Lifting the Chains: The Black Freedom Struggle in America Since Reconstruction

William Chafe, Alice Mary Baldwin Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History, will look back on four decades of the Behind the Veil Oral History Project, and tell us about his use of those materials in his new book, Lifting the Chains: the Black Freedom Struggle in America Since Reconstruction (Oxford University Press, 2023).

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 during the age of legal segregation in the American South, from the 1890s to the 1950s. It is the largest single collection of Jim Crow oral histories in the world.