Recent Projects at the SOHP

While the main programmatic focus of the SOHP continues to be its Long Civil Rights Movement intiative, we remain active in an array of research, documentation, and community outreach efforts.

Our already excellent labor collection has been enhanced considerably by the addition of hundreds of interviews related to the publication of two award winning books on North Carolina's labor movement--Leon Fink's The Maya of Morganton (2003) and Robert Korstad's Civil Rights Unionism (2003). In Maya of Morganton, University of Illinois at Chicago history professor Fink has provided us with an extraordinary account of the recent union organizing drive by Guatemalan immigrants in a poultry plant in Morganton. Korstad's book takes as its subject the remarkable efforts of black workers in Winston-Salem to organize for labor and civil rights in the 1940s. The Korstad and Fink interviews have been deposited in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, which continues to be the most heavily used portion of the Southern Historical Collection.

This past summer, the SOHP launched a series of interviews examining the Raleigh News and Observer's impact on state and regional politics from WWII until the paper's 1995 sale. Funded by a $50,000 Triangle Community Fund grant, the project is the brainchild of former publisher and president Frank A. Daniels, Jr., grandson of N&O founder Josephus Daniels.

And this past September 24, dozens of SOHP friends and associates joined together at the Love House and Hutchins Forum to celebrate the release of Pam Grundy's excellent eighth grade textbook--A Journey Through North Carolina. The book features interviews from the SOHP's "Listening for a Change Series," a Z. Smith Reynolds initiative to document unrecorded aspects of North Carolina's post-World War II history through oral history.