Recently Holly, my colleague here at the Southern Historical Collection, and I got the chance to tag along on a bus tour of Durham, N.C., with the Department of City and Regional Planning here at UNC-Chapel Hill. The tour focused on planning and development activities in several areas of downtown Durham, and how history and [...]
Kudzu was introduced to the United States at the first World’s Fair in 1876, and was planted by southern farmers to prevent land erosion. During World War II, however, tensions between the United States and Japan resulted in a kudzu shortage…that’s right, a kudzu shortage. I discovered this while perusing a website called Remember Cliffside [...]
Southern Conference for Human Welfare
20-23 November 1938, Birmingham Ala.
This is a pamphlet from a third interracial conference attended by Olive M. Stone. Inside it describes topics to be discussed at the conference, as well as the purpose of having such a conference: bringing together progressive leaders in the South.
“The Conference issues an urgent invitation to [...]
Negro-White Conference, Shaw University, Raleigh, N.C.
30 November – 2 December, 1934
Pictured here are the findings of another month-long interracial conference attended by Olive M. Stone, which historian Glenda Gilmore has called “the first southern interracial conference that dared endorse integration” (Defying Dixie, p. 221). The conference also challenged the approaches taken by several of the [...]
Olive M. Stone, an Alabama native, was a sociologist whose work focused on social welfare, race relations, and southern farmers. That’s her, pictured here in Russia, 1931. Stone’s involvement in civil rights and radical politics brought her to a number of southern and northern interracial conferences in the 1930s. This post is the first of [...]
Here are a couple of Thanksgiving cartoons from a “Winter Stories” scrapbook, ca. 1900, from the papers of Charles L. Coon (finding aid), our friend from the previous post. Coon, an early 20th-century education reformer and teacher, put together a number of scrapbooks like this for use in classrooms.
This document, “Regulations to Govern the Teachers’ Homes,” 1921-1922, was prepared by Charles L. Coon, an early 20th-century education reformer and superintendent of Wilson County schools, in order to protect the the “property of the public” (apparently referring to the home itself) and the “health and good name of the teachers.” Some highlights include:
8.(d) The [...]
The North Carolina Commission on Interracial Cooperation Records (finding aid) contains a group of surveys done in 1948 to assess the holdings of NC public libraries related to minorities, especially African Americans. A list of titles was sent out to white and black libraries around the state, and librarians indicated which titles they had in [...]
