Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 16, 1994 TAG: 9401200310
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
A team of historians and volunteers at the Harrison Museum of African American Culture recorded the oral histories of nearly 80 older black residents of the Roanoke Valley last year.
People talked about almost everything:
The price of milk 50 years ago. Formal dances. Church socials. Roanoke gigs by some of America's biggest bands. Racial violence. The strains of segregation and urban renewal. And the determination of railroad workers to send their sons and daughters to college.
Someday, there may be a book. That's the dream of museum director Melody Stovall, who did some of the interviews herself.
With private donations and a grant from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and Public Policy, the museum project - titled ``A Hidden History: The Black Experience in the Roanoke Valley - came close to its goal of capturing 100 tape-recorded interviews.
Stovall hopes her staff and supporters can do more interviews in the coming years.
She and new curator Aletha Cherry are building a permanent collection of old photographs and written materials, too. (The museum, at 345-4818, welcomes donations of photos, old church bulletins and other historical memorabilia.)
In honor of Black History Month and tomorrow's birthday of Martin Luther King Jr., today we publish excerpts from the oral histories.
Culled from 1,700 pages of interviews transcribed by students at Virginia Tech, these excerpts do not cover every aspect of life in the Roanoke Valley, to be sure, or every point of view.
But they give a taste of the rich history that resides in the memories of local residents - and now, too, in the growing files at Harrison Museum.
by CNB