Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow South: Digital Access to the Behind the Veil Project Archive

FAIN: PW-277365-21

Duke University (Durham, NC 27705-4677)
John Gartrell (Project Director: July 2020 to present)

The digitization, cataloging, and transcription of Duke University’s Behind the Veil (BTV) oral history collection of 1,200 analog master recordings and over 3,800 supplemental materials, including photographs and project files, to current digital standards. The collection, which illustrates African American life in twenty Southern communities under Jim Crow, would be published in the Duke Digital Repository.

“Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow South" will expand online access to the the Behind the Veil (BTV) project archive, housed in the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University. The archive's provenance is traced to an oral history initiative from the early 1990's launched by the Duke's Center for Documentary Studies which interviewed African Americans from twenty distinct communities in the US South to document their experiences living through the era of segregation commonly known as Jim Crow. The BTV archive contains interviews with over 1,200 individuals and families, nearly 3,000 pieces of visual materials including slides, prints and photo negatives, and supplementary project files and electronic records. This proposal will migrate the archive's analog master recordings, photographs, and project files to current digital standards and publish the collection in the Duke Digital Repository with appropriate metadata and transcription.