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project overview

Behind the Veil: Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow South is a major research project into the history of African American life during the age of Jim Crow, roughly the period from the 1890s to the 1950s. The Jim Crow era was a time of undeniable oppression and exploitation of black Americans. However, these sixty years of legal segregation in the American South also represented a time when African Americans made monumental efforts to build their own communities and institutions, resisted discrimination in ways large and small despite personal risk, and put their ineluctable mark on American culture.

The large goal of the Behind the Veil project is to investigate the realities of African American life as it was lived in the Jim Crow South. Toward this end, the project supports:

• the creation and preservation of archival materials, including oral history interviews and family photographs

• research and publication on all aspects of black life during the Jim Crow era

• the teaching of African American history in schools, colleges, and universities

• intervention in public policy debates about the legacy of racial discrimination in America.

The project began in the late 1980s when several historians connected to the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University met to address their shared concern about the relatively static historical interpretation of the age of segregation. Although it covered a long period and was the law in eleven southern states, Jim Crow was seen as a tale of total oppression by whites, on the one hand, and passive submission by blacks, on the other. In defining the project, we wanted to get beyond this simple dichotomy, to understand the complex realities of African American life, and we wanted this knowledge to emerge from the lived experiences of African Americans.

To accomplish this goal, we knew that we would need to rely on the first-person testimony of ordinary men and women who lived behind the veil. There also was urgency to our mission. Generations who had lived their formative years under the reign of Jim Crow were passing away. Over the next few years, hundreds of life history interviews were collected by project. These are testimonies to the enduring capacity of human beings to struggle for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The interviews provide historians with the sources they need to tell the real story of Jim Crow.

The African American fight for equality continues into the twenty-first century. The Behind the Veil project believes that a better, fuller understanding of the lives and world behind the veil will help all Americans come to grips with the tragic legacy of the Jim Crow period in our nation's history.