One hundred oral history recordings of African American life in the Jim Crow South—from the Center for Documentary Studies’ Behind the Veil project—have been digitized and are now available on the Duke University Libraries website and iTunesU. This digital collection captures the vivid personalities, poignant personal stories, and behind-the-scenes decision-making that bring to life the African American experience in the South during the late-19th to mid-20th century.
Listen to this sample interview of Imogene Watkins Wilson, from Memphis, Tennessee, a schoolteacher whose husband edited the Memphis Tri-State Defender, the city’s leading African American newspaper.
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From 1993 to 1995, dozens of graduate students at Duke and other schools fanned out across the South to capture stories of segregation as part of Behind the Veil: Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow South. The students sought to preserve the stories before the men and women who survived Jim Crow—roughly the period from the 1890s to the 1950s—passed away. More than 1,200 interviews were recorded on regular cassette tapes, transcribed, and archived in Duke’s special collections library. It is the largest single collection of Jim Crow oral histories in the world. The selection of one hundred recorded interviews that have been digitized and made available online, with transcripts, total about 175 hours of recordings and 10,000 pages of text.
Listen to coverage of the project on NPR’s Tell Me More:
TO EXPLORE BEHIND THE VEIL: Visit the Duke Libraries website or iTunes U, accessible via any computer with iTunes installed.
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