Back Ways

The Civil Rights History Project, mandated by an Act of Congress in 2009, is a joint undertaking of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture and the American Folklife Center in the Library of Congress. The project began with a nationwide survey of oral history collections and culminated in a broad series of oral history interviews with civil rights movement veterans from coast to coast. The SOHP conducted ...

"The Long Women's Movement in the American South" gathers interviews with women who found courageous and creative ways to fight for gender equality and against sexual discrimination in the South, a region that until quite recently has been left out of the narrative of second-wave feminism. Oral history's unique ability to capture the experiences of ordinary people and expand our understanding of extraordinary political and social transformations has been surprisingly ...

Stories to Save Lives: Health, Illness, and Medical Care in the South seeks to bring the powerful research methodology of oral history to bear on one of the critical issues facing our state: healthcare. We know that health outcomes vary across the state, by race, class, gender, and region, but the quantitative measures we have cannot always explain enough about why. In order to develop more effective interventions to save ...

Back Ways is a project of the Southern Oral History Program that works to understand the social experience of racial segregation in the rural South through oral history and archival research. Former SOHP field scholar and lifelong local resident Rachel Cotterman collaborated with members of the Harvey's Chapel AME Church and other neighbors to trace the histories of rural back roads southwest of Hillsborough. This digital exhibit is a collection ...

The Long Civil Rights Movement initiative is a project intended to better understand how the South has been shaped by the Black and women's liberation movements, the Vietnam War, natural disasters, and conservative politics. We conducted oral history interviews in Charleston, South Carolina and Charlotte, North Carolina. Our focus was on the continued resonance of the Civil Rights movement after the 1960s. We have conducted over 350 interviews, many of ...