The Civil Rights History Project: Survey of Collections and Repositories

Listening for a change

Repository: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Southern Oral History Program

Collection Description (Extant): Listening for a Change encompasses an overview 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.

SERIES K.2.5. LISTENING FOR A CHANGE: WEST CHARLOTTE HIGH SCHOOL PROJECT: 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).

SERIES K.2.8. LISTENING FOR A CHANGE: HISTORY 170, ORAL HISTORY COURSE PROJECT: DESEGREGATION AND THE INNER LIVE OF CHAPEL HILL SCHOOLS: 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.

SERIES K.2.10. LISTENING FOR A CHANGE: SEGREGATION AND INTEGRATION OF NORTH CAROLINA ATHLETICS PROGRAMS: 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.

SERIES K.2.14. LISTENING FOR A CHANGE: SCHOOL DESEGREGATION: DAVIDSON STUDENT INTERVIEWS: 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.

SERIES K.2.15. LISTENING FOR A CHANGE: SCHOOL DESEGREGATION: DAVIDSON-JOHNSON C. SMITH STUDENT INTERVIEWS: 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.

SERIES K.2.16. LISTENING FOR A CHANGE: SCHOOL DESEGREGATION IN CHARLOTTE, N.C.: 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.

SERIES K.2.19. LISTENING FOR A CHANGE: STEPHENS-LEE HIGH SCHOOL, ASHEVILLE, N.C.: 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.

SERIES K.2.20. LISTENING FOR A CHANGE: MIGHTYTIGERS--ORAL HISTORIES OF CHAPEL HILL'S LINCOLN HIGH SCHOOL: 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.

SERIES K.2.22. LISTENING FOR A CHANGE: NORTH CAROLINA CHURCHES: 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.

SERIES K.2.23. LISTENING FOR A CHANGE: AFRICAN AMERICANS IN GEORGIA: 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).

SCOPE AND CONTENT: 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.

Access Copy Note: Some interviews are restricted or closed as noted in the finding aid.
Interview transcripts are CLOSED while they are being digitized. Please contact the The Southern Historical Collection for more information.
If an interview has been transcribed, researchers should quote from the transcript. If no transcript is available, reference to material in the interview should be taken from the audio recording. Some interviews have restrictions imposed by the interviewees or interviewers; restricted interviews are clearly marked. Researchers may, for example, be required to obtain written permission from the interviewee or interviewer to quote from the interview.
Use of audiotapes or videotapes may require production of listening or viewing copies

Collection URL: http://www.lib.unc.edu/dc/sohp/projects.html

Digital Status: Partial

Existing IDs: Collection Number: 04007 K.2

Extent: 695 items

Finding Aid URL: http://www.lib.unc.edu/mss/inv/s/Southern_Oral_History_Program_Collection.html

Language: English

Interviewees: Alma Enloe, Arthur Griffin, William Hamlin, Ned Irons, Harriet Gentry Love, John W. Love, Jr., Latrelle P. McAllister, Leroy Miller, Brian Tarr, Carrie Abramson, Jeff Black, William Culp, Saundra Davis, James Atwater, Edwin Caldwell, Jr., Kathy Cheek, John Ray Davis, Julie Falconer, Sam Holton, Robert P. Humphreys, Fran Regester Jackson, Paul M. Killough, Lucy Lewis, Barbara Beye Lorie, John Mason, Joanne McClelland, Daniel H. Pollitt, Charlene Regester, Charles Rivers, Jerome P. Seaton, Stephen Scroggs, Joseph Straley, Marie Peachee Wicker, John Derek Williams, Perry Deane Young, William C. Friday, John McLendon, Jr., James Ross, Susan Shackelford, Wayne Bess, Garfield Carr, Steve Cherry, Talmadge Conner, James Dawkins, Frank Fields, Terry Graham, von Roy Harris, Melton Johnson, Al Jones, Leroy Magness, Vennie Moore, Kenneth Norton, Miriam Parrott, Ronnie Roseboro, Clyde Smith, Alan Stoudemire, Brenda Tapia, Rudolph Young, Karen M. McKaig, Agnes Alexandre, Mary Archie, Herbert Smith, Ed Beam, Garfield Carr, Deborah Carter, Winona Chestnut, Mary Clemmons, Helena Cunningham, Moses Davis, Anne French, Brenda Fonberger, Sylvia Hager, Andrew Haywood, Martha Jenkins, Myrtle Johnson, May McNinch Johnston, Judy Krenzer, Charles LaBorde, Carolyn Lawrence, Jacqueline McCullough, Robert Meeks, Rosalie Davis Meeks, Kathleen Moloney-Tarr, Eleanor Workman Payne, Eunice Pharr, Marcus Rivens, Kenneth Allen Simmons, Shaw Smith, Bill Strong, Brenda Tapia, Kenneth Vinson, Kay Watts, Patsy Rice Camp, Timothy Gibbs, Madge Hopkins, Willie Joplin, Anna Spangler Nelson, Patricia Sutherland, Rudolph M. Torrence, Gosnell White, Robert Yost, Angela C. Wood Fritz, William McMillan, Jr., Maggie W. Ray, Gerson Stroud, Jeremy M. Tarr, Norma Scott Baynes, Richard Bowman, Samuel Maurice Camp, Louis Edward Grant, Bertha B. Johnson, Portia Leverette-Waddell, Ilka Carmen McDowell, Everett Earl Parrish, Louis Claude Ray, Herbet James Watts, James Atwater, Alice Battle, Fred Battle, Shirley Bradshaw, Willie Brad Bradshaw, Edwin Caldwell, Hilliard Caldwell, Elizabeth Carter, Rebecca Clark, Thurman Couch, Nate Davis, Shirley Davis, Walter Durham, Keith Edwards, Sheila Florence, Vivian Foushee, Everett Goldston, Burnis Hackney, Sylvester Hackney, Gloria Register Jeter, Betty King, David Kirkman, Mary Manning, Polly McCauley, Stella Nickerson, Delaine Norwood, Raney Norwood, Joanne Peerman, Clyde Perry, Diane Pledger, Zora Rashkis, Mary Scroggs, Clemintine Self, Charlene Smith, R. D. Smith, Robert Smith, Ted Stone, Stanley Vickers, Jo Chadwick, Dorothy Sykes, Marion Hartman, Anne Burns, John Williams Corbett, Judson Mayfield, Elizabeth Gilliam Parker, George Parker, Katerina Whitley

Rights (Extant): When the copyright has not been assigned to the University of North Carolina, copyright is retained by the interviewers/interviewees, or their descendants, as stipulated by United States copyright law.

Subjects:

African American churches--North Carolina
African American clergy--North Carolina
African American educators--North Carolina
African American schools
African American students--North Carolina
African Americans--North Carolina
Educators
School integration--North Carolina
Segregation in education--North Carolina

Genres:

Interviews
Sound recordings
Transcripts