The Civil Rights History Project: Survey of Collections and Repositories

Minnesota's greatest generation oral history project: Part I

Repository: Minnesota Historical Society. Minnesota History Center

Collection Description (CRHP): On civil rights issues, see interviews with Wilbert LeRoy Bartlett, Joseph Gomer, Harold and Lawrence Brown, and Martin O. Weddington, who discuss their experiences as part of segregated military units such as the Red Tailed Angels; also Lavinia Stone Murray and others who dealt with segregation and discrimination on the home front.

Collection Description (Extant): The emphasis in these thirty interviews, Part I of a continuing project, is on the experiences of veterans, people not in the military, and ethnic minorities. Some of the subjects discussed by the interviewees are the Great Depression years; economic conditions and life in the United States during the war, particularly bond drives, rationing, raising children during shortages, and the increase in women's employment; experiences of servicemen, including the draft, training camps, being wounded and rehabilitation, hospital care, captivity in European and Japanese prisoner of war camps, adjustment to life after the war, post-traumatic stress disorder, and GI Bill education opportunities; changes following the attack on Pearl Harbor; Japanese American internment camps; reaction to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's death and the atomic bomb; Japanese language training at Fort Snelling and Camp Savage; minorities' experiences during the war, including segregation, discrimination, and racism, both in and out of the military; religion and chaplaincy service; military and Red Cross nurses; and life in Japan during the war.

For biographical information see individual description sheets in the oral history notebooks.

Origin Info: Interviewed by Thomas Saylor, Daniel Borkenhagen, and Thomas Brandt.

Date(s): 2001-2003

Existing IDs: OH 112

Extent: 62 sound cassettes (60 min. each), 2 sound cassettes (90 min. each), transcripts (30 v. in 30 folders; 28 cm.)

Finding Aid URL: http://www.mnhs.org/library/findaids/OH112.pdf

Language: English

Related Archival Items: See also Part II of this project. Interviews from a related project, "Oral history interviews of the Minnesota's Greatest Generation Oral History Project: The home front in western Minnesota, 1973-1980" (OH111) may also be relevant.

Interviewees: Wilbert LeRoy Bartlett, Joseph Gomer, Harold Brown, Lawrence Brown, Martin O. Weddington, Lavinia Stone Murray

Rights (CRHP): Contact the repository which holds the collection for information on rights

Subjects:

African American veterans
African Americans--Minnesota
Discrimination in the military
Minnesota--Race relations
Race discrimination--Minnesota
World War, 1939-1945--Participation, African American

Genres:

Interviews
Sound recordings
Transcripts