Black History Month: Oral Histories

Videotaped interviews from the Library of Congress's Veterans History Project.

The Behind the Veil Oral History Project was undertaken by Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies . A selection of recorded oral history interviews chronicling African-American life during the age of legal segregation in the American South, from the 1890s to the 1950s.

Interviews with women who have made substantial contributions to improving the lives of African-Americans and all people, through professional and voluntary activities, in their communities and nationally.

Oral histories and interviews from the University of Georgia's Civil Rights Digital Library.

The Explorations in Black Leadership video collection contain 51 interviews . These oral interviews reveal how leaders are nurtured, and how historical circumstances shape them. These interviews are stories of identity -- stories about the self, stories about the group, and stories about value and meaning.

From the Internet Archive.

Oral history interviews conducted in the 1980s with aging Philadelphians who participated in and witnessed the Great Migration firsthand, these stories tell of both individual lives and collective experiences adapting to a new home in the "City of Brotherly Love."

Founded in 1973, the Southern Oral History Program collects interviews with southerners who have made significant contributions to various fields of human endeavor. In addition, the Program undertakes special projects with the purpose of rendering historically visible those whose experience is not reflected in traditional written sources. Interviews are conducted by Program staff, graduate students, faculty members, and consultants.

Young activists and organizers with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC (pronounced “SNICK”), represented a radical, new unanticipated force whose work continues to have great relevance today.

From Pacifica Radio.

The recordings of former slaves in Voices Remembering Slavery: Freed People Tell Their Stories took place between 1932 and 1975 in nine states. Twenty-three interviewees discuss how they felt about slavery, slaveholders, coercion of slaves, their families, and freedom.

This project contains multiracial oral histories both from the start of the civil rights era and those captured in more recent interviews, with contributions from a number of North Texas institutions.