Making Voices Heard: Collecting and Sharing Oral Histories from Users of Segregated Libraries in the South (Presentation for the Oral History Association Annual Meeting, October 2017)

From the conference program: This presentation reviews the progress and objectives of a federally-funded, 3-year oral history project that explores how segregated Carnegie libraries were used as places of community-making, interaction, and learning for African Americans before integration in the 1960s. Known then as “Carnegie colored libraries,” these public libraries opened in eight southern states between 1900 and 1925 and were an extension of the well-known library development program funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Some operated for as many as six decades until, by the 1970s, most had closed or were integrated into the library systems of their larger communities. This presentation focuses on the planning of several project deliverables, from constructing a low-cost, sustainable project website to working with partner organizations to create free, online scholarly resources. The paper will reflect specifically on how participant recruitment can be integrated into the planning of project deliverables