Behind the Veil was a three-year funded project undertaken by Duke's Center for Documentary Studies from 1992-1995. The project aimed to conduct oral histories with elders of the African American community that lived in the American South during the period of Jim Crow and collect their recollections of existing in an era of de jure and de facto segregation. At the end of the project nearly 1,200 interviews had been collected from 12 states and 19 locales. These recordings were made on audiocassettes, and in addition to the audio, the project team created over 1,000 slides from photographs donated by the interviewees. The project leads would work with networks of scholars and community leaders to identify who would be interviewed and worked to gain permission from the interviewees. From there, project team embedded themselves in these local communities for at least two weeks to conduct the interviews. It is important to note that the questions to the interviewees are not standardized. This is because the interviewers, which were mostly graduate students at Duke and other universities, were allowed to curate their interviews based on their scholarly interest. Because of this, one will find clusters of interviews by specific interviewers that speak to themes like gender, class, labor, education, religion, etc. You can learn more about the project and the people who lead the interviews from this virtual conference, "Behind the Veil at 30 Years" on YouTube.
The collection also includes project records and administrative files documenting the permission forms shared with and signed by the interviewees, along with interview notes from project team. Lastly, there are a handful of recordings (audio and video) of training sessions led by notable scholars of African American history invited to Durham, NC to lead workshops on the Black experience and the processes of conducting oral histories. The Behind the Veil collection was donated to and is administered by the John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History & Culture in the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library beginning in 1993, with subsequent additions deposited through 2019.
To view the collection guide please use this link - https://archives.lib.duke.edu/catalog/behindtheveil
Images of the Behind the Veil project team, 1990s
