Mellon Foundation Funds Joint
“Long Civil Rights” Project
An historic $937,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation of New York marks an important milestone for the Southern Oral History Program’s ongoing Long Civil Rights Movement initiative. The three-year grant—“Publishing the Long Civil Rights Movement”—is a collaborative effort among SOHP, UNC Press, the Center for Civil Rights in the School of Law, and the UNC library that allows SOHP to join its partners in exploring new ways of producing and disseminating civil rights movement-related scholarship.
Since 2004 SOHP researchers have been documenting social justice activism in the post-1960s South with an emphasis on school desegregation, and struggles for open housing and racial and gender equality on the job. These efforts have produced one of the nation’s most extensive collections of oral history interviews related to social change during the 1970s. With Mellon grant funding, according to SOHP director Jacquelyn Hall, the organization will “develop new avenues of communicating its scholarly findings,” while using digital technology to “invite the participation of a community of scholars in ways that we would not have dreamed of just a few years ago.”
The grant has its origins in a December 2006 meeting between the Mellon Foundation and representatives from the university and the UNC press. The Foundation expressed an interest in finding unique ways to produce print and digital publications in the humanities while strengthening the links between university presses and campus faculty. The UNC officials suggested that the project be built around the press’s and the university’s strength in interdisciplinary civil rights scholarship. Kate Torrey, the director of UNC press, suggested that Hall’s essay, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” might provide the foundation for the grant, and the project partners spent eight months crafting their proposal.
A central theme of Hall’s essay is that the narrative of the civil rights movement has been erroneously limited to the tumultuous decade between the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, which made school segregation illegal, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Hall asserted that the “longer civil rights movement” began with the liberal and radical milieu of the late 1930s, continued well beyond the 1960s, and included the political and legal backlash that has led to a re-segregation of schools and neighborhoods and threatens the social aims inherent in the Brown decision. She argued for a widening of the window of civil rights chronologically, spatially, and ideologically to include contemporary issues such as race and the public schools, economic justice, and the women’s and gay rights movements. In so doing, Hall sought to debunk popularized notions of the Civil Rights Movement that, in effect, diminish its lasting meaning and obscure its continuing power and relevance.
Upon learning of Mellon’s decision in December 2007, Torrey said that the UNC Press will “be able to explore new opportunities for linking audio materials with textual materials and photographs to reinforce and illuminate scholarly and legal analysis.” Aligning UNC Press with the strengths of the University would create a powerful platform that could serve as a catalyst for collaboration and shared capital investment in university-based publishing, she said.
Torrey, who has been director of UNC Press since 1992, noted that the press has long been a leader in making its titles available to libraries in non-print as well as traditional ink-on-paper formats, but she acknowledged that economic pressures have limited the extent to which they have been able to experiment with different digital forms. “The expertise and the dollars involved in entering the digital arena presented a high hurdle for university presses,” Torrey said. “The Mellon Foundation, which has been the single most generous foundation in exploring scholarly communication within the humanities, has given us support to experiment.”
Richard Szary, director of the Louis Round Wilson Library and Associate University Librarian for Special Collections, explained that the library, SOHP and UNC Press would bring a complementary set of expertise and skills to the project.
Szary and his library staff provide considerable technical expertise to the Mellon grant project, along with his role in overseeing the library’s newly established Carolina Digital Library and Archives. The award-winning Documenting the American South digital library is now one of the flagship programs of the new department. “A good part of our role will be to provide the underlying infrastructure, the digital publishing platform, if you will, that we also need for our own purposes at the library,” Szary said.
Szary said there is much the library and the Southern Oral History Program can learn from UNC Press in terms of editing and selecting materials and tailoring products to fit a market need. “The technical developments are going to be challenging but the grant will also help the library and SOHP to build a new model of working together with the press in new and exciting ways,” Szary said. “We’ve always had a good relationship with the Press, but this deepens it in many complementary ways. We are equally excited about working with the Center for Civil Rights and the array of scholars on this subject across campus.”
The Library’s Southern Historical Collection is the repository for the Southern Oral History Program’s tapes and transcripts. Currently, a $500,000 grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services is funding collaboration between SOHP and the Library’s “Documenting the American South” group to make 500 interviews available on line. The project is also developing pathbreaking tools for synchronizing the voice of each storyteller with a scrolling transcript and making oral histories searchable in ways they have never been before, according to Hall. The long civil rights project, Hall believes, will be able to learn from and build on this project. “Sometimes, people get grants to do something that is a brand new idea. That’s great. I think this idea appealed to the Mellon Foundation, in part, because civil rights is so firmly rooted in UNC’s ongoing activities and research.”
While it is far too early to decide outcomes, the people involved in the project believe that this grant can serve as a model for others to follow. “There are so many more questions than answers right now about the production, publication and consumption of innovative scholarship and legal analysis, but the Mellon grant gives us the chance to work those questions out,” Torrey said. “We will learn a tremendous amount and if it works, I am optimistic that this kind of collaboration can carry over in other areas.”
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is a private foundation that makes grants in the areas of higher education and scholarship, scholarly communications, research in information technology, museums and art conservation, performing arts, and conservation and the environment. Mellon Foundation Web site: http://www.mellon.org
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