Mellon Foundation funds innovative interdisciplinary
civil rights scholarship

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation of New York will support a collaborative effort on civil rights between the University and UNC Press.

The three-year, $937,000 grant will support “ Publishing the Long Civil Rights Movement,” a project that, through print and digital publications, will underscore one of Carolina’s longstanding academic priorities: interdisciplinary civil rights scholarship.

CHAMBERS Director of the UNC Center for Civil Rights, Chambers graduated first in his class from Carolina’s School of Law in 1962. In 1964, he opened his law practice in Charlotte. Chambers and his partners argued a number of civil rights cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, including the landmark Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education. He also led the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc. before serving as chancellor of N.C. Central University.

The four principal investigators who will lead the project are Kate Douglas Torrey, director of the UNC Press; Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, director of the Southern Oral History Program in the Center for the Study of the American South; Julius Chambers, director of the Center for Civil Rights in the School of Law; and Richard Szary, associate university librarian for special collections.

The grant to Carolina is part of a larger program at the Mellon Foundation intended to advance humanistic scholarship by developing new and thoughtful ways of connecting the publishing activities of university presses with the academic priorities of their universities. Other grants in this program have been made to the University of Minnesota and the University of Pennsylvania.

Hall’s essay, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” delivered as her presidential address to the National Organization of American Historians, provided a foundation for the Mellon grant.

An expanded framework
A central theme of Hall’s essay was that the narrative of the Civil Rights Movement had been erroneously limited to the tumultuous decade between the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, which made school segregation illegal, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Hall argued that the “long Civil Rights Movement” began with the liberal and radical milieu of the late 1930s and continued with current national issues, including the political and legal backlash leading to a resegregation of schools and neighborhoods and that threatened the social aims inherent in the Brown decision.

HALL Founder and director of the Southern Oral History Program, Hall is a former president of the Organization of American Historians and the Southern Historical Association and was the founding president of the Labor and Working Class History Association. In 1997, she received UNC’s Distinguished Teaching Award for graduate teaching, and in 1999 she was awarded a National Humanities Medal for her work.

Hall, in effect, widened the window of civil rights in both time and geography to include contemporary issues such as race and the public schools, economic justice, and the women’s and gay rights movements.

In so doing, Hall sought to debunk popularized notions of the Civil Rights Movement that, in effect, diminished its lasting meaning and obscured its continuing power and relevance.

“By confining the civil rights struggle to the South, to bowdlerized heroes, to a single halcyon decade, and to limited, non-economic objectives, the master narrative simultaneously elevates and diminishes the movement,” Hall wrote.

“It ensures the status of the classical phase as a triumphal movement in a larger American progress narrative, yet it undermines its gravitas. It prevents one of the most remarkable mass movements in American history from speaking effectively to the challenges of our time.”

Expanding the narrative to the events that came before and after the classically defined Civil Rights Movement, Hall argued, will reinforce the moral authority of those who fought for change in those years.

“At the same time,” she wrote, “I want to make civil rights harder. Harder to celebrate as a natural progression of American values. Harder to cast as a satisfying morality tale. Most of all, harder to simplify, appropriate and contain.”

With these concerns in mind, the Southern Oral History Program, which Hall directs, began gathering interviews on the “long Civil Rights Movement” throughout the South, focused especially on school desegregation and re-segregation, economic justice and various social movements that grew out of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1970s and 1980s.

SZARY Director of the Louis Round Wilson Library and associate University librarian for special collections, Szary is responsible for merging the individual collections into an integrated special collections library for current and future needs. He also administers the library’s expanding digital collections department. Szary came to UNC in 2006 from the Yale University Library and previously from the Smithsonian Institution’s Office of Information Resource Management.

Opening rich possbilities
Torrey said that in addition to challenging the conventional understanding of the chronology of the Civil Rights Movement, the grant-funded project would be challenging the usual geographic, demographic and thematic definitions of civil rights.

“We can also see how the oral history component will open up all kinds of rich possibilities,” Torrey said. “Through this grant, we will be able to explore new opportunities for linking audio materials with textual materials and photographs to reinforce and illuminate scholarly and legal analysis.”

Chambers, whose legal career spans much of the long history of civil rights that Hall seeks to reveal, said he was excited about the possibility the grant would afford to allow scholars from across campus to share ideas and work together to bring new insights to intractable problems.

Chambers, who is perhaps the nation’s most renowned school desegregation attorney, said he had a particular interest in exploring the negative effect that recent resegregation has had on educational opportunities for children.

For 15 years, Chambers worked with community groups in Charlotte to chart the course of Swann v. Charlotte/Mecklenburg Board of Education, a case that eventually made Charlotte a national leader in school desegregation. In his current work, Chambers is monitoring recent court rulings that undermine the legal underpinnings of desegregation.

“I have always been interested in forging collaborations with the different disciplines,” Chambers said. “This grant will help tremendously, both by making it easier to communicate more effectively and by encouraging more disciplines to become involved with our work at the center.”

TORREY Director of UNC Press since 1992, Torrey had previously served as the press’s assistant director and editor-in-chief. She came here from her post as editor-in-chief at the University Press of Kansas. A former president of the Association of American University Presses and Women in Scholarly Publishing, Torrey earned a B.A. from Stanford University and an M.A. from the University of Chicago and completed work toward a Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Bernadette Gray-Little said Carolina and UNC Press are eminently qualified to tell the expanded story of civil rights that Hall’s work envisions.

“The University and UNC Press share a rich history and national reputation for the study and documentation of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States,” Gray-Little said. “Within the University our expertise spreads across disciplines and programs, from the well established Southern Oral History Program in the Center for the Study of the American South to the relatively new Center for Civil Rights at the UNC Law School.”

Advancing University priorities
Gray-Little said the focus on the long Civil Rights Movement would directly advance many of the University’s academic priorities, including efforts to extend interdisciplinary research, education and public service.

Torrey said Carolina, as the oldest public university in the nation, and the UNC Press, as the oldest university publishing house in the South, are recognized nationally for a commitment to public service and exploring controversial issues that challenge personal and public thinking.

Since the late 1920s, UNC Press has sustained an ongoing program of books by and about African-Americans, she said, and this grant will build on the press’s robust and progressive publishing program.

“We are very pleased about this outstanding Mellon Foundation grant that will help to strengthen the collaboration between UNC Press and UNC-Chapel Hill. This enhanced collaboration will create an exciting opportunity to generate some important work about the Civil Rights Movement,” said Harold Martin, UNC system senior vice president for academic affairs and member of the Board of Governors of UNC Press, an affiliate unit of the UNC system.

Through the grant, Torrey hopes to align UNC Press with the strengths of the University to create a powerful platform that could serve as a catalyst for collaboration and shared capital investment in University-based publishing.

Torrey, who has been director of UNC Press since 1992, said the press has long been a leader in making its titles available to libraries in non-print as well as traditional ink-on-paper formats. Still, Torrey said, economic pressures have limited the extent to which the press can experiment with different digital forms.

“The expertise and the dollars involved in entering the digital arena present a high hurdle for university presses,” Torrey said. “The Mellon Foundation has given us support to experiment.”

Digital publishing platform
Szary said the University Library, the Southern Oral History Program and UNC Press would bring a complementary set of expertise and skills to the project. Szary was hired in fall 2006 to the newly created position of director of the Louis Round Wilson Library and associate university librarian for special collections.

The Wilson Library collections include the Manuscripts Department (comprising the Southern Historical Collection, Southern Folklife Collection, and University Archives), the North Carolina Collection (including the North Carolina Collection Gallery and Photographic Archives) and the Rare Book Collection.

One of Szary’s chief responsibilities has been to merge these individual collections into an integrated special collections library that better serves the needs of scholars and students.

It is his technical expertise that Szary will bring to the Mellon grant project, along with his role in overseeing the library’s newly established Carolina Digital Library and Archives. The award-winning Documenting the American South digital library is now one of the flagship programs of the new department.

“A good part of our role will be to provide the underlying infrastructure, the digital publishing platform, if you will, that we also need for our own purposes at the library,” Szary said.

Szary said there is much the University Library and the Southern Oral History Program can learn from UNC Press in terms of editing and selecting materials and tailoring products to fit a market need.

“The technical developments are going to be challenging but the grant will also help the library and the oral history program build a new model of working together with the press in new and exciting ways,” Szary said. “We’ve always had a good relationship with the press, but this deepens it in many complementary ways. We are equally excited about working with the Center for Civil Rights and the array of scholars on this subject across campus.”

The library’s Southern Historical Collection is the repository for the Southern Oral History Program’s tapes and transcripts. Currently, a recent $500,000 grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services is funding collaboration between the Southern Oral History Program and the Library’s “Documenting the American South” group to make 500 interviews available online.

The project is also developing inventive tools for synchronizing the voice of each storyteller with a scrolling transcript and making oral histories searchable in ways they have never been before, Hall said. The long civil rights project, Hall believes, will be able to learn from and build on this project.

Through initiatives like the Carolina Covenant, Torrey said Carolina has demonstrated a central point of Hall’s work: that the Civil Rights Movement is far from over and that the work started more than a half-century ago has yet to be completed.

The Carolina Covenant provides a debt-free education to qualified low-income students. The program sparked a national movement in U.S. higher education. Now 40 similar programs have been launched nationwide

“The covenant speaks to the point that the long Civil Rights Movement, even though it may not be described in that vocabulary, is an academic priority of UNC-Chapel Hill,” Torrey said. “Civil rights, in all its many manifestations and forms, is a subject that grows organically out of activities across campus and out of the publishing program of the press.”

A new scholarship model
While it is far too early to decide outcomes, the people involved in the project believe that this grant can serve as a model for others to follow.

“There are so many more questions than answers right now about the production, publication and consumption of innovative scholarship and legal analysis, but the Mellon grant gives us the chance to work those questions out,” Torrey said. “We will learn a tremendous amount and if it works, I am optimistic that this kind of collaboration can carry over in other areas.”

Gray-Little will hold quarterly meetings with the four co-principal investigators to review progress and keep the project aligned with continuing academic priorities.

“In supporting our academic agendas, a successful project will create a template for even richer partnerships between the academy and the press going forward,” Gray-Little said.