Behind the Veil

The Behind the Veil digital collection was made possible through grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The Behind the Veil Oral History Project was undertaken by Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies from 1993 to 1995. Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the primary purpose of this documentary project was to record and preserve the living memory of African American life in the American South during the age of legal segregation and its immediate aftermath, from the 1890s to the 1970s. Over the span of three summers, teams of researchers conducted oral history interviews with more than one thousand Black elder who remembered the period known as “Jim Crow.” The transcribed recordings of the interviews in this collection capture the vivid personalities, poignant personal stories, and behind-the-scenes decision-making that bring to life the African American experience in the South during the late-19th to mid-20th century. Interviews were conducted in close to 20 locales (urban and rural) across 12 states. It is the largest single collection of Jim Crow oral histories in the world.

This digital collection also contains photographic slides created by the research team from original images shared with them by interviewees. These images capture individual and family portraits, community events and institutions, and document the everyday lives of the interview participants and their extended networks. Additionally, the collection’s project records contain interview notes and detailed documentation on the execution of the project.

The North Carolina recordings were all digitized as part of the Triangle Research Libraries Network’s project “Content, Context and Capacity: A Collaborative Large-Scale Digitization Project on the Long Civil Rights Movement in North Carolina.” (2010-2012) Other collections from that project are also accessible as Duke digital collections. The remaining parts of the collection were digitized as part of the “Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow South: Digital Access to the Behind the Veil Project Archive” funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (2021-2024).

The entire collection is housed in the John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and Culture, in the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University.