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Listening for a Change Initiative Culminates (2004)

SOHP Research Helps Reframe Post-WWII State and Regional History

In 1998, the SOHP embarked on one of its most ambitious projects, Listening for a Change: North Carolina Communities in Transition. This project was made possible by the generous support of the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, with additional funds provided by the Carolina Center for Public Service, UNC's Odum Institute for Research in Social Science, UNC's Institute on Aging, and the Harold S. and Dorothy Elizabeth Bean Conrad Southern Oral History Fund. Five years, fifteen subseries, and more than 360 interviews later, the SOHP's has now substantially completed the Listening initiative as originally conceived. With the remaining funds we are focusing in on a key aspect of the state's post-World War II history, the transformative changes set in motion by the civil rights movement. This new initiative is tentatively entitled The Long Civil Rights Movement.

Listening for a Change unfolded in two broad phases. By 2001, we had largely completed the initial field research, having deployed dozens of researchers to generate a body of oral history interviews documenting critical but little understood aspects of the state's historical evolution in the last half century. These voices now preserved in the SOHP's archive present a fresh understanding of North Carolina's postwar history, and thus the history of the region, especially in the areas of race, the environment, and demographic and economic change.

During the initiative's second phase, we sought to use these interviews to invigorate popular understanding, policy debate, and community life across North Carolina. Indeed, the project's name was inspired by Hugo Slim and Paul Thompson's Listening for a Change: Oral History and Community Development (1995). These efforts, which included public forums, lectures, and other presentations, culminated in the June 2001 Teachers Institute, which we conducted in collaboration with the North Carolina Humanities Council. The Teachers Institute brought fifty-five public school teachers from across the state to Chapel Hill for a week-long program of historical study around Listening's key themes. The teachers' embrace of our materials - an overview essay reviewing the broad patterns of North Carolina's post-war history as revealed by the new research, a series of further essays synthesizing our research findings in each of five thematic areas, a selection of annotated oral history transcript excerpts, and a curriculum for use in public school classrooms - confirmed the hunger for such innovative approaches to understanding the past. The quality of our research and the value of our outreach efforts were further confirmed in February 2003 when graduate research assistants Angela Hornsby and Katie Otis and associate director Joe Mosnier were named recipients of the Graduate School's "Centennial Award" for their contributions to the Listening project. This new award celebrates "graduate student research excellence in service to the citizens of North Carolina." Hornsby examined Northeast Central Durham's evolution during a decade of heavy Hispanic in-migration; Otis studied relief provision after the great flood of 1999; and Mosnier documented the restructuring of the state's economy in the last several decades. These projects all aimed to promote public memory of vital historical experiences and thus to help an engaged citizenry grapple with contemporary community concerns. These outreach efforts will continue with the distribution of a fully bilingual, CD-ROM-based multimedia documentary, entitled "Neighborhood Voices/Voces del Barrio," which examines the transformation of a traditionally African-American community as large numbers of Hispanics settled in northeast central Durham. We will distribute the CD throughout North Carolina during Spring 2004, particularly to teachers and to groups concerned with cross-cultural understanding during a period of continuing ethnic and racial change. To request a copy, call the SOHP (919-962-0455) or send email to info@sohp.org .

As we shift our focus to "The Long Civil Rights Movement" project, we will continue to forge partnerships with local groups devoted to advancing public understanding of and engagement with contemporary social issues.








The Southern Oral History Program
(a component of the UNC Center for the Study of the American South)
CB#9127, 406 Hamilton Hall
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-9127
(919) 962-0455
info@sohp.org