Southern Oral History Program

The Long Women's Movement in the American South

The Southern Oral History Program has begun work on the next phase of our ongoing long civil rights movement research: the long women's movement. Our fieldworkers have focused on east Tennessee, a rural region where poverty challenged black and white women to band together to pursue labor rights, reproductive health services, environmental cleanup, and economic justice. Collectively, these interviews show how the modern American women’s movement was widespread, engaged women on various fronts, and occurred throughout the rural and urban South. Moreover, many women expressed how they evolved in personal ways within their families and marriages, the resistance they encountered as they began to critique the gendered inequalities in American society, and how the women’s movement continues to influence their decisions and perspectives of everyday life. Explore the interviews here.

The Civil Rights History Project

In 2009, the United States Congress directed the Smithsonian Institution and the Library of Congress to document the history of the civil rights movement with The Civil Rights History Project Act. The Act mandated that the American Folklife Center do a nationwide inventory of civil rights oral history collections (take a look here) and directed the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture to collect 50 new oral history interviews. For that task, the NMAAHC turned to the Southern Oral History Program. The interviews will become available to the public at the Library of Congress this Fall and will join the collection at the NMAAHC, slated to open in 2015.

Until then, here's a sample of what we heard.

Southern Voices: Angelia Sliger

Angelia Sliger grew up in the Bumpus Cove community in the mountains of Tennessee. Her mother, Gail Randolph, was a leader in an environmental justice movement to stop toxic dumping in their community. Gail Randolph began attending workshops at the Highlander Research and Education Center, and she often took Angelia, then a teenager, with her. In this excerpt, Angelia discusses a poem she wrote in high school that was inspired by the women’s movement.

 

Support Our Work

Our Community Oral History Fund, part of Innovate Carolina, supports community oral history projects in North Carolina by providing workshops on oral history methods, consulting as the project develops and serving as an archive for selected interviews when they are completed.

We aim to create a $100,000 endowment to sustain the Community Oral History Fund in perpetuity, ensuring that the voices and memories of North Carolinians are preserved for the future. For more information on how to support the fund, please contact Sally Greene at (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) or 919-962-0553.

And there are more ways to give! The SOHP does not receive funding for its fieldwork projects from the University. We rely on donors like you to head into the field and conduct the interviews that become the foundation for the next scholarly conversation, school project, or book. Please consider helping us achieve our mission. Here's how. And thanks!