Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, April 29, 1993 TAG: 9304280365
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: FRAN SCHWARTZKOPFF COX NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The life stories of more than 2,000 people - as they tell them on videotape - will be the centerpiece of "Behind the Veil: African-American Life in the Jim Crow South," which focuses on the 80-plus years when laws relegated blacks to the back of the bus and into separate schools, hospitals and cemeteries.
"It's a period that people want to forget," said Robert Korstad, a Duke history professor. "It has none of the romance of the antebellum period and none of the heroics of the civil rights movement."
The interviews will form the basis of a book, exhibit and documentary. It also will be available to scholars and others who want to use the firsthand accounts. The 30 communities in which the interviews take place also will receive transcripts for their own history projects.
The project reflects a growing movement among historians to record the stories of those who were forced to live as second-class citizens by laws separating "colored" from "white" and who later provided the foundation for the civil rights movement.
"It will give us some sense of how generations of African-Americans survived and protested and ordered their lives during a difficult period," said Raymond Gavins, a Duke history professor.
The interviews will span the 1960s back to the late 19th century, when, according to the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, the term "Jim Crow" was first used to describe the Southern system of legal segregation.
The term Jim Crow may have originated with a real man: white minstrel Thomas "Daddy" Rice, who in the early 1800s performed a song-and-dance routine dressed in rags, with his face blackened with burnt cork. The name became synonymous with segregation in the late 19th century.
Partly responsible for the push to document the era is a broadened sense of what constitutes Southern history - more than wars and white men. In addition, there has been an influx into the history profession of black Americans who want to learn from Jim Crow's silver lining: thriving black neighborhoods, businesses and schools.
The hope is to learn "from the past ways to help invigorate policies - local, state, national - that are supposed to be giving people access to hope and ambition," Korstad said.
Also prompting the effort is the prospect of losing firsthand accounts.
"Most of the people who lived through the era are 75 and 80 years old," said James Eaton, director of Florida A&M's Black Archives and Research Center. "If we don't record [their histories] now, we won't ever get a chance to do that."
Duke's interview process is funded partly by a $315,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. It is the culmination of three years' preparatory work and will document everyday lives, ranging from work to religious participation.
Scouring the regions that make up the South - from the coastal areas to the Delta - will be scores of graduate students and professors from Duke, the University of North Carolina, North Carolina Central University and several historically black colleges.
Students are busy taking classes in how to spot and collect material such as family photos and how to conduct the interviews, which will begin this summer. More material will be gathered over the next two summers.
"We're going to see some stories and people who are quite heroic," Gavins predicted.
by CNB