Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South

This “viscerally powerful . . . compilation of firsthand accounts of the Jim Crow era” won the Lillian Smith Book Award and the Carey McWilliams Award (Publisher’s Weekly, starred review).
 
Based on interviews collected by the Behind the Veil Project at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies, this remarkable book presents for the first time the most extensive oral history ever compiled of African American life under segregation.
 
Men and women from all walks of life tell how their most ordinary activities were subjected to profound and unrelenting racial oppression. Yet Remembering Jim Crow is also a testament to how black southerners fought back against systemic racism―building churches and schools, raising children, running businesses, and struggling for respect in a society that denied them the most basic rights. The result is a powerful story of individual and community survival.
 
Praise for Remembering Jim Crow
“A ‘landmark book.’” ―Publisher’s Weekly, “The Year in Books”
 
“This is not just an oral history for the South but for us all. It is a sobering reminder of the mistakes this nation has made, a hopeful reflection on how far we have come.” ―The Kansas City Star
 
“A shivering dose of reality and inspiring stories of everyday resistance.” ―Library Journal

William H. Chafe, project director of Behind the Veil, is a professor emeritus of history and the Alice Mary Baldwin Professor of History emeritus at Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy and the author of multiple books. Raymond Gavins is a professor of history at Duke University and the project director of "Behind the Veil: Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow South," an oral history project undertaken by Duke's Center for Documentary Studies and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is the author of The Perils and Prospects of Southern Black Leadership. Robert Korstad is the Kevin D. Gorter Professor of Public Policy and History at Duke University. He received his BA and PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research interests include twentieth-century U.S. history, labor history, African American history, and contemporary social policy, and he is the co-director of a major documentary research project at Duke's Center for Documentary Studies, "Behind the Veil: Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow South." Chafe, Gavins, and Korstad live in Durham, North Carolina.