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Sharing the South  

February 2012  

 Greetings! 

 

Our spring semester is in full swing with lectures, music, and new oral history interviews. Also, the Center's quarterly journal Southern Cultures invites you to visit its Fifteenth Anniversary Reader page for some of the best writing on the South, now newly digitized.

 

In January, the Southern Oral History Program completed the first phase of the Civil Rights History Project. This project, mandated by an act of Congress, netted fifty interviews that will join the Library of Congress and become a cornerstone of the collection at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African American History and Culture, which is scheduled to open in 2015.

 
SOHP Mic LogoIndependent historian and former SOHP Associate Director Joseph Mosnier led the fieldwork team, and Digital Humanities Coordinator Seth Kotch managed the project in Chapel Hill. Interviewees include grassroots leaders like James Jones, who organized activism in rural Arkansas; revolutionaries like Kathleen Cleaver, who was active in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Black Panther Party; national leaders like the Reverend James Lowery; and lesser-known activists like the Hicks family, who transformed their town of Bogalusa, Louisiana, with lawsuits and direct action.  

 

These interviews reveal a national movement animated by young people fed up with racial injustice and dedicated to a social, economic, and intellectual restructuring of American society.  They reveal, too, a chapter of American history that is as troubling as it is inspiring and an American present still confronting the legacies of its past.

 

Upcoming events at the Center include a celebration for our Sounds of the South undergraduate research award, a gospel concert February 29th with the Branchettes and New Sons of New Bethel, and on March 1st & 2nd, a film screening and symposium, Loving Then and Now: The Context and Impact of a Landmark Civil Rights Opinion.    

 

Please check our website for the most up-to-date information on the Center and its programs. We also have an active Facebook page and Twitter feed. We hope to see or hear from you soon!

Upcoming Events @ the Center and UNC-CH

Feb. 24 & 25 - Triangle African American History Colloquium (TAAHC) will hold its sixth annual conference, "Defining Freedom in African American History and Culture". Hyde Hall, UNC-CH.

Feb. 28 & 29 - Shared Tables: A Triangle Symposium on Local and Global Food Studies

Feb. 29 - Gospel Concert with the Branchettes and New Sons of New Bethel. 7 p.m., Person Hall, UNC-CH.

March 1 - Screening of The Loving Story. 7 p.m., Varsity Theater, Chapel Hill.

March 2 - Symposium - Loving Then and Now: The Context and Impact of a Landmark Civil Rights Opinion. 9:30 a.m., Hyde Hall, UNC-CH. Register here.

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Connect

Gospel Music on the Hill  
 
Please join us on February 29th at 7 p.m. in Person Hall
on UNC Campus, as the Center hosts two of the best know local gospel groups, the New Sons of New Bethel, and the Branchettes. The New Sons of New Bethel capture both the sweetness of close harmony and the intensity of deeply-held faith in their a cappella gospel singing. The group -- which now numbers seven men-originally came together in 1999 as a family -- based quartet in Durham's New Bethel Baptist Church. 

The Branchettes are one of the region's most celebrated traditional gospel ensembles. Hailing from the Long Branch Disciples Church (hence the "branch" in "Branchettes") in Newton Grove, N.C., the duo of Lena Mae Perry and Wilbur Tharpe have been singing together for 39 years. Their powerful vocal and instrumental stylings lend their songs a deeply traditional edge, invoking the times (as Sister Perry proudly proclaims) of their "foreparents and that old-time religion."

There will be a brief introduction by Glenn Hinson, associate professor in Anthropology at UNC-CH. Free and open to the public.

"Loving Then and Now: The Context and Impact of a Landmark Civil Rights Opinion" Screening and Symposium

On March 1st The Loving Story (77 min.), will screen at the Varsity Theater in Chapel Hill. The Loving Story tells the story of Richard and Mildred Loving and examines the drama, the history, and the current state of interracial marriage and tolerance in the United States. It was short-listed for an Academy Award for best documentary film. Immediately following the screening is an informal discussion with a very distinguished group of scholars. Film begins at 7 p.m. and is free for students and $4 for the general public.

On March 2, the Center for the Study of the American South, with support from the Institute for the Arts and Humanities, will hold a symposium, Loving Then and Now: The Context and Impact of a Landmark Civil Rights Opinion that will bring scholars together to discuss the film from historical, legal, and cultural perspectives. Filmmakers Nancy Buirski and Elisabeth James will speak during lunch about making the film. Register for the symposium here.

The Loving Story and this symposium are supported by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Hutchins Lecture Series

March 22 with  Tomiko Brown-Nagin at 4:30 pm in the Kresge Foundation Common Room (Room 039) at the Johnston Center for Undergraduate Excellence in Graham Memorial Hall.

Dr. Brown-Nagin teaches courses on American social and legal history, constitutional law, education law, and policy and public interest law. She has written widely on civil rights history and law and has published in both law and history journals. Oxford University Press recently published Dr. Brown-Nagin's book Courage to Dissent, about lawyers, courts and community-based activism during the Civil Rights Era. She was the Charles Warren Visiting Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School in fall 2008.