“Through the long, hot summer and the long cold winter, Delta Ministry looks ahead: to a total ministry, to growing self-respect and self-determination among delta Negroes, to a bold new start for some.” So begins the text of a wonderful brochure (found in the SHC’s Delta Health Center Records) that tells the story of the Delta [...]
UNC’s Southern Oral History Program (SOHP) collects interviews with Southerners who have made significant contributions to a variety of fields and interviews that will render historically visible those whose experience is not reflected in traditional written sources. The Southern Historical Collection is the repository for oral histories collected by the SOHP.
The SOHP has digitized 500 [...]
On this date, forty four years ago, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the “National Voting Rights Act of 1965.” The Act was intended to enforce the fifteenth amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It did so by outlawing disfranchisement practices adopted in many southern states after the Civil War, including literacy tests. Amazingly, the [...]
The image: two young men stride through two large open doors. Each man is carrying a packet of papers. The men are smiling and seem confident.
I had seen this image many times before. In fact, we have a print of this photograph in the SHC’s collection of J. Kenneth Lee Papers. From our description of [...]
[Each month we feature a "creator" or one of the SHC's manuscript collections. In archival terms, a creator is defined as an individual, group, or organization that is responsible for a collection's production, accumulation, or formation.]
The North Carolina Fund, an independent, non-profit, charitable corporation, sought and dispensed funds to fight poverty in North Carolina, 1963-1968. [...]
[A continuation from part 1 of a post about the 1947 Journey of Reconciliation]…
We include here a video that contains excerpts of audio from a 1974 oral history interview with Igal Roodenko, participant in the 1947 Journey of Reconciliation, from the collection of the Southern Oral History Program (SOHP) at UNC Chapel Hill. The [...]
Before Rosa Parks, there was Irene Morgan
On Saturday, February 28, 2009, the Chapel Hill/Carrboro NAACP, the Town of Chapel Hill, and the people of the Chapel Hill community gathered for a dedication of a highway historical marker to commemorate the 1947 Journey of Reconciliation (also known as the first “Freedom Rides”). The dedication included a [...]
[Today we feature the life and work of Reverend James A. Felton of Hertford County, North Carolina. The Southern Historical Collection is proud to be the repository that preserves a small collection of papers from the Felton family (the James A. and Annie V. Felton Papers, Collection #5161, finding aid). The following biographical note [...]
