industrialization in some of the other regions selected for research.
Burlington, N.C., is of particular significance for industrialization in the Piedmont because it was one of the first places where the textile industry took hold, and it eventually became the center for Burlington Industries, the largest textile corporation in the world. At first called Company Shops, Burlington originated in the 1850s as the location of the repair shops of the Goldsboro-Charlotte line of the North Carolina Railroad. The name was changed to Burlington in 1887. The first cotton mill in Alamance County, the Alamance Cotton Mill, was built on Cane Creek in 1837 by Edwin Michael Holt and William Carrigan. The mill survived the Civil War, and Holt and his sons gradually added other cotton mills to their holdings. By 1900, the Holt family controlled 24 of the 29 mills in Alamance County. Several mills were located in Burlington, and the city limits later expanded to include other mills and the villages surrounding them.
After World War I, the cotton industry in Burlington experienced economic difficulties, partly due to a fall in demand for the ginghams that constituted the area's main product. In 1923, at the invitation of the Burlington Chamber of Commerce, James Spencer Love, who owned a controlling interest in the Gastonia Cotton Manufacturing Company of Gastonia, N.C., founded Burlington Industries. Initially, Love's company manufactured cotton cloth, but it was affected by the general slump in the cotton industry. Within a year, Love had switched to rayon manufacturing. During the 1920s and even during the Depression, Burlington Industries expanded, building new mills and taking over old ones. By the end of 1936, Burlington Industries owned 29 mills.
In order to explore the history of the textile industry in Burlington, efforts were focused on former workers of the E. M. Holt Plaid Mill, owned by the Holt family, and on the Pioneer plant, owned by Burlington Industries. Established in 1883, the Plaid Mill was one of two cotton mills in Company Shops before the town was renamed. The mill was established by Lawrence Holt with financial backing from Banks Holt, W. H. Turrentine, and William A. Erwin. Burlington Industries acquired Plaid Mill in 1938. The Pioneer plant, the first mill owned by Burlington Industries, was built in 1923; the Piedmont Heights mill village grew up around it. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Burlington textile industry diversified into hosiery as well as rayon manufacture. As a result, the interviewers also talked with former workers from the Burlington area's many hosiery mills.
Work, family, and living conditions are the topics covered most extensively in these interviews. Although the interviewers focused primarily on the Plaid and Pioneer mills, the interviews deal with the geographic and job mobility that characterized these people's lives. Movement--from farm to factory, from job to job, and from village to village--is an important feature of most of these interviews. Consequently, many Piedmont mill towns are discussed, among them Swepsonville, Leaksville, Spray, Schoolfield, Glen Raven, Glencoe, Altamahaw, Gibsonville, Durham, Bellemont, and Graham. Many of the interviewees worked part or all of their lives in Burlington's hosiery mills. Several of them engaged in home production of stockings, an important feature of the hosiery industry in the 1920s and 1930s. Ethel Hilliard discussed at length her childhood in El Dorado, a North Carolina gold mining town.
One of the main themes pursued by the interviewers was the transition from family ownership (the Holt mills) to corporate management (Burlington Industries). The relationship between workers and owners is reflected in vignettes about members of the Holt family and of J. Spencer Love, and in accounts of union activity. Technology, time study, work organization, the impact of the Depression and World War II on the textile industry, occupational sex roles, child labor, and working conditions, are all topics of discussion.
These interviews are also important for the information they include about everyday life. Most of the interviewees discuss family history, childhood, and education. Other topics include housing, sanitation, the advent of electricity, transportation, and diet. Some of the interviews reveal how some farm practices, such as gardening, raising livestock, and canning, were continued in the mill villages. The interview with Ben Wiles, a grocer, is informative both about the grocery business before the age of supermarkets, and about the implements of everyday living. Boarding was an important feature of mill village life, and more than half of these interviewees either boarded at some stage in their lives or had parents who ran boarding houses.
Health was an important topic of discussion in almost every interview. Common illnesses, the effect of cotton dust in the mills, childbearing, the flu epidemic of 1918 , and health care (doctors, midwives, and folk remedies) are all discussed. Interviews with Carroll Lupton , a doctor who had worked in Piedmont Heights, and with Grace Moore Maynard and Mrs. Robinson former members of the Burlington Service League are particularly informative on the subject of health.
Recreation is another aspect of everyday life discussed in these interviews. Many of the interviewees talked about dances, drinking customs, and entertainments such as the circus, medicine shows, and movies. Music--string bands, labor and folk songs, fiddling, and gospel--was also an important part of these workers' lives. Among sports activities, baseball stands out. Several workers including H. G. Meacham, V. Baxter Splawn, and Frank Webster played in baseball leagues and a few belonged to semi-pro teams .
Religion is also covered. In some cases, the interviewers were especially interested in exploring the relationship between the churches and the mill owners. Other interviews reveal the importance of preacher George Washington Swinney and Glen Hope Baptist Church to Piedmont Heights mill village. Preacher Swinney was no longer alive at the time that these interviews were conducted, but an interview with his wife, Etta Swinney and tapes of his preaching are included. Interviews with Mildred Overman, educational director of Glen Hope Church, and Thomas Staley, a church maintenance worker, are of particular interest.
Interviews with mill managers, other entrepreneurs, and middle-class women, add another dimension to this study of Burlington. Of particular significance are interviews with female entrepreneurs Bertha Cates, a coal and lumber yard operator, and her sister Verna Cates Stackhouse, manager of the King Cotton Mill. Cates was an active member of the Association of Business and Professional Women. One of the first female bank clerks in the area, Grace Moore Maynard, described the impact of World War I on the employment of women in white collar jobs.
A number of other topics are touched upon more briefly. Reid Maynard discussed life at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill during World War II and his wartime service. The interview with Grace Moore Maynard, daughter of D. M. Moore, mayor of Burlington from 1912 to 1919, provides some information about that period of the city's history. Finally, these interviews provide some insights into the mill workers' racial attitudes, but this topic is not explored extensively.
The Bynum, N.C., interviews focus on a company-owned cotton mill town in Chatham County, N.C.
Bynum had its beginnings as the site of a grist mill located on the Bynum family property. In 1872, Luther and Carney Bynum and neighbors George Thompson and E. W. Atwater established a cotton spinning mill, the Bynum Manufacturing Company. In addition, they created a mill village to house the workers, which included a church, a parsonage, and a company store. In 1886, John Milton Odell of Concord, N.C., acquired majority shares in the Bynum Manufacturing Company, which was dissolved when it became part of the J. M. Odell Manufacturing Company. The Bynums continued to serve as mill superintendents until 1902 when William Lord London of Pittsboro became secretary of the mill. London came from a distinguished North Carolina family. His grandfather had been secretary to Governor William Tryon. After the Revolution, London settled in Wilmington. His son, Henry Adolphus London, moved to Pittsboro before 1838, established a mercantile business, and served as secretary-treasurer of the Cape Fear and Deep River Navigation Company. Henry London's sons were also active entrepreneurs. Henry Armand London edited the Chatham Record for 40 years and was president of the state senate in 1901 and 1903. With his brother, William Lord London, he founded the first bank of Pittsboro. After returning from the Civil War, William Lord London took over his father's mercantile business. In addition to his banking venture, London served on the board of directors of the Pittsboro Railroad Company and the Elizabeth Hosiery Company. He also arranged for the construction of the Pittsboro court house.
In his capacity as secretary of the mill, William Lord London appointed Edgar Moore superintendent in 1904. Except for a break from 1922 to 1927, Moore was superintendent until 1955. By the time William Lord London died in 1916, the Londons had acquired a controlling share in the company. 1916 was also the year that a fire destroyed the mill. Upon reopening the plant in 1917, the company expanded production by adding a second shift and built new houses to accommodate a larger work force.
Arthur London succeeded his father as superintendent and, in 1955, became chairman of the board of the J. M. Odell Manufacturing Company. He was succeeded by his son, W. L. London, and, in 1964, by John London. 1955 also was the year that Frank Durham succeeded Edgar Moore as mill superintendent. As early as the 1950s and 1960s, many long-time workers had begun to leave the mill. More workers left in the 1970s after the mill began to manufacture a synthetic blend and hired the Tuscarora Company of Mount Pleasant, N.C., to manage mill operations. In 1977, Chatham County, with assistance from the Agency for Housing and Urban Development, purchased the mill houses, renovated them, and sold them to the inhabitants and other buyers. John London retired in 1979, ending the London family's association with the mill.
Most of the Bynum interviewees worked at J. M. Odell Manufacturing Company for part or all of their careers. Many of them began to work at Odell after the 1916 fire. Most of the Bynum mill workers moved around less frequently than their Burlington counterparts and maintained close ties with the rural community after migrating to Bynum from surrounding farms. In fact, some of the interviewees spent part of their working lives as farmers or farm laborers. Because the J. M. Odell Manufacturing Company in Bynum was a spinning mill, the subseries covers only this branch of the textile industry. Among the topics covered are technology, the impact of the Depression and World War II on the mill, paternalism, work discipline, work division by sex and race, and unionization attempts. Many of the workers also discussed at length brown lung and other health hazards of mill work. Many of the workers knew the Londons and shared their recollections with the interviewers. Interviews with John and Lawrence London provide more detailed information about the London family and the mill's history.
The interviews also document mill village life in great detail. Interviewer Douglas DeNatale conducted many of the interviews, and the series strongly reflects his interest in rural culture and how it survived and changed in the mill village. Gardens, livestock maintained within the village, diet, homes, and furnishings comprise some of the elements of everyday living covered by the interviewees. Many of the workers also talked about early modes of transportation and the advent of the automobile. The transition from company to private ownership in the 1970s had a major impact on the community, and many of the interviewers discussed this change. Good information about this change can be found in the interview with Greg Warren of the Chatham County Housing Authority.
Family ties and relationships are also discussed in these interviews. Childhood, early work experiences, and education are covered in almost every interview. In addition, the interviewees described domestic activities, courting, family violence, and household servants. Most of the interviewees boarded when they first arrived in Bynum, but they tended to lodge with relatives rather than in organized boarding houses. DeNatale was particularly interested in music, religious practices and traditions, and folklore, and, as a result, his interviews explore these topics in detail. Story-telling was a popular pastime in Bynum, and some of the interviewees recounted popular tales. Bynum's musical traditions included gospel singing, Hawaiian music, string bands, and fiddling. Other common pastimes described in the interviews are baseball games, listening to the radio, socials, dances, card playing, movies, hunting and fishing, community fish fries and barbecues, and quilting. Almost every interviewee mentioned religion, and many recalled attending revivals. DeNatale's interest in folkways extended to medical and health matters, and some of his interviews include information about home remedies and folk beliefs. In addition, the interviewees discussed epidemics, especially the 1918 flu epidemic; alcoholism; and health care, including the roles of doctors and midwives.
Other topics are covered in less detail. Some of the interviewees left mill work to take jobs at North Carolina Memorial Hospital in Chapel Hill. Race relations are also covered in discussions of African Americans entering mill work, servants, the Ku Klux Klan, and school desegregation in Pittsboro. A few of the interviewees mentioned Bynum citizens serving in World War I.
The Bynum interviews include the first interviews conducted for the Perspectives on Industrialization Project by an oral history class at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The class was designed to train field workers to conduct subsequent interviews for the project. As a result, the interviews in this subseries vary in quality. After the class ended, one student, Douglas DeNatale, conducted further interviews in Bynum for his master's thesis in the folklore curriculum at UNC Chapel Hill.
The Catawba, N.C., interviews focus on the industrialization of an entire county.
Cotton manufacturing began in Catawba County as early as 1816, but substantial industrial development in Catawba came with the railroads. Hickory and Conover, the main industrial centers, were originally stops along the Western North Carolina Railroad line from Salisbury to Morganton. Maiden, a third industrial town, developed around a cotton mill that farmer Henry Carpenter built to take advantage of a rail line through his property. After the turn of the century, Catawba County's nascent industry received a boost when the Southern Power Company (later Duke Power) began to promote industry in order to add customers for the electricity generated by its hydroelectric plants on the Catawba River. In addition to cotton, the manufacturing of hosiery, furniture, and work gloves became main industries in the area. Although the interviews are with workers in all four of Catawba County's major industries, furniture and glove manufacturing were stressed more than hosiery or cotton.
Many of the interviews relate to the Shuford family and the many enterprises they created. In 1880, Abel A. Shuford founded a cotton mill at Granite Falls, which he later moved to Hickory. Shuford also founded Hickory's first bank (the First National Bank of Hickory) and invested in other local enterprises. Subsequent generations diversified into furniture, plastics, rayon, and pressure-sensitive tape. In the early 1980s, Shuford Mills and another Shuford enterprise, Century Furniture, were the largest employers in Hickory.
Another branch of the Shuford family was instrumental in the development of the glove and furniture industries in Conover. Adrian L. Shuford began his career as a clerk in his uncle Abel Shuford's bank in Hickory. In 1916, Shuford and a local Republican politician, Charles Robert Brady, bought the Warlong Glove Company of Newton and moved it to Conover. Brady and Shuford branched into other business ventures, and, by 1925, they held a controlling interest in Hickory Handle. In 1927, they sold the company to Preston Yount and Rob Herman, who were the supervisors at the glove and furniture mills respectively. A year later, Brady and Shuford divided Conover Furniture into two companies, with Brady retaining control of Conover Furniture and Shuford taking charge of Warlong Glove. Under Shuford's management, Conover Knitting Company was established and installed in the same building as Warlong Glove. Conover Furniture passed to Brady's son, Walter Brady, and son-in-law Bill Barker upon his death in 1934. Interviews with members of the Shuford family and with Lula Brady Barker document the history of the Shuford and Brady enterprises in Conover.
During the Depression, the furniture industry hit upon hard times owing to a decline in the market. As a result, Conover Furniture went bankrupt in 1938. James Edgar Broyhill, a Lenoir industrialist, bought the plant in 1941. Information on the development of the glove industry after World War II can be found in the interview with Arthur Little, founder and owner of Southern Glove, and in interviews with Ralph Bowman, former president of Hickory Chair, and Hugh Boyer, president of the company (now called Hickory Manufacturing). These interviews also document the transition from family to corporate management, and the interviewees' ties with the furniture industry as a whole through membership in such organizations as Western Carolina Industries and the Southern Furniture Manufacturers' Association.
Most of the interviewees worked in the furniture, glove, cotton, or hosiery industries although many of them held several different jobs during their careers, some of them outside of industry. Topics relating to work include wages, hours, discipline, pensions, technology, management, and working conditions. Many of the interviewees described occupational, gender, and racial differences in their respective industries. Cotton mill workers discussed stretchouts and speedups most often, while furniture workers mentioned occupational hazards more than other interviewees. Some of the workers, especially those in the glove and hosiery industries, spent part of their careers doing piecework at home. Almost every interviewee voiced an opinion about union activity. Interviewee Mareda Cobb recalled the Gastonia Strike of 1929 and the 1934 General Strike. Most of the interviewees also recalled the Depression, and some of them worked for the WPA during that period. Several of them also recounted the impact of World War II and the 1974 recession on industry.
Other jobs held by various interviewees included railroad work, carpentry, and construction work on dam projects. Jobs for women included domestic service, clerical work, banking, and journalism. A number of the interviewees grew up on farms and did farm work as children. Several of them worked as farmers during their adult careers. A few taught school.
Family life is another theme in these interviews. Most of the interviewees recalled their childhoods, education, and early work experiences. Few of these workers lived in mill villages. Several, however, lived in housing owned by Brady, and one worker spent his childhood in a mill village in Newton. The interviewees in this series were frank in discussing courtship and marriage, pregnancy and childbirth, birth control, illegitimacy, and domestic violence. Boarding and domestic servants are mentioned in a few of the interviews. Mareda Cobb and Carrie Yelton were very active in senior citizens groups and nutrition centers for the elderly.
Religion is also a topic of importance. Many of the interviewees belonged to the Lutheran Church, reflecting the German ancestry of many of the region's settlers. Others were Methodists, Baptists, or attended the United Church of Christ or the Assembly of God. Several of the interviewees talked about the dual system of public and Lutheran parochial schools that prevailed in Catawba County until the 1930s. W. Farel Warlick played an important role in the consolidation of the Conover schools.
Many of the interviewees discussed the political life of the county. They often revealed their political affiliations, took stands on the New Deal, and commented on political events, including the 1974 recession. World War I, World War II, and the Korean War were addressed from the perspective of those who fought. Although most of the interviewees who claimed a political affiliation belonged to the Democratic or Republican parties, two of them discussed the Populist Party. The Fred Yoder interview focused on his father's participation in the Farmers' Alliance and in the Populist and Democratic parties. Marion Butler, Robert Glenn, and Josephus Daniels figure in his account. Local politics are also discussed in an interview with Adrian Shuford, who served as mayor of Conover and in the state senate.
Another area covered in these interviews is race relations. Most discussion on this subject focused on race relations in the work place and on the differing jobs assigned to members of each race. Other topics include integration, the NAACP, white racial attitudes, and the Ku Klux Klan. Three interviews with African-American workers cover some of the same topics and provide information on the black community in Conover. Fred Yoder's discussion of the Populist movement includes information on race relations early in the century.
Medicine and health constitute are other areas explored in these interviews. Hospitals, doctors, midwives, nursing homes, and the Catawba Medical Foundation are among the health care providers discussed. The 1918 flu epidemic, polio, and other specific illnesses were also mentioned.
Transportation, recreation, and music are minor themes, although there are many references to them. Recreational activities included movies, radio, swimming, attending fairs, bowling, softball, cock fighting, and square dances. Marshall Clay recalled his participation in a semi-pro baseball league. Thurman A. Sheets made musical instruments as a hobby. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is the subject of part of the interview with Fred Yoder. Yoder recalled various UNC professors, including Charles Lee Raper, J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton, Frank Porter Graham, and Eugene Branson.
Charlotte, N.C., has been a focal point for economic development in the Piedmont region. During the antebellum period, Charlotte was a small market town, with only 3,000 citizens in 1860. In spite of its small size, it became an important trade center. As early as 1825, Charlotte businessmen began urging the state legislature to improve the town's transportation links with other markets by establishing railroad service. Construction on the first railroad began in 1849. Location in the center of a gold-producing region also added to Charlotte's importance. With the discovery of gold in Mecklenburg County in 1799 and the opening of other mines in surrounding counties, Charlotte became a center for shipping gold to the federal mint in Philadelphia. In 1835, the United States government established a branch of the mint in Charlotte. Industrial and commercial development began in the second half of the 19th century, with cotton playing an important role. As cotton prices fell after the Civil War, it became more profitable to manufacture textiles in the South, thereby avoiding the cost of shipping cotton north. Charlotte, however, was slower to develop a textile industry than elsewhere in North Carolina. In 1881, entrepreneurs established the town's first textile manufacturing establishment, the Charlotte Cotton Mill. Other mills followed, with the most rapid expansion occurring between 1889 and 1910.
Charlotte began to expanded even more rapidly after the turn of the century. With the encouragement of businessmen and investors such as Daniel Augustus Tompkins, Charlotte's industry became more diversified, with no one industry predominating. Textile and agricultural machinery, chemicals, cotton seed oil, and peanut food products were among the industries that developed in Charlotte during this period. Real estate development and construction accompanied economic expansion. In 1890, James Latta began to develop Dilworth, a tract of land outside the city limits. The Dilworth project eventually included both residential and industrial neighborhoods. Myers Park, a residential development, was begun shortly after the turn of the century. As Charlotte expanded, the city used North Carolina's annexation law to incorporate outlying neighborhoods and mill villages.
After World War II, distribution rather than manufacturing became central to Charlotte's economy. As conglomerates began to incorporate individual mills, cotton manufacturing became more centralized. Consequently, textile manufacturing moved out of the city to other locations, although Charlotte remained at the geographical center of the region's cotton industry. At the same time, new highways began to displace mill villages and other working-class neighborhoods. The development of superhighways facilitated Charlotte's development as a distribution center. Charlotte eventually claimed to be second only to Chicago as a trucking terminal.
Charlotte's emergence as a financial center began after the Civil War. Numerous banks were founded in the 1870s, and the wave of new financial and commercial institutions continued into the 1920s. By the early 1980s, Charlotte claimed to be the largest financial center in the southeast.
The Charlotte interviews on the mill village neighborhoods of north Charlotte. Most of the interviewees worked all or part of their careers in the cotton or hosiery industries. Among the topics discussed are various jobs in the mills, work conditions, child labor, work discipline, changing technology, speed ups, and efficiency experts. The impact of the Depression and World War II is also discussed. Accounts of unionization attempts and strikes figure prominently in these interviews. A few interviewees recalled specific strikes, among them the Gastonia Strike and the 1934 General Strike. Mildred Gwin Andrews, who served as secretary-manager for the Yarn Spinners' Association and worked as a researcher for the Cotton Textile Institute and the American Textile Machinery Association, provided information about the history of cotton manufacturing in North Carolina and described some of the industry's professional associations.
Mill village and family life constitute the other major themes of these interviews. Discussions of paternalism, living conditions, and company stores reveal the close ties between the mills and the villages. The relationship between textile workers and other Charlotte residents illuminates class relations within the city. Almost all of the interviewees discussed family life, including childhood, education, furnishings and diet, courtship, marriage, and pregnancy. A few interviewees also touched upon more personal matters, such as illegitimacy, divorce, birth control, suicide, and alcoholism. Because the interviewers made some of their contacts through a church hot lunch program for senior citizens, programs for the elderly are an important element in these interviews.
Other themes relating to everyday life include recreation, health care, and religion. The interviewees enjoyed a wide variety of recreational activities, including fishing, hunting, square dancing, quilting bees, and playing in musical groups. Interviewees also mentioned attending movies, minstrel and medicine shows, and listening to the phonograph and radio. Several workers also played on mill baseball teams. Among the topics relating to health care are folk cures, the 1918 flu epidemic, and vaccinations. Midwives attended many women at the births of their children, but hospital deliveries are also mentioned. Religion was an important element in the lives of these interviewees. In their narratives, they emphasized church attendance, Sunday school, and revivals rather than their experiences as members of specific denominations.
Because of Charlotte's importance as a commercial center, a few of the interviewees are from outside the textile industry. The owner of a trucking company, and railway, streetcar, and auto workers are included among the interviewees representing occupations relating to transportation. These interviewees discussed unionization in the trucking and railroad industries, and the streetcar workers recalled the strike of 1918. Several mentioned Cameron Morrison, a Charlotte businessman who served as governor of North Carolina (1920-1928) in connection with transportation.
In order to show Charlotte's economic diversity, the project included interviews with business leaders and executives. Milton Short, a member of the Chamber of Commerce, offered a businessman's perspective on Charlotte's growth and development. Interviews with John Belk, Jean Cole, and with engineers at Duke Power and Westinghouse provide information about some of Charlotte's other major enterprises.
The Charlotte interviews include information on a number of prominent North Carolinians. The role Mildred Gwin Andrews took in the textile industry brought her into contact with Liston Pope, Harriet Herring, Howard Odum, Luther Hodges, and James Spencer Love. In his capacity as a naval officer serving in Georgia, Ralph W. Strickland recalled meeting Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Benjamin V. Martin, son of a Clemson professor, had many recollections of his early years and college education at Clemson University.
The Durham, N.C., interviews document the experiences of workers in the city's tobacco, textile, and hosiery industries. Durham began its transformation from a crossroads into a major industrial city with the completion of the railroad line between Raleigh and Greensboro, just prior to the Civil War. After the war, Robert F. Morris, one of the largest farmers in Orange County, moved his tobacco business to Durham. William Blackwell, a Person County merchant, acquired the business in 1869 and, in 1870, he took Julian Shakespeare Carr, son of Chapel Hill's leading merchant, as a partner. Carr assumed full ownership of the plant in 1883. By the mid-1880s, Durham had many other tobacco companies, among them Washington Duke and Sons. The Dukes gradually absorbed Blackwell's and other firms and, by 1890, had established a consolidated cigarette firm, the American Tobacco Company. Anti-trust action in 1911, however, forced the dissolution of the company, which was reorganized as the new American Tobacco Company consisting of the former Duke properties, and Liggett and Meyers, which included Blackwell's former holdings.
The textile and hosiery industries in Durham arose in conjunction with the tobacco industry. These mills provided outlets for surplus capital and made bags and other products needed by the tobacco companies. Among Durham's textile establishments was the Erwin Cotton Manufacturing Company and mill village in West Durham, founded by members of the Duke family. William Erwin, who was related to the Holts of Alamance County and had supervised Plaid Mill, served as superintendent. Eventually, Erwin took on Kemp Plummer Lewis, whose family owned the Rocky Mount Cotton Mills, as an associate. The hosiery industry in Durham had similar origins. In 1884, J. S. Carr and J. M. Odell, established the Durham Cotton Mill in East Durham. By the 1890s, Carr, driven out of tobacco by the Tobacco Trust, devoted most of his energies to hosiery as he consolidated 14 local mills into one company.
Work is one of the most important topics covered in these interviews. Many of the interviewees migrated to Durham from surrounding farms (among them, Stagville, owned by Bennehan Cameron), and many of them alternated between farm or sawmilling jobs and work in the city's factories. Often the interviews include accounts of sharecropping, farm work, lumbering, and sawmilling. Among women, domestic service often was their first job. In talking about work in the tobacco factories, the interviewees focus on work conditions, the steps involved in processing tobacco, the division of labor by gender and by race, labor policies, the advent of labor unions, and strikes. The textile and hosiery workers cover similar topics, as well as speedups and time studies. A number of the interviewees relate their personal recollections of William Erwin and Kemp Plummer Lewis.
Race relations are covered more thoroughly in these interviews than in others in the series because many of the tobacco workers were African Americans. Many of the interviewees discussed segregation in the factories, both in jobs and in the facilities provided for blacks and whites. Other topics relating to race relations include segregation and discrimination in the churches, schools, neighborhoods, mill villages, and especially in the unions. Racial violence, such as lynching and Ku Klux Klan incidents, and miscegenation, are also discussed.
Almost all of the interviewees discussed childhood experiences, work as children, education, family life, courtship and marriage, and living conditions. Many of the interviewees described boarding house life, their homes, sanitation facilities, and life in the mill villages. Education occupies a particularly important place in these interviews because some of them were conducted by Kenneth Kornblau, a Duke undergraduate, for a paper on the Durham schools. These interviews focus on the backgrounds and experiences of teachers and school officials and on the history of Durham's school system.
Music played an important role in the lives of many of the people interviewed. They sang in the tobacco factories, played guitars and other instruments, and formed bands and singing groups to perform gospel music and the blues. Several interviewees shared memories of Gary Davis, a nationally known blues singer from Durham. Two of the interviewees worked as musicians, touring with medicine shows and performing on the radio. Other forms of recreation and entertainment are dances, cornshucking and quilting parties, movies, vaudeville, and sports.
These interviews touch on a variety of other topics. Many of the interviewees discussed illnesses, such as tuberculosis, diphtheria, typhoid, and the flu epidemic of 1918. Medical care, especially the segregated services provided by the tobacco companies, is also covered. Many of the women discussed birth control, pregnancy, childbirth, and abortion. Religion was important in the lives of many of the interviewees, and most of them discussed their church involvement. Crime, street life, and prostitution are also covered in several of the interviews. Finally, most of the interviewees discussed the Depression, and a few of them referred to experiences during World War I and World War II.
These interviews focus on the development of the textile industry in Greenville, S.C. Before the Civil War, Greenville served as a county seat, a center for grain milling, and a summer vacationing area for Low Country planters. In the 1880s, entrepreneurs began to build cotton mills and accompanying mill villages along the railroad lines on the outskirts of Greenville. As a result, Greenville developed distinctive neighborhoods that reflected the social tensions within the community. There were the prosperous town, the neighborhoods in which black servants lived, and the mill villages.
The interviews also cover the work experiences and daily lives of Greenville's mill workers. Most of the workers or their families migrated to the city from farms in the Piedmont or the Appalachian Mountains. Many of the interviewees related their farming experiences and described their adjustments to mill work. In describing mill work, the interviewees talked about work conditions, safety, stretchouts, wages, paternalism, the division of labor by gender, home work, the impact of the Depression and World War II, and violence in the mills. They also discussed unionization attempts, and several interviewees had vivid recollections of the 1934 General Strike.
Occupational illness is an especially important topic in these interviews. Many of the interviewees suffered from emphysema, byssinosis, or brown lung as a result of their mill work, and some of them had been involved in litigation with textile companies over health issues. Technology, the construction of mills and mill villages, and the movement of the textile industry from New England to the South are also mentioned.
Interviews also document family life in the mill villages. Almost all of the interviewees discussed their childhoods and school years. Many talked about marriage, courtship, illegitimacy, pregnancy, divorce, sex and birth control, and old age. Discussions of sanitation, attitudes towards the residents of the mill villages, part-time farming, community violence, housing, illnesses and medical care, transportation, and housing reflect the tenor of mill village life. The interviewees belonged to a variety of churches, and some of them discussed company involvement in mill village churches. Although many mentioned recreation and music, this topic is not as important in these interviews as it is in some of the other series.
Other topics include World War I, military service in World War II, the electric power industry, and politics. Although there is one interview with an African American worker and some mention of the role of blacks in the mills, race relations are not a major topic.
Interviews in this group reflect the theme of the "Perspectives on Industrialization: The Piedmont Crescent of Industry, 1900-1940" project, but either were not conducted in any of the original seven communities or were done after the completion of the original project. The project focuses on the impact of industrialization in seven main areas: Badin, Burlington, Bynum, Catawba County, Charlotte, and Durham, N.C., and Greenville, S.C. These interviews are with workers from the communities Carrboro, Greensboro, Gastonia, and Marion, N.C. Topics include the development of various industries in these regions, especially textiles, tobacco, hosiery, and furniture and the experiences of workers in these industries, both in their work and in daily life, including health, recreation, religion, family, education, and financial hardships.
Interviews about industry in Farmville, N.C., were done by Scott Ellsworth of Duke University in 1977.
Interviews are chiefly about the strike in 1929 by textile workers in Elizabethton, Tenn.
Most interviews in this series focus on the growth and development of traditional and emergent North Carolina industries, including furniture, banking, tobacco products, textiles, poultry, food and food services, tourism, pharmaceuticals, computers, and steel. Some interviewees also discuss the impact of businesses on the communities in which they operate and about the regional, national, and global developments that will affect their future prospects.
The four Hostile Takeover Project interviews are with representatives of Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company; Heublein, Inc.; Microdot, Inc.; and Richardson-Vicks, Inc. Interviewees talk about their experiences during hostile takeover attempts on their companies. Discussions center around takeover attempts as related both to the individual organizations and to the broader effects of this business practice on the country's economic health. The interviews were conducted in 1989 by William A. Crowther, former director of Marketing Communications, International at Richardson-Vicks.
This project was funded by H. Smith Richardson, Jr., of Wilmington, N.C., and was developed in conjunction with the Oral History Collection at Columbia University, New York, N.Y.
North Carolina Business History Project interviews are with leaders of traditional and emergent North Carolina industries, including furniture, banking, tobacco products, textiles, poultry, food and food services, tourism, pharmaceuticals, computers, and steel. Interviewees describe the origins and evolution of their companies and the changes and problems they confront. They are also asked about the impact of businesses on the communities in which they operate and about the regional, national, and global developments that will affect their future prospects. Included are interviews with Richard Barentine, International Home Furnishings Marketing Association; Lauch Faircloth, politician and businessman; Roger Gant, textile firm president; Dennis B. Gillings, Quintiles Transnational Corp.; James Goodnight, SAS Institute; James A. Graham, North Carolina Commissioner of Agriculture; John Medlin, Wachovia Corporation; Hugh L. McColl, Bank of America; Sherwood H. Smith, CP& Tom E. Smith, Food Lion, Inc.; Robert Sidney Smith, National Association of Hosiery Manufacturers; Jacob Froelich, Froelich Companies; F. Kenneth Iverson, Nucor Corporation; Lonnie Poole, Waste Industries; and S. Davis Phillips (Dave Phillips), Phillips Industries and North Carolina Secretary of Commerce.
The first interviews I-0005 through I-0012, were conducted by Walter E. Campbell. Peter Coclanis, professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill directed the project.
An additional group of interviews, I-0068 through I-0085, conducted by Joe Mosnier, contains interviews with North Carolina business leaders such as James Goodnight of SAS Institute and John Medlin of Wachovia Bank. They explore how North Carolina is faring in the new global economy. Mosnier asked what strategies the state's business leaders adopted as traditional industries floundered and newer pursuits such as computing and agribusiness boomed; how the interviewees attempted to control and respond to these historic trends and changes; and what kind of economic future the interviewees envision for the nation's tenth largest state.
Interviews I-0092 through I-0106, conducted in 1997 by Dorothy Gay Darr, explore four areas of North Carolina business history: tourism, textiles, furniture, and retail. Interviewees include members of the Cecil Family of the Biltmore Estate, owners of hosiery companies, owners of furniture and veneer companies, and a retail executive for the J.C. Penney Company.
These 61 interviews with 51 individuals selected by the Hickory Springs Manufacturing Company were designed to unearth and preserve knowledge about the company, the families in positions of leadership, the industry, and the region. Hickory Springs Manufacturing Company, founded in 1944 in Hickory, N.C., produces a wide range of bedding and upholstered furniture products, including metal and foam parts and various types of hardware. In 1998, it consisted of 56 plants in 14 states and had a workforce of 3,600 employees. The company was distinguished by an unusually low employee turnover rate.
Three of the company's top executives--Bobby Bush, Jr., vice-president of the Foam Products Division; Rob Simmons, director of the International Department; and Jack Finegan, corporate director of communications--conceived the idea of conducting an oral history project. In 1997, they began working with the Southern Oral History Program to design the project. The Program supervised an independent researcher, Anne Radford Phillips, as she conducted interviews with individuals selected by Hickory Springs.
Interviews conducted by students of the University of North Carolina School of Law with prominent lawyers and judges in North Carolina. Some of the lawyers interviewed are also politicians, who have served in the North Carolina General Assembly or in the United States Congress. Interviewees discuss family and personal life in addition to career, law, legal ethics, and the legal profession. Many interviewees share childhood experiences, memories of World War II or the Vietnam War, college and law school experiences at UNC and elsewhere, and memorable cases. Several interviews, especially those with African American or Native American lawyers and judges, address racial segregation, school integration, and civil rights law. Other interviews address women in the legal profession. Some interviewees discussed the death penalty, and several interviewees describe working with Julius L. Chambers. These interviews were undertaken as part of a course taught by law professor Walter H. Bennett, Jr. The interviews were subsequently transcribed at the Law School and donated to the Southern Oral History Program Collection.
Series K contains interviews conducted in the course of community studies by students and faculty exploring questions of central concern to the humanities: What is the meaning of community? What role does historical memory play in coping with loss, creating new identities and communities, and becoming agents rather than victims of change?
Interviews in this series explore the meaning of community and the role of historical memory.
Cane Creek interviews explore the controversy in the late 1970s and early 1980s between residents of dairy farming community, Cane Creek, N.C., and the Orange County Water and Sewer Authority (OWASA). OWASA's proposal to construct a reservoir that would flood Cane Creek farms threatened a community already beset by economic pressures and government policies that had transformed the practice of farming in the region. Like their counterparts throughout the United States, Cane Creek farmers had been drawn since World War II into mechanized and centralized agricultural practices. Proximity to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and rapid population growth added pressure to the Cane Creek community and led to OWASA's search for new water sources. Residents of Cane Creek organized the Cane Creek Conservation Authority (CCC) to fight OWASA. The CCC lost its battle to stop the reservoir, and construction for the began in January 1987.
The interviews in this series document all sides of the OWASA controversy and reveal the social and cultural dimensions of America's transforming rural life and the political, environmental, and public policy changes of urban growth. The majority of those interviewed were farmers and residents of Cane Creek, but the series includes interviews with OWASA personnel, an attorney, a local politician, a county commissioner, and university employees who lived in the Cane Creek community. Students enrolled in an oral history course in the fall semester of 1985 conducted most of the interviews, but graduate students continued the project through the spring of 1989.
Coastal Carolina interviews focus on North Carolina counties where World War II defense industries and military bases sparked rapid and unprecedented change. The coast with its sharecroppers, small farmers, fishing villages, and timber camps, was transformed as thousands of civilian workers poured into industry, and skilled occupations were available to women and African Americans for the first time.
The project "World War II and After: Memory, Community, and Social Change in Coastal North Carolina," marked the 50th anniversary of World War II and focused on North Carolina counties where defense industries and three of the nation's largest military bases sparked rapid and unprecedented change in the once isolated and self-sufficient coastal communities.
Interviews are with residents of Mebane, N.C. and former employees of White Furniture Company of Mebane, which closed its doors in 1993. Interviewees discuss the plant's importance to the town and the history of the company, which until it closed was one of the oldest operating furniture factories in the South.
The impact of plant closings on North Carolina communities was also explored in a photography exhibit on the White Furniture plant that was mounted by photographer and American Studies instructor Bill Bamberger in an abandoned department store. Bamberger and Cathy Davidson used the interviews and photographs in their book Closing: The Life and Death of an American Factory.
Interviews are with first and second generation Indian-Americans living in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area of North Carolina. Interviewees discuss the desire to preserve Indian culture and heritage in the United States, generational differences in the Indian-American community, gender roles among Indian-Americans, and Hindu religious beliefs and practices.
Interviews conducted between 1980 and 1985 by writer Warren Moore Miller explore life in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina. Miller interviewed mountain residents including folklorists, university faculty, attorneys, politicians, a former moonshiner, blue collar workers, farmers, craftsmen, and teachers. Among the interviewees were U.S. Senator Sam Ervin, Winston Cup racecar driver Junior Johnson, and ballad singer Cas Wallin. Miller used the interviews in his book Mountain Voices: A Legacy of the Blue Ridge and Great Smokies (Globe Pequot Press, 1988).
Interviews were conducted during the fall of 1999 by UNC Chapel Hill graduate and undergraduate students enrolled in an oral history course. Students engaged community members of Chatham County, N.C., in discussions about the county's history since World War II and its future directions. Interviewees discussed county land use, taxation, economic development, and race relations.
Interviews are with former and then current residents Henderson County, N.C., in the Green River Valley, which lies on the border between North Carolina and South Carolina. Many interviewees discuss the city of Greenville, S.C. David Schenck directed the "Green River Heritage Area" project, which was initiated by the Green River Preserve and Landowners in the Green River Valley.
Interviews were conducted in March 2009 for "Our Stories, In Focus," a project sponsored by the Chapel Hill Public Arts Commission and UNC Chapel Hill's Program in the Humanities and Human Values. Project participants with diverse cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds attended workshops where they shared their stories. Topics discussed include family life and upbringing, what brought them to North Carolina, and their relationships to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The interviews were conducted informally with interviewer and interviewee occasionally changing roles.
Many interviewees were students, who share their experiences entering the university and their aspirations for the future. Several interviewees born outside the United States discuss their journeys to North Carolina and offer outside perspectives and observations on the Chapel Hill area.
Interviews are with longtime residents of Wilson County, N.C., who were children or teenagers from white middle class and affluent homes during the 1930s and 1940s. Parts of the Wilson community, in contrast to most of North Carolina and the nation in the 1930s, prospered because of the tobacco market. The interviewees describe their memories and perceptions of the Great Depression, and they describe their childhood pastimes, friends, families, and the town of Wilson during the 1930s and 1940s.
Interviews are with longtime residents of Cary, N.C., who were children or teenagers during school desegregation. The interviewees describe their childhood pastimes, friends, families, and the town of Cary between the 1930s and 1960s.
In 1959, a four-lane expressway was making its way through the heart of Durham, N.C. Riding on the coattails of the 1956 Interstate Highway Act and adopting city revitalization techniques pioneered by urban renewal leaders a decade earlier, the East-West Expressway—now known as Highway 147—triggered thirty years of business and automobile-oriented redevelopment throughout Durham, fragmenting the city and leaving a path of destruction in its wake. Set directly in the expressway’s track were several working-class black communities, communities that would pay the ultimate price in the name of economic growth and prosperity. Some communities, however, took note of the relocation and displacement occurring in neighborhoods affected by the highway and mobilized against the expressway in an effort to keep their communities intact. Crest Street was such a community.
This collection includes six oral histories focused on the lives of Crest Street residents and activists, including Willie Patterson, Maedell Gattis, and Betty Johnson and allies to the Crest Street cause, attorneys Mike Calhoun and Alice Ratliff. This project focuses on documenting the history of the Crest Street community through the lens of community history and resident experiences. Crest Street leaders, advocates, and attorneys reflect on the movement to save Crest Street from the expansion of the East-West Expressway, a movement that maintained Crest Street as a unified community and a thriving example of residential empowerment in the face of seemingly unstoppable urban forces.
Interviews were collected by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill student Emily Goldstein in support of an honors thesis in geography titled “We Shall Not Be Moved: A History of Anti-Expressway Organizing by the Crest Street Community in Durham, North Carolina,” and the creation of a community archive titled the Crest Street Community History Project.
Listening for a Change encompasses interviews exploring dramatic changes in North Carolina since World War II and includes a variety of community-based projects focused on themes of race, public schools, the environment, a rapidly changing global economy, and the continuous influx of new immigrants. The project's name was inspired by the book, Listening for a Change: Oral History and Community Development. Co-authors Hugo Slim and Paul Thompson emphasize the importance of oral history as a form of participatory documentation and a method of historical inquiry that encourages active involvement by community members.
Listening for a Change encompasses a series of interviews exploring the dramatic changes in North Carolina since World War II, and a variety of thematic, community-based projects centered primarily on the themes of race and the public schools, the environment, and the impact of a changing global economy and new immigrants. The project's name was inspired by the book, Listening for a Change: Oral History and Community Development, co-authored by Hugo Slim and Paul Thompson, which emphasizes the importance of oral history as a form of participatory documentation, a method of historical inquiry that encourages the active involvement of community members. The overview project is the most wide-ranging component of Listening for a Change. Most interviews are by historian David Cecelski, who traveled around North Carolina seeking individuals who could help explain the epochal changes taking place in the state. Cecelski has described this work as a collage--an attempt to convey a strong sense of the diversity and richness of the state's past. Cecelski's column, "Listening to History," in the Raleigh News and Observer is based on interviews for this project. Additional interviews have been conducted by Melynn Glusman.
Interviews consider the impact of immigration on North East Central Durham, N.C., a transitional community once composed predominantly of African Americans, but now increasingly Latino. In 1998 and 1999, project directors Alicia Rouverol and Jill Hemming and researchers Colin Austin, Ann Kaplan, and Angela Hornsby conducted 23 interviews with immigrants and with long-time community members from the North East Central neighborhood. The interviews explore how community is created and re-created under such circumstances and how individuals derive a sense of meaning in the midst of major social transformations. Questions focused on daily life in North East Central Durham, what qualities of community each group contributed to the neighborhood, conflicts between groups, and opportunities to build bridges across racial and cultural divides. Five of the interviews were conducted in Spanish.
Interviews conducted by Mark Klempner in 1998 and 1999 explore the recollections of six Jewish immigrants to North Carolina during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. These six subjects, all members of the professional class, encountered little or no religious persecution in the South. They describe North Carolina as a polite, warm, and kind community, which they are happy to call home.
Initiated by Leon Fink, professor of history, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, this project was designed to document the history of working-class culture in Cooleemee, N.C. Will Jones interviewed African American residents of Cooleemee, N.C., about their memories of working in the textile mill and living in the town.
Interviews conducted by Pamela Grundy focus on school desegregation in Charlotte, N.C. The interviews examine both the process of desegregation and the effects it had on individuals, on race relations, and on the community as a whole. Unlike many southern communities, where desegregation was largely thwarted by large-scale white flight to private institutions or suburban school districts, the combined Charlotte-Mecklenburg County School District achieved a relatively stable racial and economic balance within its schools, largely because of an ambitious busing program (Charlotte was the site of the landmark Swann case, in which system-wide busing to achieve desegregation was given legal force).
These interviews, led primarily by Peggy Van Scoyoc and conducted by members of the Friends of the Page-Walker Hotel as part of the Cary Heritage Museum's Oral History Project, contribute to the project's mission "to document the history of Cary by recording observations and reminiscences which relate to the character and development of the town." Interviewees include members of prominent Cary, N.C., families; a former mayor; former sharecropping families; former farmers; former teachers; long-time community merchants: florist, restaurant, grocery, and barber shop owners; the town's retired chief of police and fire chief; former Page-Walker Hotel owners; adult children of former farmers and merchants; and other residents in the community. Interviews were conducted over several decades, the majority between 1998 and 2015.
These interviews by Chris McGinnis, an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, were conducted for an independent study in the fall semester of 2000 and for the Southern Oral History Program in 2001-2002. They give a perspective of gay life in the South, with particular emphasis on North Carolina in the 1960s through the 1980s. The interviews chronicle the development of the gay community in the South and explore early gay bars, social events and festivals of the gay community, gay organizations and activism, and places where gay men met and engaged in public sex, among other topics. Included are interviews with Chapel Hill, N.C., town council member Joseph A. Herzenberg and writer Perry Deane Young. Interviews with Angela Brightfeather and Lily Rose DeVee offer perspectives of transgender individuals.
This is a collection of interviews by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill graduate and undergraduate students who participated in an oral history course in the spring of 2001. The students looked closely at Chapel Hill's troubled effort to dismantle a system of racial segregation in the public schools; the fraught process of creating new, integrated institutions; and the ways in which the memory of those experiences shapes the inner life of schools to this day. The particular focus of the project was Lincoln High School, Chapel Hill's historically black secondary institution, which was closed upon the implementation of the desegregation plan. Interviewees include former teachers, students, and administrators of Lincoln High School and Chapel Hill High School, which was integrated in 1962. Included is an interview with school board member Edwin Caldwell, Jr.
Students researched, conducted, indexed, and transcribed these interviews.
This collection of interviews by historians Lu Ann Jones and Charlie Thompson explores the dramatic changes in eastern North Carolina tobacco farming and farm communities since World War II. In addition to tracing the history of growing, cultivating, harvesting, and selling tobacco, interviewees speculate about what current developments in tobacco politics may mean for the future of tobacco farming. This series also contains two interviews conducted by students under the direction of Dr. Jacquelyn Hall during the Spring 2011 semester at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
This collection of interviews was conducted by Pamela Grundy as part of her research for a book on North Carolina athletics, Learning to Win: Sport, Education and Social Change in Twentieth-Century North Carolina (University of North Carolina Press, 2001). The interviews with John McLendon and James Ross deal largely with African American sport during segregation. Ross's interview also contains a good deal of material on African American community life generally. The interviews with William Friday and Susan Shackelford deal with athletics and integration. The Shackelford interview focuses on the integration of high school cheerleading, and also contains some observations about school integration in general.
This collection of interviews by Rob Amberg documents the construction of a nine-mile section of Interstate 26. Amberg explored the history of daily life in the once isolated community of eastern Madison County and considered the consequences of highway development on community interaction and sense of place. Interviewees include the county sheriff; a probation officer; an environmental activist; the resident highway engineer of the I-0026 Corridor project; self-described hippies who moved to Madison County in the early 1970s to live off the land; the mayor of Mars Hill, N.C.; and the town manager of Mars Hill, N.C.
These interviews by folklorist Barbara Lau focus on the experience of growing up Cambodian in Greensboro. They are part of Lau's ongoing research project concerning Cambodian refugee communities in North Carolina. Since 1992, Lau has been documenting folklife traditions, community and family ceremonies, and personal experiences of Cambodians in North Carolina. Photographs, videotapes, and audiotapes documenting this work may be found in the Barbara Lau Collection (#20055), Southern Folklife Collection.
Interviews with flood victims, rescue workers, relief workers, ministers, farmers, farm workers, small-business owners, environmental monitors, and political leaders in eastern North Carolina about the devastating flooding in the aftermath of Hurricane Floyd. In the fall of 1999, soon after the flood, the Southern Oral History Program set out to document the catastrophe and to assess the environmental, political, and economic consequences of the disaster, as well as its impact on individual lives. Many broad themes emerged from the interviews: the sweeping toll of the flood on human lives; the disruptions to community and sense of place; the character of political response to the disaster at local, state, and national levels; public health and environmental issues arising from the flooding; the effect of the disaster on the region's most vulnerable residents, including children, the elderly, and lower-income families, and the experiences of relief workers. Interviews by Jay Barnes for his book, Faces From the Flood: Hurricane Floyd Remembered, explore the impact of the floods and offer parallels between memory of the hurricane and memory of other recent tragedies, particularly the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001.
Accompanied by photographer Rob Amberg, project coordinator Charlie Thompson led the effort. UNC Chapel Hill doctoral student Katie Otis and award-winning North Carolina reporter Leda Hartman also conducted interviews. Interviews by Jay Barnes were conducted with emergency workers, community volunteers, business owners, and survivors.
Interviews conducted for a class on oral history and school desegregation taught by Pamela Grundy at Davidson College in the spring of 1999. They deal with aspects of school desegregation in the town of Mooresville, in Iredell County, and in Davidson, N.C. The most comprehensive set of interviews deals with the history of the Ada Jenkins School, which was the African American school in Davidson until it was closed in 1965.
Interviews by members of a Davidson College-Johnson C. Smith University oral history class conducted by Pamela Grundy. In the spring of 2001, the class focused on school desegregation in Mecklenburg County, N.C. The interviews concentrate on desegregation at West Charlotte High School, a historically black school in the center of Charlotte, and North Mecklenburg High School, a historically white school in the northern part of Mecklenburg County.
Interviews by Pamela Grundy focusing on school desegregation in Charlotte, N.C. The interviews examine both the process of desegregation and the effects it had on individuals, on race relations, and on the community as a whole. Unlike many southern communities, in which desegregation was largely thwarted by large-scale white flight to private institutions or suburban school districts, the combined Charlotte-Mecklenburg County school district managed to achieve a relatively stable racial and economic balance within its schools, chiefly because of an ambitious busing program.
An oral history project documenting the immigration stories of South Asians in Chapel Hill and Carrboro, N.C. The project was conceived by Andrew Jilani and funded in November 1998 by the North Carolina Humanities Council.
Interviews exploring environmentalism in Louisiana. Eugene Ford and Paul Francke, undergraduate students at the University of Chicago, conducted the interviews in August 2000, while they were working as summer interns with the Southern Oral History Program.
Interviews by Kelly Navies explore the history of Stephens-Lee High School in Asheville, N.C. Built in 1923, Stephens-Lee was for many decades western North Carolina's only secondary school for African Americans. The school drew students from Buncombe, Henderson, Madison, Yancey, and Transylvania counties, and represented a focal point and a key source of pride for the extended African American community in the state's western region. In 1965, however, the all-white school board closed Stephens-Lee as part of its desegregation plan, and, in 1975, the entire multi-building campus, except for the gymnasium, was bulldozed. Navies interviewed former faculty, administrators, and students of Stephens-Lee to collect memories of the school and to assess the impact of desegregation and the school's closing on the black community in western North Carolina.
Interviews by Bob Gilgor, a retired doctor and Chapel Hill, N.C., documentarian, with teachers, staff, and alumni from Lincoln High School, Chapel Hill's historically black secondary institution. The school was closed during the implementation of school desegregation in Chapel Hill in 1962. Interviewees discuss African American life and race relations in Chapel Hill, as well as education, discipline, extracurricular activities, and social life in high school before and after school integration.
RESTRICTION: None of these interviews may be copied. Researchers must obtain written permission of interviewee, interviewer, director of the Southern Oral History Program, or director of the Chapel Hill Museum for publication. Some interviews have further restrictions on access or use.
Interviews focusing on the life histories and experiences of residents in Terra Ceia, a Dutch community founded in Beaufort County, N.C., in the 1930s. The people of Terra Ceia have been successful farmers of flowers, soybeans, corn, and other crops, and have created and sustained several community institutions, including the Terra Ceia Christian Reformed Church, the Terra Ceia Christian School, and an annual Dutch festival.
Interviews exploring church history and Christian life in North Carolina with a particular focus on African American denominations, race relations, and civil rights activism within church communities.
Interviews conducted by Mark Schultz between 1988 and 2005 in several Georgia counties about the primary ways that white and black lives actually intersected there in the years between 1910 and 1950. Interviewees include black and white landowners, tenants, lumber workers, tradesmen, soldiers, teachers, and preachers; men and women; and migrants to northern cities and lifelong Georgia residents. Interviews conducted before 2004 form the basis for Schultz's book The Rural Face of White Supremacy: Beyond Jim Crow (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005). Hancock County interviews were also used for his Ph.D. dissertation, Unsolid South: An Oral History of Race, Class, and Geography in Hancock County, Georgia, 1910-1950 (University of Chicago, 1999).
The former title of this project is "African Americans in Hancock County, Georgia." The majority of interviews in this collection are with residents of Hancock County; the remaining interviewees include residents of the Georgia counties of Banks, Clarke, Elbert, Hall, and Stephens.
These interviews, conducted by Leon Fink, explore the ways in which the small town of Morganton, Burke County, N.C., has been transformed with the arrival of Guatemalan immigrants. Interviews touch on community life and culture in Morganton as well as on Guatemala and on the immigrants' effort to unionize the local poultry plant, Case Farms, where they were employed. Fink's book, The Maya of Morganton: Work and Community in the Nuevo New South (UNC Press, 2003) draws on these interviews.
Interviews about the University of North Carolina, originally developed as part of the University's bicentennial celebration in 1993, but currently an ongoing project. Some interviews focus on specific aspects of university life; others document the birth and growth of particular schools, institutes, or programs within the university, including the Campus Y, the School of Medicine, the Dept. of Radio, Television, and Motion Pictures, the School of Nursing, the School of Public Health, and the Institute of Government. Others record more general information about the institution, including women's athletics, student activism, civil rights, student life, and women faculty and administrators. Interviewees include members of University of North Carolina classes from the 1920s and 1930s; former and current professors and administration personnel, including historians who have studied or taught at the University; and former student activists, civil rights leaders, and other campus leaders. Also included are a series of interviews that William A. Link, professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, conducted with family, friends, and associates of William C. Friday, in preparation for his biography, William Friday: Power, Purpose, & American Higher Education (1995).
Major topics include the expansion of the University of North Carolina system from three institutions to sixteen, the establishment of a medical school at East Carolina University and a veterinary school at North Carolina State University, the role of the federal government in the affairs of the University, the interaction of the United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare's Office for Civil Rights with University administrators, intercollegiate athletics, the Dixie Classic basketball scandal, the North Carolina speaker ban law, and racial integration of the University. Some interviews also address Friday's early life and education; his role in the development of the National Humanities Center, the Research Triangle Park, and the North Carolina Rural Economic Development Center; his involvement in antipoverty and literacy movements; and his work as head of the William Rand Kenan, Jr., Fund and the Kenan Charitable Trust. Additional subjects of interest are the role of Friday and the University in state politics and Friday's work on the White House Task Force on Education, the Carnegie Commission on the Future of American Education, and the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics. There is also a small number of interviews about North Carolina politics and the University. Also included are a series of interviews relating to the role of minority faculty and women faculty on the campus between 1960 and 1990. Issues include hiring practices, tenure and promotion policies, department cultures, discrimination, and affirmative action. There are also interviews docusing on the role of Kenan Professors in the University. There are also interviews exploring the history of the School of Medicine and UNC Hospitals.
This collection of interviews is comprised of single oral histories with notable individuals in University of North Carolina history.
Interviews pertain to the Campus Y, a UNC Chapel Hill student organization established in 1859, and to Anne Queen, its director from 1964 to 1975. Most of the interviews with former Campus Y student leaders, alumni, staff, and university administration were conducted in 1990 by C. Cheatham and in 2010 as part of the 150th Anniversary celebration of the Campus Y. Interviews include recollections of personal experiences with the Campus Y, reflections on social justice movements and students' development of social consciousness, and advice for students who become involved with the Campus Y. Major topics include Anne Queen's directorship and other staff support, student leadership and community, work in post-college life, and the 150th Anniversary. The Campus Y spurred the creation of UNC's campus bookstore and the institution of first-year student orientation, intramural athletics, and the Carolina Symposium. It participated in the launching of the Student Environmental Action coalition (SEAC), the Student Coalition for Action in Literacy Education (SCALE), and Nourish International. The Campus Y was involved with the integration effort in UNC's undergraduate program, the local civil rights movement, Vietnam War and anti-apartheid protests, the overturning of t he North Carolina speaker ban law, the Foodworkers' Strikes of 1969 and 1970, and other major social movements.
Interviews conducted in 1991 pertain to women's athletics at UNC Chapel Hill.
Interviews conducted between 1990 and 1991 pertain to the UNC Law School.
Interviews conducted between 1988 and 1989 by Robert Korstad pertain to the UNC School of Public Health.
The Southern Historians Project interviews conducted by historian Dewey Grantham between 1981 and 1983 are with historians who studied or taught at UNC Chapel Hill.
Interviews conducted by William A. Link, professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, with family, friends, and associates of William C. Friday, Head of the UNC system from 1956-1986, in preparation for Link's biography, William Friday: Power, Purpose, and American Higher Education (University of North Carolina Press, 1995). Major topics include the expansion of the University of North Carolina System; the role of the federal government in the affairs of the University; intercollegiate athletics; the North Carolina speaker ban law; and racial integration of the University. Some interviews also address Friday's early life and education; his role in North Carolina politics, development, and philanthropy; and his involvement in antipoverty, literacy, and education movements. Additional subjects of interest are the role of Friday and the University in state politics and Friday's work on the White House Task Force on Education, the Carnegie Commission on the Future of American Education, and the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics.
Conducted between 2004 and 2005 by Molly Matlock Parsons and Montgomery Wolf, these interviews focus on the character, philosophies, and career of Albert Coates, UNC Chapel Hill alumnus, law professor, and founder with his wife Gladys Hall Coates of UNC's Institute of Government (now School of Government). This project, part of research for a biography of Albert Coates, was conceived by Gladys Coates and funded by the Albert and Gladys Coates Endowment Fund.
Interviews are about North Carolina politics and the University of North Carolina.
Relating to an SOHP-coordinated and Association for Women Faculty (AWFP)-initiated project commemorating the AWFP's 30th anniversary, these interviews were conducted in 2007 and 2008 with professors, activists, and other community members. Founded at UNC Chapel Hill in 1978 by leading women faculty and administrators, the AWFP seeks to advance the status of women on campus. The interviews address changing hiring practices, tenure and promotion policies, department cultures, discrimination and affirmative action, and the role of minority and women faculty on campus between 1960 and 1990.
An additional four interviews (L-0384 to L-0387) were conducted in 2012 by Brooke Midkiff, PhD candidate at the UNC School of Education, as part of her research on women faculty�s discourse about feminism, themselves, and their professional experiences as scholars in the current higher education environment.
In summer 2014, SOHP field scholar Katie Womble conducted four additional interviews with female faculty members hired in the 1970s and 1980s at UNC Chapel Hill.
These interviews explore the history of the University of North Carolina School of Medicine and UNC Hospitals.
Jennifer Donnally conducted these three interviews with past UNC Hospital Volunteers Association Board members in Spring 2010 to accompany the organization's papers, deposited in Fall 2010 in the University Archives. The interviews cover the Volunteer Association from its founding in 1952 to 2010. Topics include the Volunteer Association's relationship to the hospital, duties and responsibilities of volunteers, developments within the UNC Hospital system, and UNC Hospital's relationship to the wider North Carolina community.
An additional four interviews (L-0384 to L-0387) were conducted in 2012 by Brooke Midkiff, PhD candidate at the UNC School of Education, as part of her research on women faculty�s discourse about feminism, themselves, and their professional experiences as scholars in the current higher education environment.
This body of interviews was conducted by students at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine (UNCSOM) during the fall 2012 semester as an assignment for Dr. Raul Necochea's seminar: The Revenge of the Sick: History of Medicine from the Patient's Point of View. The students interviewed clinicians who worked at North Carolina Memorial Hospital from the 1950s to the 1970s. The interviews were guided by the question, "What was considered 'good doctoring' decades ago?" These interviews seek to provide perspective on how definitions of medical competence and professionalism change and remain over time by asking experienced clinicians for stories that illustrate their training and how they practiced in circumstances that may be different from those today. The interviews also contribute to the institutional memory of the UNCSOM by preserving testimonies of older practitioners familiar with the history of the University of North Carolina Health Care System.
In 1997, professors Jacquelyn Hall and Della Pollock conducted a small series of interviews with UNC Chapel Hill faculty members on the qualities of leadership in a university setting.
The North Carolina Area Health Education Centers (AHEC) program began in 1972 with three AHEC regions under a federal AHEC contract with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Medicine. In 1997, the Southern Oral History Program began a series of interviews to document the early years and growth of AHEC in North Carolina. These interviews highlight transitions in medicine as well as service to smaller communities in the state. Karen Kruse Thomas served as lead interviewer on the project.
Funded by a gift from the William Rand Kenan Jr. Charitable Trust, this set of interviews looks at faculty careers at UNC Chapel Hill with a special emphasis on the role played by Kenan Professors at in the life of the university. There is an additional interview (L-0365) conducted by undergraduate student Charlotte Fryar with Bland Simpson in 2013.
Interviews pertain to the history of racial justice movements at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1991 to 2018, with a focus on the student-led movement for a free-standing Black Cultural Center (Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History) from 1991-1993 and the 2014-2015 movement led by the Real Silent Sam Coalition to create Hurston Hall. Interviews include discussions of personal experiences with institutional racism, reflections on the racialized landscape of the campus, workers' movements and labor activism in Chapel Hill, and the legacy of past racial justice campus organizing for contemporary movements. Other topics discussed include the housekeepers' movement of the 1990s, early efforts to challenge Saunders Hall in the 1990s and 2000s, the role of collegiate athletics in racial justice movements, the impact of the University's academic-athletic scandal on Black students and faculty in the 2010s, black women's leadership in campus organizing, and the legacy of the University as a site of enslavement.
Interviews with black high school principals in North Carolina conducted by Goldie Frinks Wells, a doctoral candidate at UNC Chapel Hill, as part of research for her dissertation, "A Comparison of the Role Perceptions of Black High School Principals." Respondents, African Americans who held the post of principal in 1964 and African American principals in 1991, spoke on topics including job responsibilities, demands, accomplishments, and rewards; education and the black community; racism and discrimination; school administration; and personal background and character traits. The project focused on the influence of desegregation on black high school principals' perceptions on their work roles.
Beginning in fall 2012, the Southern Oral History Program has conducted an undergraduate internship program for students to gain experiential education in the intellectual, organizational, and practical work of oral history. Each semester, the interns engage in research by conducting an oral history project, usually related to student activism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The NC 2020 Coalition is a collaboration of organizations commemorating the centennial of the 19th Amendment. The coalition focuses on commemorating the anniversary by sharing information on events around North Carolina and on the history of suffrage efforts in the United States and promoting voting rights and equality at the ballot box. Working together, the group's purpose is to promote accuracy of the historical record, showcase legal and social advances in gender equality since the amendment's passing, and describe its relevance in the current fight for equal rights. In collaboration with the NC 2020 Coalition, students at the SOHP at the University of North Carolina conducted oral histories with women and transgender men involved with the coalition. In working together to figure out how to collectively remember the complex history of the Women's Suffrage Movement, the interviewees each bring their own sometimes conflicting, sometimes overlapping memories of activism, voting, and citizenship.
Coordinated by James Leloudis of the UNC Chapel Hill History Department and Robert Korstad of the Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy at Duke University, these interviews with former student volunteers, foundation officers, federal and state policy makers, and community residents were conducted as part of a project on race, poverty, and the North Carolina Fund (NCF). Also included are tapes and transcripts of sessions from a 1996 conference in Durham, NC, "No Easy Walk: Lessons and Legacies from the North Carolina Fund" and interviews conducted by UNC Chapel Hill students in 2011 under the direction of Dr. Jacquelyn Hall. Interviews highlight the NCF's position as an intermediary between local organizations and communities, and between federal government and private philanthropy. Respondents discuss their personal and professional backgrounds, their connections to and experiences with the NCF and its impact, details about their respective communities, and issues of poverty, inequality, and public policy. The NCF, established in 1963 and funded by the Ford Foundation, the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation, and federal agencies, was a forerunner of Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty. It established and supported community action agencies, in addition to operating manpower development programs, conducting research on poverty, training community organizers, and sending teams of student volunteers into rural communities to help residents fight poverty and racism.
Interviews in this series explore journalism, media, and reporting in the American South. Media includes radio, television, film, and photography.
The Media and the Movement collection includes oral histories with founders and deejays at influential, independent, minority-owned and operated radio stations, and others involved in independent media after the 1960s. Interviews include journalists, producers, activists, and politicians, all discussing facets of this media era and ongoing activist work. Altogether, this collection comprises an aural snapshot of a moment in American history when budding activists were pushing the boundaries of what the legal successes of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s accomplished. These activists explored the legacies of the classical phase of the Civil Rights Movement by using the spoken word, music, art, storytelling, and journalism to continue to redefine the relationship between the powerful and the less powerful.
WAFR-Durham, WRFG-Atlanta, and WVSP-Warrenton were three pioneering radio stations established by civil rights and Black Power activists in 1970s South in the wake of both the black freedom struggle, and expansion of federal support for non-commercial media. WAFR, which stood for Wave Africa, was founded in 1971 by African American activists Robert Spruill, Vincent Spruill, Obataiye Akinwole, Ralph Williams, and Donald Baker and became the nation’s first-ever non-commercial community-based, black-operated radio station. In 1973, the community broadcaster WRFG, or Radio Free Georgia, began broadcasting in Atlanta. Although founded by white civil rights and anti-war activists Harlon Joye and Barbara Joye, WRFG became one of the city’s few multiracial radical institutions. It quickly attracted black activists such as Tim Hayes, a founding member of the Atlanta chapter of the Black Panther Party, veterans of the Southern Nonviolent Coordinating Committee such as Fay Bellamy, and Black Arts luminaries such as Ebon Dooley. WVSP was founded in Warrenton in 1976 by Jim and Valeria Lee who, along with early program director Jereann King Johnson, had actively participated in Black Power organizations in the late 1960s and early 1970s. WSVP broadcast developed a multiracial staff. It ran for 10 years and was one of the nation’s premier rural radio stations during its time.
UNC undergraduate students in Professor Tori Ekstrand's Fall 2020 MEJO 448: Freedom of Expression in the United States class conducted interviews about UNC student experiences during COVID-19. Topics include freedom of expression issues on college campuses, students' personal experiences during the pandemic, how students stayed connected to others during the era of remote instruction, and students' discontent with how the UNC administration handled public health, safety, and the and welfare of the campus community during this time.
Beginning in 1981, James Eddie (James Edward) McCoy of Oxford, N.C., conducted interviews with elderly black citizens (80 to 100 years old) of disparate backgrounds in Granville County, N.C. Topics include family life, lineage, and history; agricultural and other labor; religious life; education; and black communities. These interviews bring to life the tobacco fields of Antioch, the cotton plantations of Oak Hill, the church services at Black Cat, and the hustle and bustle of black neighborhoods like Grab-All in Oxford. They tell what daily life was like in the black orphanage at Oxford, at Mary Potter School, and in lumber camps and cotton fields. The collection also includes interviews with McCoy by interviewer Kelly Navies. This series was processed with support from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission.
Interviews in this series were conducted for special projects by researchers, many of whom received stipends from the Southern Oral History Program for their projects.
Erika LeMay, graduate student in the Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, conducted these interviews for her master's thesis on the war on poverty in North Carolina. Her focus was the grassroots organization of the People's Program on Poverty (PPOP) in northeastern North Carolina.
Enrique Murillo, a Ph.D. candidate in the Social Foundations of Education program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has research interests in diversity, identity, and the social construction of Latino communities. In these interviews, interviewees reveal their experiences as Mexican nationals migrating to North Carolina. Discussion includes agricultural work, community involvement (especially with the Catholic Church), the change in Latino and Latina roles, and subsequent identity changes caused by different status and circumstance. Other important themes include family and education.
Jennifer Saunders conducted interviews for her master's thesis at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill about the development of the Hindu community in the Raleigh-Durham area and the role of the Hindu temple in this process. Interviews focus on the change and development of the Indian community in the United States, especially within North Carolina. The role of the temple receives special emphasis as a place where community can be built and a site where diverse Asian religious and cultural traditions can integrate with each other.
Karen Kruse Thomas, a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, conducted these interviews as part of a series of interviews with North Carolina health professionals about the origins and growth of the modern health care system, focusing on integration and its effects on health policy. The interviews contain descriptions of medical training and experiences with a focus on changes in medicine brought about by desegregation, new technology, "socialized medicine" and Medicare, and federal health care programs. Special attention is given to the experiences and activism of African American medical students and African American practitioners. There is also a strong focus on the University of North Carolina School of Medicine.
Lisa J. Yarger, graduate student in the Curriculum of Folklore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, conducted these interviews as part of her research for a master's thesis on the life and performing career of musician Lily May Ledford. Ledford was the most well-known member of the Coon Creek Girls, an all-girl hillbilly string band. The interviews offer insights into the lives of mountain women, folk life, women musicians, Depression era radio, the folk revival, and touch on Renfro Valley and manager John Lair.
William Jones, graduate student in history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, conducted interviews that reveal the experiences of the African American working class during the shift from agriculture to industrialization in the 1930s to 1950s. Race relations within textile mills and the lumber industry in Elizabethtown, N.C., Chapman, Ala., and Bogalusa, La., are explored, as are diversities, tensions, and leadership within labor unions. African American leadership during the Elizabethtown, N.C., strike and several strikes in Chapman, Ala., are also discussed. Jones added to his research by interviewing the Green brothers, owners of the Green Brothers Lumber Company in Elizabethtown, N.C., and Mason McGowin, son of the McGowins who operated the W. T. Smith Company in Chapman, Ala. In Alabama and Louisiana, Jones also asked some interviewees about leisure time activities, including music and dancing.
Life history interviews with graduates and dropouts from the Gateway Transitional Families Program. The Gateway Program was authorized by Section 126 of the Housing and Community Development Act of 1987 (Public Law 100-242, approved 5 February 1988), which allowed the Charlotte Housing Authority (CHA) to develop a program to help public housing residents become socially and economically self-sufficient so that they could buy their own homes. Public housing residents and people on the public housing waiting list entered the program and typically spent two years getting the education they needed to obtain jobs that paid at least $8.00 per hour. They could spend up to another five years strengthening their employment skills and increasing their incomes. Savings were encouraged through the use of escrow savings accounts, where a portion of the participant's rent goes into a bank account for the purpose of saving for a down payment for a home.
These interviews were done as part of an evaluation of the program, funded by the Ford Foundation. Six interviews were completed, three with program graduates and three with women who had dropped out of the program. The purpose was to examine thoroughly the lives of these women to describe their experiences with the program, their life histories leading up to the program, and factors that contributed to their graduation or dropping out. Only four of the women interviewed agreed to have their tapes deposited in the Southern Oral History Program Collection. The interviewer was Rachel Garshick Kleit. For more information about the program and its results, see:
Rohe, William M. 1995. "Assisting residents of public housing achieve self-sufficiency: evaluation of Charlotte's Gateway Families Program." Journal of Architectural and Planning Research 12, 3: 259-276.
Rohe, William M. and Rachel Garshick Kleit. 1997. "From dependency to self-sufficiency: an appraisal of the Gateway Transitional Families Program." Housing Policy Debate 7, 1: 75-108.
Interviews by Thomas Pearson examining life histories of Montagnard refugees from Vietnam who have settled in North Carolina.
Recordings by Michelle McCullers of interviews with members of the Gullah community on St. Helena, S.C., and of funeral services there.
Situated on 120 wooded acres in Chapel Hill, N.C., Carol Woods is an accredited, not-for-profit continuing care retirement community where residents live in cottages or apartments. Carol Woods opened its doors to its first residents in July 1979, with a second group of residents moving in November. These interviews with residents and staff members of the Carol Woods Retirement Community document the founding and early history of Carol Woods. The interviews were conducted by members of the Ad hoc Committee on the Early History of Carol Woods of the Carol Woods Residents Association. This committee was appointed to develop a history of the community on the occasion of its twentieth anniversary. Based on the interviews, Iris Friederich wrote Pioneering at Carol Woods. Included are interviews with residents Carey Bostian and Sandy McClamroch.
A copy of Pioneering at Carol Woods and a packet of information about the community are also filed at the Southern Historical Collection.
Interviews conducted by students in an oral history course taught by Alicia Rouverol at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the fall of 1997. Included are interviews with a history professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with a Japanese immigrant to North Carolina, with a paramedical technologist at Lincoln Hospital in Durham, N.C., and other North Carolina residents.
Interviews conducted by students in an oral history course taught by Alicia Rouverol at Duke University in the fall of 2000. This diverse collection includes interviews with German immigrants, recovering drug addicts, and individuals struggling with long-term illness, such as HIV.
Interviews conducted by students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in History 77, The Modern Middle East, and History 195, Women in the Middle East, with immigrants from the Middle East about what it was like to live in the United States, and what it meant to be from the Middle East, especially after 11 September 2001.
Interviews conducted by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill religious studies major Barbara Copeland as a part of her senior research project. The oral histories explore the reasons why African American interviewees converted to the Mormon faith.
Interviews are accompanied by the undergraduate honors thesis Struggling with the Mormon Ideal: African-American Women in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints by interviewer Barbara Copeland.
Interviews conducted by Kieran Taylor about the history of and community life in the New Hope community in Orange County, N.C., near Chapel Hill. Interviews discuss Blackwood and Strayhorn family history, history of the Blackwood farm, truck farming, farm life, the church community, and education, among other topics. Nannie Blackwood also describes her work as a nurse at Watts Hospital in Durham, N.C.
Interviews with residents, chiefly African American business owners, of Savannah, Ga., Greensboro, N.C., and Jacksonville, Fla., about changes in southern black businesses in the wake of urban renewal and desegregation.
The interviews about Savannah have also been deposited at the Asa H. Gordon Library, Savannah State University. The interviews about Greensboro have also been deposited at the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University Library in Greensboro, N.C. Interviews about Jacksonville have been deposited at LaVilla Museum in Jacksonville, Fla.
Six interviews conducted for the Duke Homestead Education and History Corporation on the culture and history of tobacco auctioneering. Also included is an interview with Fred Bond, former mayor of Cary, N.C., and long-time head of the Flue-Cured Tobacco Cooperative Stabilization Corporation.
Interview with Bruce Hartford, a veteran civil rights movement activist in Alabama, who became involved in the peace movement in Southeast Asia and the labor and communist movements in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960s and 1970s.
A copy of this interview has been deposited with the Bruce Hartford collection at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin in Madison. The interviewer conducted another interview with Hartford for the Martin Luther King, Jr., Papers Project at Stanford University. An additional interview with Hartford is available at http://www.crmvet.org/.
Interviews with Jews living in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, New York, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, Washington, D.C., and Wisconsin. The intersection of Jewish faith, family, and food in the South are discussed. Many of the interviews were produced in association with the Institute of Southern Jewish Life and the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience in Jackson, Miss. All interviews were conducted by Marcie Cohen Ferris in 1998-2002.
Interviews may not be copied without written permission of the donor.
Interviews, conducted by corporate historian Kathleen Kearns, detail the history of the WakeMed Hospital System of Raleigh, N.C., from its initial planning stages in 1955 to 2004. Interviewees are key figures in the hospital's history. They include members and former members of the medical and nursing staffs, former members of the board of directors, current and past administrative staff members, the hospital's former attorney, the widow of the founding chief executive officer, the former head of Rex Hospital, the former editor of the Raleigh News & Observer, and WakeMed's second chief executive officer. Topics include the history of medical care in Wake County, competition among area hospitals, recollections of local hospitals and administrators, media coverage, racial discrimination in medical care, and the hospital's transition to nonprofit status.
Three additional interviews are held by WakeMed in Raleigh, N.C.
This collection of interviews was conducted by Pamela Grundy and Susan Shackelford as part of their research for a book on the history of women's basketball in the United States, Shattering the Glass: The Remarkable History of Women's Basketball (The New Press, 2005). Interviewees include players, coaches, and administrators speaking about the game's early development and providing a view of the game on and off the court.
This project consists of two oral histories with civil rights leader Julian Bond by Elizabeth Gritter in November 1999. Gritter, later a Ph.D. student at UNC Chapel Hill, conducted these oral histories for a class project while an undergraduate at American University. The interviews trace Bond's life as an activist, from his childhood experiences with racism and exposure to civil rights to his tenure at the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to his election to the Georgia legislature and finally to his protests against apartheid in South Africa. The interviews are accompanied by Gritter's class paper on Bond, biographical sketches, and responses to follow-up questions from the interviews. Also included is a copy of Gritter's spring 2006 article in Southern Cultures, which is a profile of Bond drawn from her undergraduate paper and these oral histories.
This interview sketches the life of funeral director Lemuel Delany, Jr., and his reactions to the book Having Our Say, published by his aunts Sadie and Bessie Delany. In the interview, Delany talked about the achievements of his grandfather, the Reverend Henry Beard Delany, who led Saint Augustine's College in Raleigh, N.C., and became the first African-American Episcopal bishop despite having been born into slavery. Delany also discussed his frustration with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), based on his observation of its relationship to the black business community in Harlem, N.Y.
This interview was scheduled on the recommendation of the Olivia Raney History Branch Library in Raleigh, N.C. That library and the Saint Augustine's College Library hold copies of the interview.
Interview with independent and documentary filmmaker Tom Davenport at his home in Delaplane, Va. The interview focuses on four films produced in conjunction with the Curriculum in Folklore at UNC Chapel Hill that form part of Davenport's American Traditional Culture Series: The Shakers (1974), a historical overview of the growth and demise of the Society of the United Brethren of Believers in the last two remaining Shaker communities, Canterbury, N.H., and Sabbathday Lake, Me., recounted primarily through the reminiscences of several surviving Shaker sisters; Born for Hard Luck, a portrait of aging minstrel and medicine-show performer Arthur Jackson (Peg Leg Sam); Being a Joines, a look at life in a Blue Ridge Mountain community through the tall tales, comic local anecdotes, and religious narratives of John E. Joines; and A Singing Stream, a chronicle of four generations of the Landis family, members of the famous Golden Echos black gospel music group from rural Creedmoor, N.C. The interview discusses the troubles and trials of producing, editing, and releasing each documentary. It also includes discussion of the interaction among Davenport, Daniel W. Patterson (former chair of the Curriculum in Folklore), and Allen Tullos (former student at UNC Chapel Hill, who worked on all four films) as they struggled to capture their subjects not only through narrative and storytelling, but also through the prevailing traditions of song, dance, and religious belief. The interview is accompanied by five photographs of the filmmakers at work. There is also a brief discussion of the film Thoughts on Fox Hunting.
These interviews were conducted between 1999 and 2003 by various members of the North Carolina Council of Churches Task Group on the Impact of the Women's Movement on North Carolina Congregations. Created in primarily small group settings, they were subsequently adapted into a stage presentation entitled The Woman's Coffeehouse of Spirit: The Changing Role of Women in North Carolina Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish Congregations Over the Last Forty Years. This stage presentation features characters representing ten religious faiths: African Methodist Episcopal, Baptist, Roman Catholic, Episcopalian, Jewish, Lutheran, United Methodist, Moravian, Presbyterian, and Quaker. Interviewers included Bett Hargrave, Jeanette Stokes, Evelyn Mattern, Judith Dancy, Lehoma Goode, Deborah Houser, Lois MacGillivray, Laura Kaplan, and Amelia Stinson-Wesley.
Audio recordings of all interviews are available at the Southern Historical Collection, but interviewers and interviewees are not always identified.
This group of interviews conducted by Susan Simone explores the lives and struggles of members of the Northside community, a historically African American and primarily residential neighborhood located immediately northwest of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and downtown Chapel Hill, N.C. The project was initiated as part of a community effort to preserve family homes and long-term connections among people living in Northside.
These interviews include more than 20 hours of interview material with the folklorist, teacher, lobbyist, and activist Archie Green. The first series of interviews was conducted by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill English professor Robert Cantwell in 1985. Kieran Taylor of the Southern Oral History Program conducted the second series of interviews, which were edited for publication as "Shipwrights and Salmonbellies: How Archie Green Discovered Laborlore" (Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, Volume 4, Number 3, Fall 2007). While both interviews are rich in biographical detail, the Cantwell interviews place emphasis on Green's work as a folklorist and lobbyist, while the Taylor interviews emphasize Green's labor-related activities. The final section of the Cantwell series includes an address Archie Green delivered at the close of the University of Chicago folk festival in 1973.
In 2005-2006, Betsy Brinson began a project to preserve the stories of soldiers and their families who were opposed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Brinson, a member of the board of Quaker House in Fayetteville, N.C., located near Fort Bragg, the home of the 82nd Airborne Division, recognized the stories of these men and women were critical additions to the historical record. As the project evolved, Catherine Lutz of Brown University collaborated with Brinson. Helen Jones contributed photographs of many of the interviewees.
These interviews were conducted in conjunction with a 1998 master's thesis by Kieran W. Taylor, a graduate student at the University of Mississippi in the Department of Southern Studies. The interviews were intended to explore the legacies of the Providence Cooperative Farm, an experiment in biracial and cooperative living in Holmes County, Miss., that began in the late 1930s and continued to 1955 when several of its white leaders were driven from the farm. While not all of the interviewees were able to provide first-hand descriptions of the activities at Providence, many of them offer rich detail regarding African American life in rural Mississippi from the 1920s through the 1980s. The interviews with Henry Clark, the son of slaves, and James Walden offer especially vivid descriptions of farm life, folk medicine and beliefs, and race relations. Researchers should note that these interviews complement the Delta and Providence Farm Papers (#3474) at the Southern Historical Collection.
This series contains interviews conducted by students under the direction of Dr. Jacquelyn Hall during the Spring 2008 semester at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Topics bear on the history of the American South and are related to themes emphasized by the Southern Oral History Program. The themes include immigrant experiences in the Chapel Hill area, art education in public schools, and needleworkers. Please see Series U.13 for interviews from Dr. Hall's Spring 2008 course that pertain to "The Long Civil Rights Movement."
In January 2007, the SOHP launched an examination of the impact and influence of the News and Observer of Raleigh between 1945 and 1995. As North Carolina assumed its modern form, the News and Observer covered politics, the operations of state government and public-policy debate, serving readers across the state and region. In 1995, after 101 years of Daniels family ownership, the paper was sold to the McClatchy Company, the nation's largest publisher of daily newspapers. The SOHP's Beth Millwood and Joseph Mosnier conducted interviews with former governors and key legislative leaders; longtime News and Observer management figures, editors, and reporters; Daniels family members; and industry observers. Many of the interviewees were alumni of the School of Journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Topics include civil rights; discrimination in employment; segregation and integration of schools; national, state, and local politics; Jesse Helms; journalists and journalism; the McClatchy organization; and many issues relating to the running of a newspaper. The News and Observer project is supported by a grant from the Josephus Daniels Charitable Fund of the Triangle Community Foundation.
These interviews were completed as part of photographer Sonia Katchian's Carrboro Farmers' Market Photography Project in 1995. All seven of the interviews are with farmers who participated in the Carrboro Farmers' Market, most of whom had been involved in the market since or near the beginning of its existence. The interviews and photographs were completed between January and March of 1995 and culminated in an exhibition at the ArtsCenter in Carrboro, 10 April 10 to 9 May 1995. There was also was a Farmers' Speakout on 23 April 1995, which is included in the collection on VHS (VT-4007/20). Other supplemental materials include about 45 copies of photographs (originals at the Smithsonian Institution) of the farmers interviewed and other farmers involved the Carrboro Farmers' Market Photography Project; 20 photographic slides; two gallery guides to the exhibition; and five VHS tapes.
These interviews, completed while oil was still flooding into the Gulf of Mexico from the ruptured deepwater well, reveal the worry, hope, confusion, and commitment of Louisiana coastal residents during a time of deep uncertainty and peril. Interviewees put their current predicament in historical context, describing their lives and livelihoods connected, often for generations, to the coast and to the water. Topics include interviewees' evolving understanding of government, regulation, and industry; the coexistence of oil and fishing industries; and the importance of work, family, and place. Interviewees compare the oil spill to earlier challenges, such as hurricanes, and describe how this time seemed different: more daunting, less certain, and more out of control. They express frustration with much of what was happening, and, at the same time, confidence in the perseverance and intelligence of local people to get through the crisis.
New Roots: Voices from Carolina del Norte is part of the Latino Migration Project, an education and research program dedicated to improving public understanding about the impact and implications of the expanding Latin American presence in North Carolina and the Southeastern United States. The Latino Migration project was established in 2006 as a collaboration between the Institute for the Study of the Americas, one of the oldest centers in the nation for the study of Latin America, and the Center for Global Initiatives at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. New Roots oral histories focus on issues related to Latin American immigration to North Carolina and the formation of Latino communities in the state. The interviews were conducted by students in courses taught by Professor Hannah Gill at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and by staff of the Latino Migration Project. Interviewees include immigrants and second generation families, professionals who work with immigrants, policy-makers, religious leaders, educators, students, and local business owners.
These conversations with "Betty" or "Evelyn" were compiled for photographer Louanne Watley's series using the same names. They constitute more general field recordings of Watley's time with her subjects than formal interviews and consist of five tracks wherein speakers compare and describe Watley's photographs; discuss trees, memories of family and pets, and day-to-day life; and go to a grocery store and a liquor store where they engage with occasional passersby and compare brands and prices of items. Watley's photographs relating to these audio recordings are held in the North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives.
These interviews, conducted by participants in the Johnson Intern Program, an eleven-month service program dedicated to social justice through faith, relate to a community service project about faith communities' involvement in the civil rights era in Chapel Hill, N.C.
These interviews were conducted, 1975-2007, by Pete Daniel, retired curator at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History and past president of the Organization of American Historians, as part of his research on the 20th-century history of the American South. Some of these interviews have been used in his books, including
Sue Thrasher, co-founder of the Institute for Southern Studies, donated these interviews to the Southern Oral History Program. The Institute for Southern Studies was founded in 1970 by civil rights activists to provide resources for grassroots and community activists, scholars, and policy makers in the South. Throughout the 1970s, the Institute's staff conducted oral history interviews with labor and civil rights activists who had been involved in various struggles in the 1910s through the 1940s. They interviewed members of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, organizers of the Gastonia Textile Strike (1929), participants in the Llano Cooperative Colony in Louisiana, members of the United Auto Workers who participated in a 1936 sit-down strike, Black Liberation theologians, organizers for the United Furniture Workers, and others involved in civil rights and labor organizing. Many of the interviews were edited and appeared in the Institute for Southern Studies' publication Southern Exposure.
These interviews focus on individuals who built on the legacy of Bill Friday in their organizations and efforts to confront poverty in North Carolina. In addition to documenting a variety of issue-oriented approaches to poverty (such as literacy, education, housing, and economic development), these interviews explore a range of approaches to affecting social change, including direct service, policy advocacy, community organizing, community development, collaborative community change, and electoral politics.
Interviews, conducted in 2014 by Sara Wood in Robeson County, N.C., as part of a project called "Lumbee Indians of NC: Work and Cook and Eat" with the Southern Foodways Alliance. The interviews focus on Lumbee men and women who work in or are affiliated with foodways in North Carolina. They reveal Lumbee identity through traditions, stories, experiences, and food. As interviewees recount the beginnings, daily operations, and ends of their own businesses, they touch on the ways in which food affects family and community within the Lumbee culture.
Benjamin Filene Director of Public History and associate professor of history at UNC Greensboro donated these interviews, conducted between 2011 and 2014. They were research tools in his effort to do a microhistory of a single children's book Tobe, which was published by UNC Press in 1939. Illustrated with dozens of black-and-white photographs, Tobe was one of the first children's books to feature depictions of everyday African Americans.
Filene saw the book and the story behind it as a way to open up rich issues in twentieth-century cultural and social history: the complexities of race and representation, visions of childhood, the history of juvenile literature, and the lived experience of rural life in the pre-civil rights South. Filene identifed the people in the photos (primarily the Garner, Herbin, Goins, and Shoffner families, who lived in the African American community of Goshen, now part of Greensboro, N.C.), the family on whom the story was based (the McCauleys, who lived in rural Orange County, N.C.), the author (Hillsborough, N.C., schoolteacher Stella Sharpe), and the photographer (Charles Farrell of Greensboro). Nearly seventy-five years after the book's publication, Filene conducted more than twenty interviews with people involved in the book (or the communities it depicts) and their descendants. These interviews were central to Filene's efforts to understand the book's history and its place in personal and public memory.
Filene shared his findings in an exhibition in the North Carolina Collection Gallery, "Where is Tobe? Unfolding Stories of Race, Childhood, and Rural Life" (October 2014-March 2015). That exhibition drew on the holdings of UNC's North Carolina Collection, which include prints and negatives of the book's original photos and nearly 200 alternate photographs, and of the Southern Historical Collection, which include correspondence between UNC Press and the photographer and author.
In 1982, Nancy O. Mason interviewed residents of part of Southern Pines which used to be its own, predominantly Black township in the 1920s, called West Southern Pines. West Southern Pines was annexed back into Southern Pines in the 1930s, but these interviews attest to the longevity of the West Southern Pines community. Both black and white residents of West Southern Pines tell their recollections of the incorporation of West Southern Pines and the daily lives of its inhabitants. Topics range from segregation to daily life, touching on caddying for golfers, the character of local businesses, agriculture and aquaculture, civic organizations, families, the religious affiliations of residents, and the dissolution of the town charter. The interviews were the research materials for the book Mason produced at the behest of Southern Pines in 1987, housed in the North Carolina Collection, titled Oral History of West Southern Pines, North Carolina.
NewStories, begun in 2012, is an ongoing project of the UNC School of Media and Journalism. Interviews are conducted by students enrolled in media history coursework under the direction of Dr. Barbara Friedman. The series explores the life experiences of North Carolina media workers, whose career fields include print and broadcast news, photojournalism, web journalism, public relations, marketing, advertising and education. Included is a series of interviews with inductees of the North Carolina Halls of Fame. The interviews are biographical in nature, yet some concentrate on particular events or periods within the lifetime of the respondent. This series includes six interviews from the Fall 2013 semester (R-0845 to R-0849, R-0771) and seven from the Spring 2015 semester (R-0770, R-0772 to R-0777).
Carolina Cooks, Carolina Eats is a class and research project at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, beginning in Spring 2015, in the Department of American Studies under the direction of Marcie Cohen Ferris, Sharon Holland, and Elizabeth Engelhardt. This project thematically explores the history and contemporary politics of food in five regions of North Carolina: the coast, eastern Carolina, the Piedmont, western Carolina, and a thematic landscape: the state's borderlands. Students are collecting oral histories from each region, exploring diverse themes that range from: southern history and culture (food and historical issues of race, class, gender, ethnicity, and place), environmentalism and sustainability, public health and nutrition, activism, immigration, globalism, gender and sexuality, and justice.
Interviews conducted in 2014 and 2015 document the Moral Mondays movement in North Carolina, which began in 2013, in response to legislative changes enacted by the North Carolina General Assembly. Interviews are from separate documentation efforts by Jonathan Michels and Bernetiae Reed, but the two interviewers did collaborate on several interviews. Michels, a freelance writer, conducted interviews in the spring and summer of 2014 with individuals who are active in the North Carolina political scene and played integral roles in the Moral Mondays protests. Many of these interviewees were arrested for their participation in the protests. Reed a master of library and information science student at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and volunteer with the Southern Historical Collection conducted interviews from summer 2014 through spring 2015. Feeling that African American civil rights were being trampled by the legislature, Reed, a black woman, decided to join the Moral Mondays protests and was arrested during one of the demonstrations, prompting her to document the experience in oral histories. Other interviews by Reed broadly explore community activism and African American history in North Carolina from the 1950s to 2015.
Interviews with Tuscarora artists in Robeson County, N.C., were conducted by William Maxwell, a doctoral student in the Department of Geography at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Maxwell's doctoral research focuses on the wild-native-plants-based arts of the Tuscarora American Indian tribe of North Carolina. Maxwell conducted a series of interviews in the winter and spring of 2015 exploring how Tuscarora artists create works out of wild, local, native plants and how the plants and artworks contribute to the artists� understanding of themselves as part of their natural and cultural environment.
Between 2014 and 2016, Rachel F. Seidman collected these interviews with current-day feminist activists around the country for her book Speaking of Feminism: Today's Activists on the Past, Present and Future of the U.S. Women's Movement. The interviews took place in Chapel Hill, N.C.; New York, N.Y.; Washington, D.C.; Atlanta, Ga.; Minneapolis, Minn.; the San Francisco Bay Area, Calif. Seidman, who was at the time the Associate Director of the Southern Oral History Program, collected all the interviews except those done in Atlanta, which were undertaken by Rachel Gelfand, who was at the time a Ph.D. candidate in UNC's American Studies program. These activists represent a wide range of racial, ethnic, and class backgrounds, and sexualities. Most identify as women; one interviewee identifies as a trans man. They include journalists, writers, non-profit leaders, entrepreneurs, labor activists, and students. They range in age from approximately 20 to 50 years old at the time they were interviewed. These interviews focus on people who came of age during and after the 1980s and the "Reagan Revolution" era's backlash against feminism. The interviews cover how and why they began to identify as feminists, and what it means to them to carry on that movement today. Some of the topics covered include: their goals and strategies; how they relate to previous generations of feminists, and to each other; how the political, economic, and technological shifts of the past thirty years shaped their experiences and approaches; and whether they feel optimistic or pessimistic about the future. Some key themes that emerge are: the role that academic women's studies' programs have played over the last 40 years; the impact of major events such as the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and the economic recession of 2008; the influence of families and of girlhood friends on individual feminists; the impact of Black Lives Matter on feminist organizations; how the internet and social media have shaped feminist activism; and how feminist activism fits into individual lives and professional trajectories.
The Environmental Advocates and Activists series is an ongoing project to interview people in North Carolina and the South who dedicate much of their careers and volunteer time to addressing environmental challenges. A key aim is to explore the motivations for these advocates and activists in their work, and the challenges and successes they have experienced. The interviewees range from founders and directors of environmental advocacy groups, to office-holders at the state level. They have in common a deep love for the natural environments on which we all depend. Their work focuses on educating citizens, shaping public policy, preserving lands, forests, rivers, and air quality, and building communities around these issues. The first ten interviews in this series have focused on questions such as how the interviewees first connected with nature in their childhood years - for many of them, it began with playing in creeks as kids. The interviewees also describe how they came to their work on environmental issues, strategies they have found to be most successful, and their hopes for the future.
These interviews were conducted by Dr. Steve Estes during the summers of 2017 and 2018, as he travelled 2,500 miles from Houston, Texas through Ocean City, Maryland recording oral histories of southern surfers. The story of wave riding in the American South reflects modern U.S. history: Cold War militarization, civil rights, counterculture, the women's movement, environmentalism, tourism, and coastal development. Surfing came to the South in the 1960s through military personnel stationed at bases along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. Southern beaches were largely segregated in this era; African Americans were often restricted to the marshiest and most isolated parts of southern shorelines. Recent generations of surfers have seen an increase in the diversity of southern line-up, including black, Asian, Latinx, and women surfers. Interviews in this project also focus on the challenges that competitive surfing and the surf industry pose in the region, as surf board shapers and shop owners face globalization and mass production. One of the major cultural influences associated with surfing in America during the 1960s and 1970s was the concept of the "counterculture." As surfing traveled from the West Coast to the South, the ideals of counterculture and "hippie" lifestyle did too, as surfers rode waves of cultural change that continue to shape southern coastal communities today.
Southern Mix honors the stories of Asians and Asian Americans in the U.S. South. It was inspired by UNC Asian American alumni, and focuses on oral histories from Asian and Asian American residents in North Carolina and of the larger region of the South. The project was created by a collaboration between the Carolina Asia Center, the Southern Oral History Program, and the Alumni Committee for Racial and Ethnic Diversity. This project includes a wide range of of topics including stories of escape, immigration, cultural assimilation, heritage, heath care, foodways, language, and generational legacies.
Interviews with the staff of the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) were conducted in 1998 and 1999 for a project funded by CCL and coordinated by Joseph Mosnier. Founded in 1971 by L. Smith Richardson, Sr., in Greensboro, N.C., as a nonprofit institute devoted to the study, practice, and development of leadership, CCL has branches in Colorado Springs, Colo., San Diego, Calif., and Brussels, Belgium. Interviewees discussed their backgrounds, roles, and accomplishments within CCL and CCL's impact and institutional history. Excerpts from the interviews were published in January 2000 in a book titled Herding Cats: An Oral History of the Center for Creative Leadership.
Under the leadership of Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, the Southern Oral History Program launched a major new initiative, "The Long Civil Rights Movement: The South Since the 1960s." This project collects interviews with men and women who in the years following the sit-ins and protests of the 1960s fought to keep the doors of equal opportunity open and to extend the civil rights struggle into new arenas. The interviews for this project document activism in a wide range of communities across the South. Intensive field work sites include: Charlotte, N.C.; Birmingham, Ala.; and Louisville, Ky.
The interviewing for this project generally focuses on three main areas of civil rights activism: 1) Race and the Public Schools: In most southern communities, school desegregation did not reach significant levels until more than 15 years after the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision. These interviews consider how the process of school integration--and more recent trends toward resegregation--have transformed southern communities. Many interviewees share memories of the segregated schools of the Jim Crow era and reflect on what was both gained and lost in the process of school integration. 2) Economic Justice: Even as the popular media in the 1970s and 1980s hailed the South as the nation's new hotspot of growth and opportunity, a broad range of activists drew attention to the limits of Sunbelt prosperity. This series captures the voices of those men and women by examining movements for affordable housing, residential integration, equal employment opportunity, labor organization, welfare rights, and environmental justice. An additional series of economic justice themed interviews looks at those who mobilized in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and confronted anew the region's enduring inequalities. 3) Gender and Sexuality: The South played critical, if contradictory, roles in shaping the women's movement and the gay liberation movement. It was during the South's black freedom movement of the 1960s that many second-wave feminists and gay rights activists first gained experience as grassroots organizers and extended the goals of freedom and equality to questions of gender and sexuality. Yet the South also earned a national reputation for its organized resistance to the Equal Rights Amendment and gay rights initiatives. These interviews look at second-wave feminism and gay rights activism in the South and how both movements were inflected by issues of race and class.
The interviews in the "Long Civil Rights Movement" collection are organized according to both location and the chief area of civil rights activism discussed. Yet since the movements of the "Long Civil Rights Movement" often overlapped in time and leadership, users of the collection should be aware that many interviews speak broadly to the civil rights landscape of the post-1960s South.
This collection of interviews contains oral history interviews unaffiliated with specific projects. There is an interview with Philip E. Bazemore of Union County, N.C., regarding his charge against the state of North Carolina relating to discrimination against African American county extension agents. The interview also discusses the role of county agents; racial politics in Union County, N.C.; and Bazemore's career as a public official. There is an interview with Abie Wilson, Director of the Williamsburg Arts Council in Kingstree, South Carolina. The main focus of the interview is the Southern Negro Youth Congress. Wilson also discusses growing up in South Carolina and his family history. There is an interview with Benjamin Chavis Muhammad, long-time civil rights activist who has been active in the African American freedom struggle since the early 1960s. Chavis Muhammad discusses his family history, childhood protest activities, and student activism at Saint Augustine's College in Raleigh, N.C., and at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. There are interviews with Anton Gunn, who discusses his role in Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign as well as his upbringing and family relationships in the South as a member of the "Hip-Hop Generation." There is an interview with Elizabeth Durham, who discusses her upbringing in a Baltimore suburb and her work at the Westinghouse Defense Division at the beginning of the equal opportunity employment. There are interviews with Alexander Evans and Leonard Giles, who discuss their role in a worker's strike at the sanitation department in Rocky Mount, N.C. There is an interview with Gary Grant, who discusses the resettlement of African Americans to the newly created Tillery community in the 1930s and 1940s. There is an interview with Lucy Lewis who discusses her civil rights activism in North Carolina and New York in the 1960s and 1970s.
Ferrel Guillory conducted a life history interview with Jack Bass, journalist, scholar, and writer on racial justice and southern politics. This interview contains details about his childhood; his journalism career; entrance into politics and campaign for Congress; and his books on the judicial system in the South, civil rights, and southern politicians. This interview also contains Bass's reflections on his postgraduate education and teaching career, as well as the ways in which South Carolina shaped his life.
Twenty interviews in this series were conducted during the Spring 2012 semester, twenty-seven were conducted during the Spring 2013 semester (U-1011 to U-1037), and twenty were conducted during the Spring 2014 semester (U-1064 to U-1075, U-1077 to U-1081, U-1083 to U-1085) of Dr. Jacquelyn Hall's Introduction to Oral History seminar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Topics bear on the history of the American South and are related to different aspects and perspectives of the Long Civil Rights Movement.
There is an interview with Julian Bond, who reflects on his career as a civil rights leader, including his involvement with SNCC, SCLC, and NAACP, and current issues as of 2013.
There is an interview with Hodding Carter III, civil rights activist and journalist from Mississippi, about his involvement with the movement, including the Voter Education Project.
o There are three interviews with civil rights activists conducted by former SOHP Associate Director Kieran (Kerry) Taylor in 2002 and 2003, including Sara M. Evans, Si Kahn, and John Marshall Kilimanjaro.
Six interviews (U-1090 to U-1095) were conducted in spring 2014 as part of a C-START (Carolina Students Taking Academic Responsibility through Teaching) course led by undergraduate students Mary Clare Mazzocchi and Meg VanDeusen.
Interviews focusing on the process and challenges of tri-racial school desegregation in Robeson County, N.C. Interviewees discuss the internal political dynamics of the Lumbee and Tuscarora Indians of Robeson County, as well as black and white, white and Indian, and black and Indian race relations. While these interviews focus broadly on school desegregation, they also range over multiple facets of the civil rights movement in Robeson County, 1954-1988. The mechanics of segregation and desegregation, interviewees' experiences in a tri-racial community, and present-day attitudes are discussed.
Series of interviews started in 2019 by Jessica R. Locklear as a graduate student at Temple University as part of her research on the history of Lumbee Indian migrations to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania after WWII. The thesis focuses on the diasporic Lumbee community of Philadelphia that developed throughout the late 20th century. Faced with economic hardship, thousands of Lumbees migrated out of Robeson County and settled in urban centers including Baltimore, Detroit, and Philadelphia. While segregation barred Indians from industrial jobs in the southeast, Lumbees found employers in Philadelphia less concerned about their ethnic background. In the 1940s and 50s, many Lumbees were apprehensive about leaving their ancestors' original places in North Carolina, fearing that they would lose the ties that bound them to their sense of self. Lumbees from North Carolina continued to migrate to Philadelphia in the 1960s and 70s, many settled and raised their children in the city. Interviewees represent various age groups and diverse experiences, but all identify as being impacted by Lumbee migrations in some way and lived in Philadelphia at some point in their lives.
Interviews focusing on daily life in Birmingham, Ala., schools in the late 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, with an emphasis on the first years of student and faculty desegregation in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Interviewees include students, administrators, onlookers, and a civil rights attorney, but most are with former teachers within the Birmingham Public School System. Experiences in elementary and high schools are examined, and some interviews give a broad perspective on school desegregation and the scope of Birmingham history in this period generally. Interviewers include Willoughby Anderson, Kimberly Hill, Timothy McCarthy, and Joseph Mosnier.
These oral histories, conducted by David P. Cline, Elizabeth Gritter, Timothy P. McCarthy, and Joseph Mosnier examine school desegregation in Louisville, Ky., with a focus on the impact of court-ordered busing beginning in the fall of 1975. At that time, Louisville also merged its city and county school systems; local law required this action because the city school system had gone bankrupt. Though Louisville was famous in 1956 for its peaceful, "successful" integration of the city schools, the schools had re-segregated. The advent of busing sparked widespread violence and opposition, and countless articles at the time compared the city to Boston, Mass. These oral histories are largely of administrators, teachers, and students who experienced busing, but also include such other figures as pro-busing activists and a national guardsman who rode the buses with the students. Each interview subject describes his or her assessment of busing. The interviews also cover a range of other topics, including segregated Louisville, school desegregation efforts in 1956, connections between social movements, and the impact of class on education.
Interviews focusing on politics and the civil rights movement in Memphis, Tenn., in the 1950s and 1960s. More broadly, these interviews cover the national civil rights movement, Memphis from the Edward H. Crump era until 2004, and southern and national politics. Topics include black electoral mobilization, the sit-in movement, the John F. Kennedy administration, local civil rights leaders and grassroots organizers, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People nationally and locally, and women's political involvement. Interview subjects range from white male political leaders to black female grassroots activists, from a lawyer who defended the city against the NAACP lawsuits to the NAACP lawyers who carried them out. Interviews were recorded by Elizabeth Gritter, a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who used them for her master's thesis.
Interview U-70 was recorded by Elizabeth Gritter with the assistance of Memphis resident Calvin Turley. Gritter used these interviews in her master's thesis at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, entitled "'This Is a Crusade for Freedom': The Volunteer Ticket Campaign in the 1959 City Election in Memphis, Tennesee" (2005). Copies of these interviews are also available at the Memphis/Shelby County Public Library and Information Center.
CLOSED: These interviews are CLOSED until 2019.
Interviews are part of research by Willoughby Anderson on the legacy of the civil rights movement in Birmingham, Ala. Interviewees include community leaders, attorneys connected with the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing trials, individuals involved in municipal government, and other citizens of Birmingham. The interviews are in general life history format and focus on school desegregation, the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing, the 1977 Chambliss trial (Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing trial), the 1979 election of Richard Arrington, the creation of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute in 1992, ongoing race relations in the city, and the 2000 and 2001 Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing trials.
These oral histories broadly explore economic justice in Charlotte, N.C., focusing on the period from the 1960s through the 1990s. They address labor activism, community activism, racial discrimination in employment, the civil rights movement, politics, law, and the struggle for access to affordable housing, all within the broader context of desegregated work environments and post-segregated Charlotte. Other topics include the health care field, increased educational opportunities for African Americans, and recent social and economic trends within Charlotte. Some cover the time period prior to the 1960s and give a picture of life during the Jim Crow era. The oral history of James Knox Polk Sr., an African American, takes a life history approach and includes a discussion of sports. The interviews with Sarah Coleman, Doretha Davis, Thereasea Elder, Dorothy Howell, Gerald Johnson, Thomas Moore, Beatrice Thompson, and Clara Williams examine corporate desegregation. Thompson and Williams, early entrants into the field of broadcast journalism and television shows, and Davis, who may have been the first African American saleswoman in a white establishment in Charlotte, uncover their memories of racial and gender discrimination. Thomas Moore assesses the impact of church integration in Charlotte.
Note that this is an ongoing project; more interviews will be added subsequently.
The first 18 interviews, conducted by David P. Cline, focus on the Park Duvalle neighborhood over time and the impact of industrial pollution on Louisville's poorer communities. The Park Duvalle neighborhood, located on Louisville's west side, has long been home to a majority African American population; at one time the area was known as Little Africa. Urban renewal brought two large public housing projects to the area: the Southwick Homes and the Cotter & Lang Homes. The projects and the Park Duvalle neighborhood in general became known throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and into the 1990s as the locus of much of Louisville's crime and most of its drug traffic. The housing project was razed at the end of the 1990s and replaced with mixed-income public and private housing called the Villages at Park Duvalle. Park Duvalle was also the site of a War on Poverty-funded medical center and neighborhood center developed in 1969, both of which successfully operate today. Park Duvalle is one of several neighborhoods that bear the brunt of the airborne industrial pollution from the city's chemical and rubber plants, mostly located in the area known as Rubbertown. Each interview subject describes his or her impressions of the changing face of poverty and community involvement in the Park Duvalle neighborhood and the relationship of race to poverty and environmental pollution. The interviews cover not only those subjects but also a range of other topics, including segregated Louisville, school desegregation efforts, connections between social movements, and the ongoing struggle for complete civil rights.
A second group of interviews, conducted by Sarah Thuesen, explores the work of economic justice activists in Louisville, Ky., since the 1960s. With one exception, the dominant theme is labor union activism in Louisville. As Louisville experienced industrial decline in the 1970s, the health care sector became an increasingly vital source of employment and labor activity. Several interviewees played leading roles in the locally based Nurses Professional Organization and its efforts to organize nurses in Louisville since the late 1980s; another interviewee organized for several unions. There is also an interview chiefly focused on housing and the women's movement. Other themes in many of these interviews include the black power movement, school desegregation, and the role of race in southern politics.
These interviews are part of the economic justice series, and the interviewees are activists, union organizers, lawyers, ministers, and long-term residents of Birmingham, Ala. Some interviewees discuss local poverty, neighborhood transition, and efforts to revitalize African American neighborhoods and defend workers' rights over the past 40 years; others discuss the evolution of labor union activism in Birmingham since the late 1960s and the recent emergence of an immigrant rights movement relating to Hispanic Americans in Birmingham.
Interviewers include David Cline, Elizabeth Gritter, Kimberly Hill, Aidan Smith, Sarah Thuesen, and Dwana Waugh.
These interviews were conducted by Gerrelyn Chunn Patterson as part of her research for her dissertation, Brown Can't Close Us Down: The Invincible Pride of Hillside High School (University of North Carolina, 2005). Patterson, who attended Hillside High School in Durham, N.C., 1972-1975, interviewed other Hillside alumni about the historically African-American high school during school desegregation. Interviewees represent alumni from the 1950s to the 1970s, some of them teachers at Hillside at the time of the interviews. The interview with Evalee Parker discusses the experience of a white student at the school in the 1970s.
This series explores how the South played a critical yet contradictory role in shaping both the women's movement and the gay liberation movement. Many second-wave feminists and gay rights activists first gained experience as grassroots organizers in the South's African American freedom movement of the 1960s. The South earned a reputation for its adherence to traditional notions of womanhood and masculinity and for its organized resistance to the Equal Rights Amendment and gay rights initiatives. It was in that southern context that many activists began to extend the goals of freedom and equality to questions of gender and sexuality. This series contains 25 interviews conducted by students and interns under the direction of Dr. Sarah Thuesen during the Summer 2006 and Spring 2007 semesters at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The students chose a broad range of feminists and gay rights activists as interviewees. Most were residents of the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area. Interviewees include one of the first women to integrate the United States Military Academy in 1976 and a male professor at the Academy who witnessed that change; two ministers of local churches affiliated with the Metropolitan Community Church, a predominantly gay denomination; several grassroots leaders within the local gay rights movement; participants in the women's health and reproductive rights movements of the 1970s; former employees of Ladyslipper Music in Durham; Karen Parker, the first female African American to receive an undergraduate degree at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; the co-founders of others Against Jesse in Congress, which organized in the mid-1990s against the homophobic rhetoric of North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms; an advocate for women's collegiate athletics; activists with the Orange County (N.C.) Women's Center; members of the Triangle-area Common Woman Chorus; veterans of the Southern Folk Cultural Revival Project, including Alice Gerrard; advocates for women's involvement in politics, especially through the North Carolina Women's Political Caucus; local organizers for National Organization for Women; and local participants in the Equal Rights Amendment campaigns of the 1970s.
There are also four interviews conducted by students under the direction of Dr. Jacquelyn Hall during the Spring 2011 semester and four (U-1063, U-1076, U-1082, U-1086) during the Spring 2014 semester of the Introduction to Oral History seminar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
In May 2006, a team of researchers traveled to New Orleans, La., to initiate a project entitled "Imagining New Orleans." The project team was led by Andrew Horowitz of the New Haven Oral History Project, with collaborators from the Southern Oral History Program, Yale University, and the Louisiana State Museum. The project aimed to use oral history to document the experiences of residents who returned to New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina to rebuild their homes, businesses, and lives and to explore patterns of racial, economic, and political inequality that have long persisted in the city. In four weeks, researchers interviewed nearly 50 residents who had returned to New Orleans as pioneers of the "rebuild and move forward" efforts. The interviews were featured in an exhibit at the Louisiana State Museum. The series also contains four interviews conducted by David Suitts an undergraduate at UNC Chapel Hill, in July 2006 with children at the Children of Faith Camp, Israelite Baptist Church, who witnessed Hurricane Katrina.
This series contains a group of 43 interviews conducted by students under the direction of Dr. Jacquelyn Hall during the Spring 2008 and Spring 2011 semester at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Topics bear on the history of the American South and are related to themes emphasized by the Southern Oral History Program. These themes include, among many others, women's leadership from the 1920s to the present, second wave feminism, labor and working class history, the history of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, journalism, the legal profession, environmental issues, and southern politics. These class materials are related to the SOHP's "The Long Civil Rights Movement" initiative, which aims to expand the understanding of the civil rights movement far beyond the dramatic decade of mass protests against segregation, stressing the struggle that began in the 1930s and spawned a series of other social movements from the 1960s onward. Students chose a broad range of topics related to "The Long Civil Rights Movement" including, but are not limited to, post-secondary school desegregation; politics and race relations in Durham, N.C., and Winston-Salem, N.C.; medicine and medical education at Duke University, gender, and race; the sit-in movement in North Carolina; the gay, lesbian, and transgender community in North Carolina; race and gender in athletics; and Spanish-language media. Also included in this series are 25 interviews by Rob Lalka with individuals active in the Orleans Parish Public Schools reform effort. Please see Series R.30 for interviews from Dr. Hall's Spring 2008 course that do not pertain to "The Long Civil Rights Movement."
"Preserving the African American Experience in Pamlico County" is an oral history and photography project that has documented and preserved the history and heritage of Pamlico County, N.C., from 1930 to 1965. It includes oral histories and recollections of segregation from approximately 20 elderly citizens from Bayboro, Oriental, Florence, Arapahoe, Mesic, Maribel, and Grantsboro, N.C. The project was funded by the North Carolina Humanities Council and the Neuse-Pamlico Sound Women's Coalition, Inc. Linda Henry served as project coordinator.
"Economic Justice in Charleston, S.C.," interviews, conducted by Kieran W. Taylor in summer of 2008, examine economic justice issues in Charleston, S.C., since the 1960s. They explore a 1969 hospital strike with participants and political figures; a racial discrimination lawsuit against BellSouth; local and national politics, including Barack Obama's candidacy in the 2008 presidential election; desegregation and other challenges in public and higher education; the NAACP in South Carolina; and the grassroots activism of economic justice advocates.
The Long Civil Rights Movement: The Women’s Movement in the South project builds on the SOHP’s existing Long Civil Rights Movement research by examining the experience and history of feminist activism in the South. Where the original project focused on the roots of the black freedom struggle and activists’ work to protect and extend the victories of the 1960s, this sub-project attempts to document the spread and impact of feminism in the southern United States. Since 2009, a variety of researchers have contributed to this ongoing endeavor. Field scholars have conducted interviews across the South in Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. The issues covered are wide-ranging, including: women’s movements in Tennessee and Appalachia; labor rights; class and economic justice; education; reproductive rights and reproductive justice; sexuality; intersections of race and gender; the Equal Rights Amendment; environmental activism; faith-based activism; organizational activism; women in government; and the specific nuances of feminism in the South.
The Conservative Women project within the Long Women's Movement explores the political, social, and ideological beliefs and everyday lives of conservative women activists in the American South. SOHP field scholar and UNC history PhD candidate Evan Faulkenbury led this project and conducted interviews in Lynchburg, Va., in June 2014 and throughout North Carolina in 2014 and 2015. Faulkenbury sought to explore aspects and avenues for activism by women who support pro-life beliefs, traditional gender roles, conservative politics, evangelical fundamentalism, and who often oppose sexual freedom and dismiss feminism. Interviewees include professors at Liberty University, members of various local conservative and Republican organizations, and evangelical Christians. While much scholarship on conservatism in the South focuses on men's work, this project demonstrates the role women play in churches, schools, communities, and regional networks.
In April 2010, former members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) gathered at Shaw University in Raleigh, N.C., to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the organization's founding. Interviewees examine their experiences and activities during the civil rights movement and the lasting effects of their participation on their lives.
The Heirs Project is a multi-phased oral history initiative that explores the stories and traditions of social justice activism in North Carolina through in-depth interviews with 14 highly respected activists and organizers. Selected for the integrity and high level of skill in their work dedicated to social justice, the interviewees represent a diversity of age, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity. These narratives capture the richness of a set of activists with powerful perspectives on social justice, political activism, and similar visions of the common good. The stories shared by this cohort of activists represent personal moments of transition and transformation, tales of empowerment and exhaustion, and organizing successes and defeats. The Project seeks to highlight the history of progressive political action in North Carolina through the stories and experiences of those who pushed for change.
The project coordinators, Adrienne Petty and Mark Schultz, have decades of experience in conducting interviews in the South, and in researching the rural South. Schultz, a professor of history at Lewis University, is the author of
All materials were created by the Breaking New Ground fellows. Their written descriptions have been retained. Many interviews are accompanied by photographs, family trees, and other supplemental materials, located in folders U-0659_supp through U-0792_supp.
Interviews conducted by Priscilla M. Martinez in 2011 were deposited at the Baylor University Institute for Oral History and can be accessed
These interviews, conducted in 2012 and 2013, document the history of credit unions in North Carolina, particularly those established by and serving African Americans. During the Jim Crow era, when fair access to credit was limited, community leaders adapted and established these credit unions as an alternative means of saving and borrowing money. The first credit union in North Carolina was founded in 1916 in a rural community in Durham County, most likely for white farmers, while the first credit union established by black North Carolinians was founded two years later in Rowan County. Black citizens had set up another eight credit unions by 1920. During the 1940s, the number of black credit unions rose to fifty-five, giving North Carolina nearly as many as all other states combined. Even after many of these racial barriers fell, African American credit unions continued to grow and merge with others into the 21st century. The Self-Help Credit Union in Durham, North Carolina raised this idea for this project with SOHP, and interviewers include UNC-Chapel Hill graduate students and SOHP field scholars Daphne Fruchtman and Rob Shapard.
The Hayti Spectrum oral history interviews, conducted by Brenda L. Williams, explore African American life from the 1920s to the 1960s in the Hayti community of Durham, N.C.
Interviews explore communitiy, life, and activism of individuals who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer.
A collection of oral history interviews on the topic of local queer life, community, and activism from 1969 to the present. Aaron Lovett, an undergraduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, conducted these interviews as part of his independent research project in the History department in summer 2014. The study was advised by Dr. Rachel Seidman, Associate Director of the Southern Oral History Program. This study traces the development of queer activism from social organizing in the early 1970s, to the beginning of statewide lobbying and political activism in the early 1990s, and to recent developments in North Carolina regarding pro-LGBTQ laws such as the North Carolina School Violence Prevention Act and anti-LGBTQ legislation such as Amendment One. LGBTQ activists interviewed include feminist theorist Alexis Pauline Gumbs, HIV/AIDS advocate Carolyn McAllaster, and LGBTQ lobbyist Ian Palmquist. This study connects local and statewide LGBTQ events with regional and national trends, analyzes the nature of the Triangle area's LGBTQ community in relation to rest of the South, and documents changes and continuities in local LGBTQ life and culture.
These interviews comprise a portion of the set done by E. Patrick Johnson between 2003 and 2006 as research for his book (and performances of) Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South (2008). Major topics include when interviewees realized they were gay or not like other boys, the role of the church in their upbringing, geographic segregation in their town, gender roles at home, gay slang, coming out, college years, the impact of HIV/AIDs on their lives, and their decisions to continue to live in the South or to emigrate upon reaching adulthood. These interviews challenge traditional stereotypes of black gay men as closeted or repressed and reveal how black gay men carve out a place for themselves within their communities in the South.
The South is a place and an experience that motivates identity and historical change. These interviews, 2014-, explore social, economic, and political life of the rural south, with a particular focus on foodways, racial discrimination, and segregated spaces. This project was born out of Dr. Malinda Maynor Lowery's research on southern foodways (drawing from her involvement with the documentary television series A Chef's Life, which airs nationally on PBS and focuses on locally-produced foods, farmers, and kitchen labor in eastern North Carolina) and Lumbee history and communities, and Dr. Seth Kotch's work on making visible the sometimes invisible forces of structural discrimination in African American rural communities. These interviews merge geography with gender, race, labor, and the environment to understand rural spaces and places in North Carolina and beyond and change over time in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Interviews conducted in HIST/FOLK 670: Introduction to Oral History, taught by Dr. Malinda Maynor Lowery, in the spring 2015 semester with individuals about their experiences in rural southern spaces, including foodways, race, gender, labor, and the environment.
Back Ways: Understanding Segregation in the Rural South is an interdisciplinary, collaborative research project designed to unearth, describe, and map the often hidden forces of structural and institutional discrimination that have outlasted the victories of the Civil Rights Movement. This project began in 2014 under the direction of Seth Kotch, professor in American Studies at UNC Chapel Hill, and interviews have been conducted by Darius Scott, SOHP field scholar and PhD in Geography at UNC Chapel Hill. The geographic focus of this project is rural piedmont and eastern North Carolina, where poverty and crime rates remain high, academic performance is low, and residents - especially African Americans, Native Americans, and Latinos - are routinely seen as threatening or incapable. This project is situated in a growing body of scholarship around space, place, and identity, central issues to research in the humanities. It seeks to engage a community in a conversation about how it shaped its own spaces in the face of formal discrimination and the effects of those acts of resistance.
Stories to Save Lives is a collection of oral histories focused on the experience of health, illness, and medical care in the South. The project aims to create a better understanding of how southerners' experiences with healthcare have changed since the 1960s, how stories passed down through families and communities shape peoples' beliefs and attitudes about health and illness, and how social and cultural differences impact the relationships between providers and patients. The goal is to study the past as well as the present, with an eye to informing future changes to the American healthcare system.
The narrators in Stories to Save Lives are caregivers, doctors, nurses, other healthcare workers, and community members of different ages, racial and ethnic background, gender, sexuality, and socio-economic status. As a result, the interviews include recollections of healthcare from a multitude of perspectives and levels of experience. Many themes emerge throughout the collection including: the desire for self-sufficiency in life and healthcare; racial and gender disparities; memories and practice of home remedies; relationships between healthcare providers and patients; reliance on community support; beliefs in the influence of foodways; and cost of healthcare and insurance.
This project was created in partnership with the City of Raleigh's Dix Park Planning Team to document oral histories of eight stakeholders in the now-defunct Dorothea Dix Hospital. The interviews include former employees, both doctors and staff, as well as former patients and family of patients. Each interview provides a new perspective and varying insight into the experience and function of the hospital during its operational years. Narrators also discuss their feelings about the park project and memorializing the hospital and its patients in some way. This project is part of Stories to Save Lives, SOHP's project on health, illness, and medical care in the South.
The SOHP's Polio project seeks to understand, preserve, and amplify the experiences of people who were directly affected by the 20th century polio epidemic in the United States. The Covid-19 pandemic (beginning in 2020) cast the United States in a stark light, revealing the intensity of our struggles with injustice, inequity, and misinformation. The isolation, fear, confusion, and even hostility of the Covid pandemic will be discussed for years to come. But this even is not without precedent: for generations, Americans and others dreaded the warm summer months when polio might emerge. And it did, cruelly preying on children, sometimes dealing with them lightly but sometimes paralyzing them or even killing them. Outbreaks in 1949 and 1952 killed thousands of people and permanently damaged the health of many others. As Americans suffered, worried, and isolated themselves, researchers searched desperately for a vaccine. Learning about the experience of polio from those who lived through it offers contemporary researchers the opportunity to better understand major questions in American life, such as who deserves and receives access to quality health education and health care? What are the responsibilities of families, towns, cities, and governments to keep people healthy? What is the role of the news media in educating the public? What are the short- and long-term effects of a pandemic on individuals, families, and societies? What are the lasting impacts not just of an illness itself, but of the collective memory of how a community dealt (or failed to deal) with such a far-reaching crisis? Interviews for the project were conducted in 2020-2021 during the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic and were recorded remotely.
These interviews, conducted in-person and remotely in the summer of 2021, explore the COVID-19 pandemic experiences of Carolina Meadows residents and staff. Carolina Meadows is a Continuing Care Retirement Community (CCRC) outside of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Founded in 1985, Carolina Meadows offers different levels of care for retired people. Carolina Meadows houses between 700 and 800 residents, where the average age is 84. Approximately 450 employees provide services to support this community. The interviews in this collection explore a variety of themes, including aging and illness, methods of care, ideas of wellness, ways of mourning, medical developments and quarantine, emergency regulations and coping mechanisms, politics, mental health, networks of support and community assistance, access to resources, labor practices, frontline workers, among other issues that animate these personal accounts of the COVID-19 pandemic. This project was a collaboration between the SOHP and Carolina Meadows, and was born out of the SOHP's Polio Project, which interviewed several Carolina Meadows residents in 2020 and 2021.
Struggle, pragmatism, spirituality, and humor weave themselves into the stories of African American farmers and fishermen in the South. No one tells those stories better than the families who have lived the experience of these heritage industries. In this podcast, Masters of Our Own Domain, farmers and shrimpers in Brunswick County, North Carolina offer childhood memories, ancestral treasures, hard lessons, and shared joys, allowing listeners into the deep-rooted traditions African Americans established in a distinctive space. With their unique voices, a retired shrimper, a mature farmer, and a family with three young farmers reveal what family, land, culture, and history mean to them. African American farmers and fishermen have been part of the Southern landscape for centuries. In spaces which have both defined and contested their identities and livelihoods, how are farmers and shrimpers dealing with heritage depletion, land loss, and climate change? How have they shaped the South? These are some of the questions North Carolina State University Public History Ph.D. student Melody Hunter-Pillion asked when conducting oral histories. Melody noticed a change in the landscape of her native Scotland County, where she grew up seeing African American and Native American farmers on their tractors and selling fresh produce in her neighborhood. Guided by her interdisciplinary course instructor at the University of North Carolina, Dr. Malinda Lowery, this oral history project and resulting podcast capture testimonies which are perishable. Although their singular stories are dwindling, the power of their narratives resonates more powerfully than ever. With tractors rolling and seagulls calling in the background, hear these authentic Southern voices.
