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SOHP Collection Bolstered by Recent Deposits

The Southern Oral History Program Collection has expanded tremendously over the past two years with recent archival deposits of hundreds of interviews related to race, civil rights, and school desegregation. Most recently, Duke historian Bob Korstad has deposited nearly 100 interviews related to the Winston-Salem tobacco workers' labor struggles of the 1940s. Korstad drew upon these interviews for the publication of his prize-winning book, Civil Rights Unionism.

The interviews and research materials of Brenda L. Williams will help meet a growing interest in Durham's Hayti community. Williams's forty-six interviews and thirty-seven folders of research explore a range of aspects of black life in Hayti during the 1920s through the 1950s.

Other substantial deposits include interviews from the initial phases of the SOHP's Long Civil Rights Movement initiative. This project collects interviews with men and women who in the years following the sit-ins and protests of the 1960s fought to keep the doors of equal opportunity open and to extend the civil rights struggle into new arenas. The interviews for this project document activism in a wide range of communities across the South, including Charlotte, Chapel Hill, New Orleans, Birmingham, and Louisville.

These are only a handful of the recent additions to the SOHP collection at the Southern Historical Collection at UNC-CH. For a full listing, consult the SOHP collection finding aide or the SOHP's interview database.