Behind the Veil Research Team: Oral History with Bill Chafe, 1994 June 02
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| William (Bill) Chafe | Uh, and then we go on until 3:30, and then then we can talk convene tomorrow, mornings, whatever. Uh, so let me ask a question. How, how many of you had a chance to, through much the material that we had from material on Nate Shaw and the Foxfire material and the various things that we got sent to you? Did you ever had a chance read that? | 0:01 |
| Felix Armfield (?) | At least skim? Yeah. Okay. To be honest. | 0:32 |
| William (Bill) Chafe | That's okay. Uh, well, I think that, that this first part of the discussion was extremely helpful because what it did, I think, was to explore some of the major issues involved in the interview process and the complexity of doing moral history and the variety of roles that different participants in the process are playing. Um, and then this question of, of | 0:36 |
| William (Bill) Chafe | The way in which we need to be sensitive to concerns about ethnography as well as to questions that are somewhat different from ethnography because of the specific historical context is I think a good point as well. When I asked about, when I raised the question of evidence and what is evidence, it sort of goes back to the question of, you know, are we satisfied with a single answer to a question or do we wanna go behind the question? Um, I'm intrigued by the fact that, you know, some people will say, well, written evidence is a totally different kind of evidence than all evidence that if you've got a letter, then you've got truth. You know, whereas if you've got an interview, you just have an impression. Um, and that's, as you know, that's kind of a | 1:16 |
| William (Bill) Chafe | Truism among most traditional historians who look with some disdain and suspicion toward oral history as kind of a gimmick. Uh, it doesn't have the hard quality. | 2:09 |
| William (Bill) Chafe | It's interesting how some of these metaphors get used, but oral history is soft, weirdness is hard and one is reliable and the other is, hmm on tape that means, hmm, (laughs), and, and, and yet no one's sort of associated. | 2:26 |
| William (Bill) Chafe | Well, you don't bother to ask the question, well, well, who was writing a letter and to what purpose and with what objective in mind? And weren't they actually trying to create a construction of their reality for whoever's gonna receive the letter? And were they writing the same thing to their grandma? They were writing to uh, their child, or to their fiance, or whoever? | 2:48 |
| William (Bill) Chafe | Uh, and obviously a letter that's someone's writing for the purpose of getting a politician to do a favor is going to convey something very different from a letter that is written complaining about the politician, or didn't give the favor. | 3:14 |
| William (Bill) Chafe | Uh, and yet somehow there's this notion that as long as it's in writing, it's solid, and it's not. It's not. And I think that it's important for us to sort of then get at the questions, what is evidence and is evidence what's there, or is evidence sort of what's behind what's there? Um, and we might talk about that for a little bit, but I also thought it might be useful to talk about how different kinds of oral history present different kinds of evidence. And I was thinking there of using some of the material that you all read contrasting or comparing for example, the kinds of oral history that are represented in Foxfire, in slave narratives in the memoir of nature uh, in the kind of work that Ray's done on the NAACP uh, in the chapter that you read of mind from civility, it might be some | 3:28 |
| Felix Armfield | Interesting pieces to me is in I—in teaching my survey course in African American history, the bottom rail from after the fact . Um, it, it's one of the biggest eye openers, I think, for students because they, it opens up a whole open door of spots of, of questions | 4:42 |
| William (Bill) Chafe | That they have | 5:04 |
| Felix Armfield | On how much of this stuff is true and how much of it isn't true. How much will we ever know about the institution of slavery? | 5:05 |
| William (Bill) Chafe | Right. | 5:14 |
| Felix Armfield | And it, it really is, I think, a good solid [indistinct 00:05:18]. | 5:15 |
| William (Bill) Chafe | What does it tell you about, and what does it tell your students? What do they find out about oral history? From— | 5:22 |
| Felix Armfield | Uh, for instance the Black woman who makes the comment of why are they always coming to see us about this, the in about slavery they don't ever go ask White folks about, about slavery. | 5:30 |
| Felix Armfield | Um, I think that's a real clear insight to how people perceive what we want from them. . Um, and it also suggests the level of skepticism on the part of both parties. How much is the interview being true to the subject , as well as the interviewee. | 5:49 |
| Felix Armfield | How much are they going to be willing to offer to? Um, so I think that's a real crucial point that we all need to keep in mind that there again, it's back to presentation, how we present ourselves and the level of comfort that we can offer the interviewee and to assure them that what they have to say is important. And that's what I hear clear coming through from that particular interviewee. . Um, why is it so important that you hear what I have to say? , why is it important? What's the significance of it? Right. | 6:18 |
| Gregory Hunter (?) | Right. | 7:04 |
| Felix Armfield | I don't know. That's just my perception. I don't know what others maybe think I'd like to give it to others thinking. But clearly when you start to talk about all the interviews , those are some of the things that I think have to be in the forefront of your mind. What are the perceptions on both parties? A | 7:06 |
| William (Bill) Chafe | How many of you had read Nate Shaw before? Fascinating. Did, did oh, well, what, what, what did you think of that as a, as a piece of as evidence? Uh, | 7:32 |
| Gregory Hunter (?) | Well, I mean, I, I I, I mean, it, I suppose it, it gets back, my reaction to that has to do with your question of the difference between, between oral and written testimony. I mean, I think it's very valuable to hear someone speaking in his own words. Uh, and, and I found the, the language to be a an important textual component of, of the evidence that's absent from uh, a more mediated grammatical presentation. Um, if, if it | 7:52 |
| Felix Armfield | There | 8:35 |
| Gregory Hunter (?) | Are nuances in, in, in, in his language that I think are, if, if language in fact determines how we experience reality, then the only way one can gain a sense of his experience is by, is by sharing it through his language. , | 8:35 |
| Speaker 4 | I | 8:52 |
| William (Bill) Chafe | Think the issue of nuances, | 8:53 |
| Kate Ellis (?) | Um, excuse me, is critical because we skimming through it, and I've only said it I think about police call, and I, I felt horrible for not remembering this woman's last name. Her name was Sarah. And it's very similar. It's a book called You May Cloud Here. And I was reading it and I wanted to use it for class, and I figured, I decided not to use it because her language is very similar, and you have to pick up our nuances in order to understand what's going on in her community. | 8:54 |
| Kate Ellis (?) | And I think that as evidence, it's very provocative and fascinating, but at the same time, it's not just, it's not just hard hitting, like, this happened, this happened, and you have to like, listen to what she's saying about her family and listen to what he's saying about people he knows and try to figure out what's going on, sort of behind the words. So it's intriguing, but at the same time, difficult to really suss out . Yeah. | 9:24 |
| Anne Valk | With, with both the Nate Shaw and the Foxfire piece, I think a lot about the role of the interviewer and the editor. Yeah. Yeah. And when I, especially like, in some ways, I feel like the Foxfire piece is closer than Nate Shaw to the kinds of materials that we're collecting in that it's not a 700 page book (laughs) based on interviews done over three years or whatever . But when I read that Foxfire interview, I thought, well, this is that seldom do the interviews that I do come out so orderly, chronological, you know, nice tight little pieces where it flows topically one subject to another. Uh, and that just the presidents, the editor, was very obvious to me. | 9:53 |
| Anne Valk | So, so then to go back to your point about language as kind of an unmediated or less mediated source than something that's grammatically written, and I wonder, is that still really true that, you know, maybe it's closer to the na the native language, however you wanna phrase that, of the, of your informant, but it's still not, it's still a source that's been tampered with. Oh, | 10:50 |
| Charles Houston | Yeah. I mean, I think it's been tampered with, I mean, one of the things that's, that's kind of striking about, about Nate Shaw's narrative is it's, is it's coherence. I mean, some people can be more coherent than others in speech. , but speech as opposed to written language tends to be more elliptical, more uh, disjointed. Uh, more discontinuous, more impressionistic. | 11:21 |
| Charles Houston | And the thing about, I mean, Shaw's language is that it, it is, it it, and not only is his story of this, the story of a very strong individual with amazing integrity, but, but even the strength of his, of his mind is, is, is manifest in his document. Um, and, and one suspects that, that, that, that that there's some, that there's some organizing of this testimony by [indistinct 00:12:19] but also one, I mean, I guess, you know, that, but, but at the same time there, there's a lot of Nate Shaw coming through and that, and, and, and I mean, there is his strength and integrity are, are just sort of manifests. | 11:44 |
| Anne Valk | Well, even with this, the criticisms of that kind of editing of Rosengarden that he had to do. Um, I mean, it really speaks to the valuable source of oral history. I mean, that we know we've got this, you know, the human element is certainly there you know, that we don't have in traditional historical sources. Um, and I mean, Rosengarden's up front and he tells us that Nate, you know, Ned Cobb was his hero, was a hero to him, you know, and that there was definitely rearranging of stories. | 12:40 |
| Anne Valk | And that he, even that I guess throughout hearing, you know, under the shed Nate Charles or Ned Cobb stories that he took the most, you know, he presented the representative story, um and, and the piece. So, you know, it's certainly, we couldn't be under the shed with Ned Cobb, but Right. You know, we've got this piece of work that is Yeah. Unbelievable about, | 13:16 |
| William (Bill) Chafe | The interesting thing about it is it, it's kind of an it is a rather pure example of this dialect that we're talking about between the, the historical actor and the historian. Um, although we don't, we don't see the visible hand of the historian. Uh, we know that in effect, this history has been shaped by this chemistry. Uh, but it's more than this chemistry because it is it is, it is an artistic sculpting of of a body event, 700, 700 hours of interviews which get transcribed, reduced, rearranged, presented. And yet one thinks one's hearing a whole voice, one is hearing a whole voice, but it's a whole voice, which is being mediated by an underlying presence that uh, this fascinating creative partnership. | 13:44 |
| Charles Houston | But, but, but I think there, there's an important, I mean, despite the organization, despite the manipulation, if you will, of of, of how many hours, 70? | 14:53 |
| All | 700! | 15:00 |
| Charles Houston | 700! Oof. | 15:00 |
| Charles Houston | Well, despite that manipulation though, there, there, it seems to me there's, there's a, there's a, an additional dimension that comes through by the retention of made Shaw's original language, that, that, that, that lenss color and texture to the testimony that would be totally absent. I mean, you, you actually get a feeling for it, sort of intuitive feeling for, for the landscape with the terrain that he lived in. | 15:04 |
| Anne Valk | His mental landscape. | 15:33 |
| Gregory Hunter (?) | Right. | 15:34 |
| Speaker 7 | The music comes through, I think, really clearly is made Shaw's story is the, is the way that he tells a story. The point of the story comes out well into, well into whatever the beginning point is of the text, that there may be a space, and it may begin with, you know, it was Hoover's time, and whether or not that's Nate Charles's or, or Rosengarden's words, we can debate that. | 15:34 |
| Speaker 7 | But the point of what Nate Shaw wants us to know about that timeframe comes out somewhere along the line, gets across, and in his mind, you have to get through all the other things that are happening around that. There's not, there's not a historical moment for him to focus on. Although I think in his head, he has one, he has a way that he thinks we should, Nate Shaw has a way that he thinks we should get there, and all those things are important, and we can't avoid that as you're going out, can't avoid this landscape to get to his point. What, yeah, go ahead. I'm sorry. No, I, | 16:03 |
| Gregory Hunter (?) | I tend to like put my hands up and resting my—sorry. | 16:38 |
| William (Bill) Chafe | What, what kinds of historical, let's talk about what kinds of evidence we, we can identify in, in, in that selection from nature. Can I? We talked about the language— | 16:45 |
| Felix Armfield | Quick comment Yes. Just before that. And that is that for me, there's a few things that I look for specifically— | 16:56 |
| Felix Armfield | When doing oral history, and that is that oral history should be able to add something to history that we don't get it with yet without it. And that is, it should certainly at some point be able to give us a taste, smell, a visual scenery of history that we can only get through through all history. And I mean, when I say taste history, I mean, some of the best pieces out there that you've read is that history is when you could taste history, literally could taste it. And I'm hoping that in New Orleans, we ought to bring that back— | 17:05 |
| William (Bill) Chafe | (laughs), | 17:42 |
| Felix Armfield | You know, and seriously that we ought to be able to taste these people's history. And as historians, it ought to be our job to make certain that that's there. Uh, you can taste, you can smell the story. Um, professor Gaspar, probably (laughs) best, um did that for a group of us at Michigan State Uhhuh last fall, Uhhuh, he was visiting a professor there. Yeah. Uh, and encouraging us to, to begin to be able to taste and smell the story . Um, and I think oral history certainly is one of the best mechanisms for getting that, that, but I just want to say Yeah. Since we were talking about yeah. Make sure, | 17:43 |
| Anne Valk | So you have a lot of eating | 18:24 |
| William (Bill) Chafe | (laughs). Well, I mean, metaphor has always been benefit. | 18:26 |
| Felix Armfield | Lies so much along the lines of eating, but history should allow us an opportunity, at least in the literary sense. | 18:32 |
| William (Bill) Chafe | And that, that's the exceptional thing about Nate Shaw's Story. He's able to do that. I can tell the story that way. You can't do it. They don't have the patience to get to the details. You know, we don't have the patience. Sometimes they ask for the details. (laughs). Yeah. Yeah. Memory, it's all sharp. It's very sharp. Right. Which you (laughs), which you Yeah, that's right. | 18:40 |
| Anne Valk | Well, and also I've noticed with interviews that when I'm doing 'em and somebody is telling me a story, I understand a lot about what they're telling me, that then when I go back and read a transcript or listen to the tape , I realized that there was stuff that I wasn't quite clear on. And Ray was talking earlier this morning in the kitchen about an interview that was done last summer by somebody, and it was clear that she thought she knew what was going on when it was being talked about. | 19:07 |
| Anne Valk | It was this man who was a pharmacist here in Durham who worked out of one of the old hotels, and they talked about this place called the Back Room, which was where middle class and Black businessmen basically would go and play cards and drink. And there's this kind of very fuzzy stuff about women (laughs), and it's not really clear. And, but the interviewer, while she's doing the interview, appears to understand what he's saying. And when I read it, I was, and gone back, it's, it's just full of innuendo and things that aren't said that | 19:37 |
| William (Bill) Chafe | Yeah. | 20:21 |
| Anne Valk | That, because she gets caught, she was caught up in the story as it was happening. She didn't know to ask those questions. Right. And she thought she knew what was going on. | 20:23 |
| William (Bill) Chafe | Yeah. Answer. | 20:31 |
| Speaker 4 | Oh man. I don't know how the transcript reads, but I think is it possible that she felt she needed to indicate that she knew what was going on, just in the context of the conversation, even if she didn't, it may be you, York, Garrett, you can judge for yourself. It's upstairs. Tell me the name again. York Garrett? Okay. | 20:33 |
| Gregory Hunter (?) | But that, that brings up a, like a, a methodological like issue regardless of what her intentions were. Mm-hmm. Um, you know, which is, which is that, you know, the story does need to be recorded. So, you know, do we sort of, and, and then, and it sort of pulls together a couple other things. It's like, how do we act in an interview? You know, really sort of practical questions. I mean, do we sort of sit and nod with the person, so to encourage them to continue on, but at the same time, um you know, causing, you know, causing us to like lose a whole lot of the description of, of whatever's going on, because they think that we know what they're talking about. | 20:55 |
| Gregory Hunter (?) | So it's like, okay, you know, you understand. So let me just go through this quickly, you know? Or do we sort of sit there blank face and look like we're totally unaware of whatever we're talking about? And, and, and hopefully they'll say everything, or perhaps they'll just say, you know, you don't underst you don't know this, or, or whatever. I don't know. I don't know what the dynamics could be, but it's, it's a thing to think about. | 21:29 |
| Leslie Brown | I think it's something we'll become more aware of as we read the interviews and we, and we see that happening, and you can see opportunities reading. Yeah. . Um, and then you kind of sitting in an interview thinking in the back of your head, okay, when somebody else listens to this, are they going to understand what we're talking about? Sometimes, sometimes you need to explain that in an interview or at least initiative we're recording this for. And sometimes I'll ask you about things that we know. I know (laughs), but, you know, can you, can you explain? That's good point. I ask people to explain it, but that's like, one of the things that we learned, | 21:47 |
| Gregory Hunter (?) | That's definitely— | 22:26 |
| William (Bill) Chafe | So that the posture of seeming to know everything, or by, by by nodding, may not always be the, the appropriate response. Uh, particularly if we don't understand what, what's being referred to. And even if we do understand given the fact that we're involved in trying to set up a basic historical documentation, maybe it's worth asking the asking, asking the questions. | 22:27 |
| Anne Valk | So there like technical things also for the, that after having interviewed the person, we would have an ear for their language, but for the transcriber Yeah. Who hasn't met this person and, you know , I mean, good to maybe , you know, say the word again, or have the person spell it, or, yeah. And things like, if they gesture, you know, it was about this big, or we did, you know, we rode from corn, you know, row to row or whatever, to say, well, about three feet, or, you know, things like that. | 22:57 |
| Paul Ortiz | One of the things that Leslie I'm sorry, Annie perhaps was suggesting I put words in your mouth, but— | 23:28 |
| Anne Valk | Try it. That's okay. | 23:34 |
| Paul Ortiz | Was that, was that if the in this case York Garrett interview, if the interviewer would've been just a bit more critical than they would've gotten closer to what was going on in this situation. And you can imagine at this point, an interviewer, and I can imagine myself, you know, somebody starts talking about the back room. I can imagine just kind of nodding and you know going on to the next story, not really getting deeper into it. | 23:36 |
| Anne Valk | Yeah. Well, I'd say two things. One, if you look at this interview, you'll see that this is a person who the interviewer only had to ask, I mean, really almost five questions. And this man just went on for two, two hours. He clearly had a story that he wanted to tell . And it's fascinating to read because you get taken through that story and you, you get such a sense about who are the important people and events and things in his life. | 24:05 |
| Anne Valk | So I think it's partly that he knew what he was talking about. He wanted to tell this, I, I, I brought up, I said it in terms of that she might have known what was going on, because that has happened to me, that maybe I've done one interview and I learned something, and then I did the next interview and somebody brought up something related, so I did know what was going on. But if somebody else listened to it or read it, they wouldn't necessarily know that. | 24:39 |
| William (Bill) Chafe | 'Cause they wouldn't have the sequence. | 25:08 |
| Anne Valk | Right. Right. Right. So, to go back to your point about needing to, and your point, Leslie, about you need to ask those questions, even if you don't know , but because other people are gonna be reading these interviews you didn't know. | 25:10 |
| Raymond Gavins (?) | is, is he on the follow up list? Is what is he on the follow list? | 25:23 |
| Anne Valk | That would be fascinating because somebody interviewed him, | 25:27 |
| Raymond Gavins (?) | Some people suggested that he might be good for a following. Because this is his centennial year. He's a hundred this year. | 25:31 |
| Anne Valk | And he, his memory is very, very clear. Yeah. He remembers his, I mean, he starts his whole interview talking about his parents who were slaves and | 25:43 |
| Raymond Gavins (?) | Right. And it, it was suggested to me that he might be a prime candidate for follow up, not only for study of performance, but also to sort of compare the, the the diversion. Um, I did find some parts of his not, not his, not his informa, not his evidence on gender relationships, which I thought he and stuff that he subjected to innuendo (laughs). | 25:56 |
| Anne Valk | Somebody needs to ask him about that. Yes. | 26:28 |
| Raymond Gavins (?) | Particularly his travels across North Carolina. But his, his ideas about education and the role of educational aspiration and, and why Nathan Junior had to go to Yale, nowhere else why had to go to Yale. Um, and I find that to be very instructive about how he wants us to think about him when, when he's gone . Um, and I think that if he could be followed up, I mean, I'm just making a suggestion. Get somebody at that. | 26:31 |
| William (Bill) Chafe | It's interesting interview. I'm sorry. | 27:15 |
| Kate Ellis (?) | Well, I was just I don't wanna derail this at all, but I'm wondering how storytelling and innuendo and nuance can be used as evasion, you know, and part of this, you know. Yeah. You know, mutual manipulation going | 27:18 |
| William (Bill) Chafe | On, | 27:33 |
| Kate Ellis (?) | Um, that there must be, not to avoid the hard questions, like Leslie said, not to avoid the hard questions that need to be asked . Um, and it's gotta be a skill to be able to, when somebody's telling a story and they're obviously evading or maybe leaning you down down a path that you might wanna get back to later, so on and so forth, in terms of the time constraints that we have. Um, not everyone's gonna be a wonderful storyteller, something, we're going to be amazing storytellers. So how do you check a Balance? | 27:34 |
| William (Bill) Chafe | I think this is, this is the key question. And again, you can guess right at the heart of the issue of evidence or usable evidence and different kinds of evidence because the most natural thing in the world is for, and you think you're doing a great interview if you in fact ask a question and it follows 35 minutes of narrative, you say, God, that must have asked a really good question, (laughs). You ask the second question. | 28:03 |
| William (Bill) Chafe | And you know, God, there's another, I mean, and that's what Ned Cobb did. Uh, that, and, and, and I'll, you know, there's a story about this book because it started off being an investigation of the southern tenant departs Union. Uh, and, and a particular moment in time where Ned Cobb as an active participant in that union, was gonna be a critical source. And it ends up being a memoir of Ned Cobb, because Ned Cobb had so much to say and said it so brilliantly and eloquently and so powerfully that it became a different book. | 28:30 |
| William (Bill) Chafe | But we're not in a situation of necessarily, well, we have to ask ourselves, do we wanna have a series of Ned Cobbs or do we want something else? And, and, and it is the natural instinct of any interview process to at least begin as a major ego trip in which the person to whom the question is being asked is going to, in effect, take off and fly. Uh, maybe not, not always because some people will be self-effacing and not, and say, well, I don't have any important to tell you. Other people, on the other hand, will just sort of do the 35 minute narrative and, and pause for breath, and we'll give another question, and then we'll walk up 35 minutes. | 29:08 |
| William (Bill) Chafe | Um, and so one of the key questions here is exactly this question of combination. At what point do you, and I think it's arguable, and that I think it's true that that some form of it, some opportunity for the eagle trip is necessary because it affects, it is what helps the interviewee to feel comfortable with you and with the subject matter and with his or her role as uh, the historical actor. | 29:58 |
| William (Bill) Chafe | Uh, but there also is gonna be the point at which, in effect, you need to take control of the interview. And that's a very ill-defined point. And yet, if you don't take control of the interview, then what you have in effect is a narrative that may not, it, it may have maybe a useful source of evidence for a whole variety of questions, but that evidence may not be related to the questions that this project is investigating. So then the question becomes one of how, how do we construct our roles as active investigators as opposed to passive listeners? | 30:29 |
| William (Bill) Chafe | And if we are active investigators with with what agenda do we go into that interaction? Um, and that gets to be in many ways, the most difficult question we have to face. And part of it is going to be completely contextual that it's gonna depend on who the individual is, who we are what the setting is, and you know, what one cannot predict the nature of uh, these interactions that are gonna take place. But one, on the other hand, we probably should have some sense of general guidelines for how we want to proceed. Um, and so, you know, one, one just just go back to the to the Nate Shaw example. You know, there, there's wonderful evidence in the Nate Shaw chapter that we read about ethnography, I mean, about the land buildings in the land. Mm-hmm. | 31:19 |
| William (Bill) Chafe | Uh, relationships with family relationships generational relationships. Uh, and then there's also a different, another kind of evidence that it has to do with when does he get that automobile, and what does it mean he's driving that automobile? And what goes on at the bank with Mr. Watson and what's going on here with this piece of paper that he's being asked to sign, and why is it that he wants to make sure his wife is there to read the piece of paper because he's not, he can't read. | 32:24 |
| William (Bill) Chafe | And if he signs a piece of paper that he can't read, he's gonna basically lose his, lose his entire life. I mean, there's a different kind of evidence. Um, and so I think that we need to talk through a little bit what kinds of evidence we can, we, what kinds of evidence we may elicit, what kinds of evidence we may focus on as we think about this process. Sometimes we know something about the individual and why that person is being chosen from you . So | 32:53 |
| Leslie Brown | Maybe there's a topic to follow? But sometimes it's a leap of faith. | 33:36 |
| Leslie Brown | All you know, is, you know, Ms. so-and-so is a good storyteller, and you have to hope that she says something that you can seize. You know, other than that, I don't know, that's the Ruth Evil list, (laughs) So, looks like you have to find out, | 33:40 |
| William (Bill) Chafe | I don't want to be too schematic in making this suggestion, but I used these terms yesterday, and I'll just restate them here. I think we have to pay attention to evidence of accounts of information on evocations, of structures of oppression. Um, that, that's, that's one area that I pay attention to of what were the patterns that African Americans were supposed to follow patterns of deference, whatever the patterns were, what, whatever those structures of oppression were, evidence on that. | 34:02 |
| William (Bill) Chafe | And then evidence of of experience, experiential evidence, African-American agency, how people responded, what they thought, how they asserted themselves, how they can act, undermined, and what , any scheme. , structural new experience. | 34:39 |
| Anne Valk | I think we also, we've chosen each of these places because there's something important about them. One, looking at the south as a, as a region, there's, and so that we need to make sure that our questions reflect the particularities of each area. , where you're asking questions as well. , | 35:14 |
| Gregory Hunter (?) | Um, yeah. That, that was like a question that I had. 'cause I think did the, the area sort of changed a little bit from like earlier on at the beginning of our application process to like the, now I thought I noticed something, maybe only in terms of where we were staying or whatever. But anyway, I was wondering why those places were just, maybe we'll talk more about that when we get later on. | 35:42 |
| Leslie Brown | I think that's a really good point. We picked sites, but then the ways that those sites seem to develop, as we did background research kind of broadened what we were thinking. Okay. Um, we picked Albany, Georgia but there is a, a limit to how many people live in Albany, Georgia to be done. But then it's not just Albany, Georgia as much as it is the whole Southwest area, and the ways that those areas are connected. And the same in Tuskegee. You know, we, we kind of picked Tuskegee, but you know, that whole belt from from the Georgia border over to, to Selma is all interrelated with both Tuskegee as a place and as an institution. | 36:05 |
| Leslie Brown | And, and, and then again, there's a limit to how much work we can do in, in, in one town. We could probably cover Tuskegee itself in three days, you know, and then what (laughs) at some places a state narrow. But I, I think as you investigate, your investigation will be drawn outward because people moved, you know? Yeah. People moved around. And when we think about migration, we think about going long distance, but sometimes people just moved and had relatives and, and had relationships between, between town or between counties. Um, and there may be small differences, there may be big differences, but it's very hard, I think, in any geographic area to, to look at that area in isolation. | 36:51 |
| Gregory Hunter (?) | Yeah. Okay. And just to, this is something that I've been thinking about since, since I sort of begin to think about the project. Um, and it's a question about just sort of the, the, the ideological sort of construction of the project, which is the notion of migration in particularly to the north, although you do mention the other, you know, like sort of internal migration in the South . But you know, there, there were, there are incredible amounts of people who, who are in areas in the north now, whose stories are as relevant to the Jim Crow South , have, have, have you all like, sort of thought about that part of it and, and maybe ways to incorporate that at some point, if that type of possible | 37:39 |
| William (Bill) Chafe | Yes and no. I think we've thought about (laughs), we thought about the need to do it, and we thought about the value and richness of those sources. Uh, we have not yet described that priority into a research plan. it was not part of the research plan that was funded by N.E.H. Oh, therefore it may well require an additional year or two of research and, and a subsequent application. I think one of the problems is when you make an application as we did N.E.H. um, and especially when it was so ambitious and, and it's its it's nature it's difficult to, to alter it in mid, in, in mid-level without compelling rationale. Since the, since there is such a compelling rationale for proceeding to do what we have already committed ourselves to doing it makes more sense for us to try to add that dimension at at later point, probably years four or five of the project. Um, | 38:24 |
| Felix Armfield | It certainly was a question is, as you recall, that we discussed at the research conference at the outset of this project. , this, this matter did come up. Um, and we've discussed it from time to time in our own meetings here. Um, but implementing that will as Bill indicated, come later. | 39:32 |
| Felix Armfield | Yeah. I think, like I said on the first night that I've looked at 20th century with the migration theme, complete part of my own study at Michigan State. And my real interest is to see what happened to those folk who were left behind who did not do the migration. And I think at, I at least I hope that at some point we still get a taste of what Greg is talking about, because those persons who were left behind are going to want to talk about my brother or sister went north and talk about what, what, what the conditions were surrounding why they went north. | 39:59 |
| Anne Valk | A lot of the people that you'll talk to who are in the south, will themselves have been Exactly. Come back. Exactly. | 40:42 |
| Felix Armfield | So I think we, we'll get a taste of it. Yeah. | 40:50 |
| Leslie Brown | I think we'll get more than the taste. And even by interviewing those who stayed behind with those who left and came back with those left for a short time period and came back, I'm beginning through these interviews to get a whole different view of the, of the migration. Yeah. You know, that, that it wasn't a sort of up and, and, you know, , because we really look at it, the civil rights movement started in the south, you know, where, where there were direct action activities that, that sort of come out of the period we're talking about. | 40:53 |
| Leslie Brown | They're in the south, so there's something go going on there that that, that we need to explore. But I get a sense of, of a mu of a much more fluid movement back and forth and, and not real permanence. , the ways that we've talk about immigration have made me think, you know, well, there's a move to Chicago and New York and there's all this stuff that's going on, but actually there's a lot of, there's a lot of transitioning, and life is much more is not as cut and dry as, as it seems. | 41:25 |
| Paul Ortiz | So Leslie, you would suggest that that concept of people being left behind is not analytically useful. That, that it is. Uh, | 41:56 |
| Leslie Brown | I, I don't, I don't know. I, one of the, one of the roots of this, of, of, of the whole project is out a conference that was at Jackson State about six years ago called Those Who Stayed Behind. It's about, you know, we're doing all the study stuff in migration, what about those of us who didn't leave? . Um, and, and there's, and I think that there's a real sensitivity there too. Although what came out of it was a book on migration that was, that was a publisher, not, not a historians thing though that there's a, a real concern for what is the South act during what's happening in the South during and after the, so migration, I think there's a good piece out on that done by ine Yeah. | 42:07 |
| Leslie Brown | That's what book I'm talking about. Okay. It came outta that conference. Yeah. And her and her perspective is that the publishers have published the stuff on migration studies not the stuff that, that was about the people who stayed in the south. Exactly. Um, and all those, and I think some people do feel left behind, but I think they also see as we, we were Colored, there's also, you know, there's this attachment and there's this movement. If you read Jim Grossman, there's reconstruction of the South and the north. So it's not as, it's not as, it's not as kind of dry as adults. | 42:50 |
| Felix Armfield | You, we gotta remember that when We talk about those who were left behind. I mean, there were any number of Black folk who opted to stay. They didn't necessarily | 43:20 |
| Gregory Hunter (?) | An inaccurate connotation that they were left behind as though there's this like desert shot | 43:34 |
| William (Bill) Chafe | Stayed behind. Exactly. All of them | 43:40 |
| Felix Armfield | Not all of them necessarily saw the north, there's the Promised Land. | 43:43 |
| Gregory Hunter (?) | Yeah. And also the, like, some people sort of, you know, talked about, you know, a notion of like looking at, at an expanded community or an extended community as, as a more sort of like appropriate kind of framework to, to understand this movement of people because it is not like a movement separation, but a movement and continued interaction and, and, and support all kinds of, you know, whatever. | 43:46 |
| William (Bill) Chafe | Yes. That's an interesting, interesting correlations as well with I mean, I think a new, even a new understanding of the Europe of European migrations where we're now recognizing just how much more back and forth there was there and I mean, essentially it's a migration pattern, which is back and forth, | 44:09 |
| Charles Houston | But, but maybe the recognition that it's back and forth is, is more of a recent phenomenon. I mean, if we're asking people, I mean, if we're asking people retrospectively, you mean, to, to, to, to, to talk about the Jim Crow period. I mean, the impression one gets from, from the one to hundred time we were Colored uh, memoir is that, is that migration is a kind of one way process. | 44:31 |
| Charles Houston | People came back to visit, but those people came back to who came, who did come back to visit tall Bert tells us seemed to have found the American dream, I think is the term he used. So there's, there's implicit in it, the idea that that, that that migration is a kind of escape. That it was, that it was that it was a, he, he, he points out early on that, that, that, that despite the conditions in, in the late Jim Crow period, people still believed in the American dream. | 44:52 |
| Charles Houston | And some of them actually went in quested it to the north and came back to visit wearing fancy clothes and driving fancy automobiles. And that they seem to have found the dream, but there's even implicit in his language, the idea that, that it was an illusion because they're all referring to it as a dream and saying they seem to have found it. Um, and, and I mean, I perhaps the, the, the I mean, if, if we're talking with people who um, well, I suppose that really is one of the things we we're trying to, to draw it out of our interviews. What is the perception of, of, of migration , and whether, I mean, what the motives seem to be of those people that, that that, that did monitor . | 45:24 |
| William (Bill) Chafe | And I think that maybe we can just revisit a little bit the the question of, of intervention versus passivity. Uh, as we, as we go about this, these research questions, I, I think that I'd like to sort of hear how you feel about that issue and what level of comfort you have with the, with the notion of being very, being directive at some stage of the interview process, being directive in, in the kinds of [indistinct 00:46:49]. | 46:16 |
| Charles Houston | —Was taking us no place. I don't know how I could diplomatically, politely interrupt the person, but say, "Oh well that's a really valid point you make." You try to segue. | 0:02 |
| Gregory Hunter (?) | Especially with the intention of them continuing afterward, to tell you more. | 0:13 |
| Charles Houston | Right. To that extent, to the extent that you have to be—I don't know what the word is, perhaps dominating. It sort of depends. If the person seems to be, if person is—It's like having a conversation. You have to wait for appropriate opening. If someone doesn't present it. And then I think you have no alternative except to continue to arrive to a pause, and then to try to diplomatically redirect the conversation. I don't have any difficulty with manipulating the discussion in that way, but I think that the price of diplomacy is that—And courtesy, is that you will probably have to suffer a lot of narratives that perhaps isn't important. Or at least is relevant. | 0:20 |
| Raymond Gavins (?) | I guess in my own sense of what we are doing, I guess, Charles, I guess I don't mind that suffering quite as much, because of my assumption that in the generality of stories, that perhaps we will have a few [indistinct 00:01:43], and they can be a lot of fun too, because there are ways in which to use those performances in a general body of moral testimony. | 1:23 |
| Raymond Gavins (?) | So I mean, just personally, I think that we are not going to get that many 35 minute soliloquy stories or long concept presentations. And I would like to think that once we start intervening too much, we start getting very tense and testy about what you're supposed to say to me, because I have to take this back and put it in the library. | 1:55 |
| Raymond Gavins (?) | Then it doesn't quite—Now, this is just for me but personally, because I've sat in Eastern North Carolina, listened to Golden Franks just go on for hours. Just let him talk, because I could get another story from someone else. And I suffered through those long afternoons, and other people have gone back and gotten different kinds of stories from him, and I don't think that that's hurt us a whole lot, because we're able to get a story out of the movement in Eastern North Carolina that we feel that represents the other kinds of perspectives other than his. So I'm a little more patient, and I think we have to distance ourselves from dictating too much. | 2:29 |
| Charles Houston | Yeah. Well, I mean, I agree with what you've said. I would be uncomfortable with dictating too much. So I would listen quietly, even if I thought that—And of course, I mean I think your point also is that there isn't very much extraneous testimony, that even if it seems to be off the mark, that there is a lot of value, perhaps even unacknowledged or unrecognized value in [indistinct 00:04:01]. | 3:32 |
| Felix Armfield | I think that other times, you can tell right away sometimes. I think that basically two types of interviewees, one very formal and sedate, and then there's another one where you almost want to say, can I take my shoes off and get comfortable? I can recall one in particular was with a man over the tobacco industry who was retired and a former union leader. He was very, very polished older gentleman, and we sat there and it was very formal. I was just overwhelmed. I didn't have to ask any questions. He talked, but it was very formal and very rich. No questions about it. However, there was Black woman who I interviewed who invited me in her house and we sat back and we laughed and at some point we talked about everything but her involvement with the tobacco industry. So much so that would begin to talk about her own personal courtships and those kinds of things. | 4:01 |
| Felix Armfield | And at some point, I think that even connects with her experience in the tobacco industry. What kinds of things were going on, and how people were functioning. But I think you can tell right away what kind of interview it's going to be. And for me, I found that to make certain that I get from people what I want is I set the interview, the tone up. And what I mean by setting the tone up, if I don't know who I'm going to interview, if I don't have any clue, always a surefire way to make certain I get what I want from them is, "When were you born, and tell me a little bit about your early life." And hopefully they won't tell me about the civil rights movement. | 5:08 |
| Paul Ortiz | That's one of the things I like about this particular project, is that the information that we get about major parts of people's lives, these courtships, I mean that's an integral part of this project, because we're trying to discover the general tenor of African American lives. It's not one particular aspect, and that's one of the things that's very exciting. Also to acknowledge our own mortality as it were, we should recognize that in this collection, people are going to look at this collection 10, 20, 30 years from now, and they're going to have new questions. And I think almost everything that we get is going to be valuable to different people. | 5:53 |
| Leslie Brown | It's the kind of evidence that comes out of a setting like that. That sometimes as historians, we're looking for something, but what we're looking for, it's right there and we don't necessarily know it. What people tell us about courtship tells us a lot about relationships and then about family and how that becomes constructed and how that serves as the base of the community that reaches out in a lot of other ways and then makes other kinds of things happen. Sometimes I think as historians, we are looking for those other kinds of things that happen without going back and reviewing for example, with Nate Shaw, the landscape of someone's life. So what we find evidence in an interview, it kind of depends on what the individual historian is looking for or is willing to see in what someone said. | 6:42 |
| Felix Armfield | The way that interview with this woman certainly gave me an inside glimpse of what kinds of social outlet those Black tobacco workers had outside of the industry. What was life like after 5:00 or whenever they left the industry? What kinds of things did they return to in their own communities? And she certainly gave me a firsthand account of that. | 7:40 |
| Charles Houston | Kate. | 8:08 |
| Kate Ellis | I was just going to make, it's a pretty basic point. I think that more that we have a sense of what we're looking for and I think that we'll probably talk about that more the next week and stuff, that I think the better it will be to sort of guide things in certain ways, even if there is a 35 minute soliloquy, perhaps at the end you can say, "Well, there was a part in which you mentioned going downtown and why was it that you walked on that side of the side?" So the better we're able to keep our own goals in mind instead of—I could see getting spaced out and just going on like that. But the better speaking up. | 8:10 |
| Raymond Gavins (?) | There's one point I think that it's not [indistinct 00:08:52] to anything that we've been saying, but the most important thing is to locate these recollections in time, as historians, so that even if someone is talking about the courtship and you say, "Was it the beginning of the Depression or middle of the Depression?" It's not even an intervention that does—All it does is to situate where they're talking about. Or if Ned Cobb is talking about driving his car, was that a Model A, was that in '20s, or was that in the '30s? Because we don't have the dates, then we have no way of measuring change over time. We have no way of contextualizing what this evidence speaks to in terms of other things going on that we will be able—And we may understand what they're talking about. This is back to the question of the innuendo and stuff like that. We may understand what timeframe they're talking about, but what's going to happen 15 years from now, when another scholar's going to be looking at this transcript and they haven't the slightest idea what time it's, because they're not part of the interview process. | 8:46 |
| Felix Armfield | The interesting thing is too, also, I think it serves us well too, if we can understand language. For instance, my great aunt is a product, is a child of the Depression, but she doesn't refer to it as a Depression. | 10:00 |
| Leslie Brown | It's always on point with her. | 10:17 |
| Felix Armfield | She calls it hard times or Hoover times, is how they refer to it. And for the longest it took, "What does she mean by Hoover times?" And so I'd say, "Aunt Bets, are you talking about the Depression years?" "I don't know what you mean by the Depression years. They were hard times for us. They were call hard times and they were the Hoover days." And I said, "Well give me the years that you're talking about." And it fits right in, at that point. So language is clearly in that point. | 10:19 |
| Leslie Brown | I think that's something that we're starting to refine in a lot of ways. I've sort of disagreed with mainstream history about putting the Depression even in part of the question, because it puts in a construct that's not necessarily a part of that individual's life but dates are different than the Depression. And how do you date the Depression in rural Alabama? | 10:49 |
| Raymond Gavins (?) | Exactly. | 11:16 |
| Leslie Brown | So what it means to someone who's living in Birmingham or someone who's living in Durham, it's very different from someone who's living in rural Alabama or rural Mississippi. | 11:18 |
| Charles Houston | Or you could ask a question that said, "Well when did your courtship start?" And that may allow that person to initially to set that in historical context. They might say 1933, or they might say the Depression or hard times. | 11:26 |
| Raymond Gavins (?) | And this can be in the middle of the narrative without disrupting the narrative. These are just really punctuation marks of the narrative, and yet they help to structure the narrative, which I think is very helpful. | 11:45 |
| Leslie Brown | [indistinct 00:11:55] Tell us how old they were, too. | 11:55 |
| Raymond Gavins (?) | That's true. | 11:56 |
| Leslie Brown | Because the courtship, a courtship when someone is in their mid-forties is different from one when someone is 15. So it's not only the date that it happens, but how old are the individual is when that happens. I mean, maybe it's digging too much but we need a timeframe, but we need their timeframes. | 12:11 |
| Kate Ellis | But where they can go to play out this courtship, even if they're really focused on the relationship and how it developed. It's like well, what places were you able to go with this woman? Whatever. [indistinct 00:12:42]. | 12:27 |
| Felix Armfield | Found out so much from that one female interview, because on one hand, she presents herself in one way, and then on the other, she's somewhat just the opposite because she says to me that there were a group of women when she was at the tobacco industry, Black women who went to the authorities on their White foreman, whom had been harassing some of the Black females. And she went and got very graphic with telling me some of the details as too the foreman was lifting up some of the women's coattails, dresses, tell us those things. And we didn't appreciate this, not in the least bit. | 12:42 |
| Felix Armfield | But however, on the other hand, she gets to the point where she tells me about what it meant on Saturday night for her to get out to the local bar or whatever they might have called it then, and pop her own coattail. And in that instance you get two different dichotomies of the same person, which offers glimpses of how she did not appreciate the harassment, and at the same time, so long as she could pop her own coattail on her own terms. | 13:22 |
| Leslie Brown | [indistinct 00:13:58] Gets back to what Ray is talking about, structure of a person's experience, because it's one set of questions to ask about—If we want to know about how people lived through and experienced the Depression, then that's one framework, but we want know how people lived in their own framework and their own experience, that's a different question. That's the tension that maybe we're trying to get a lot of mileage out of 135 notes, [indistinct 00:14:32] that we don't even know if we can or can't do it until we've gone back and looked at the interviews and see what we got. | 13:58 |
| Gregory Hunter (?) | My impression is that we are attempting to privilege not necessarily at the expense of them relating it to whatever sort of structural things they want to, but to privilege personal experience. You know what I mean? In an interview. Certainly with precautions such as dating, historicizing and things, because those are essential. But we don't have to construct everything into, "Okay, well King was killed here so—" Or "That's not until [indistinct 00:15:11]." | 14:44 |
| Speaker 7 | Yes it is. | 15:10 |
| Gregory Hunter (?) | But anyway, to put it into our own historical construction of the Jim Crow era. | 15:15 |
| Charles Houston | Yeah. Well, this conversation started with your question really, how we felt about controlling interviews, and what's coming out of it for me is that everything is potentially important. And I mean, if someone wants to talk about courtship, I mean we have no way of knowing what questions historians a hundred years from now are going be asking. So in that sense, everything that a respondent says is valid, but I think the only way we can control an interview is by carrying a very clear agenda. Now, I mean we may not want to cleave strictly to a set of questions, but I think it's very important in terms of giving shape to an interview and have a very definite notion. And I assume that's something we're going to be doing here, because right now, the venue is everywhere. | 15:17 |
| Felix Armfield | That's right. | 16:14 |
| Charles Houston | It's all over the place, and at some point we're going to have to bring the beam down and focus it. | 16:14 |
| Kate Ellis | I would like to add, we've been talking about passive listening and versus active investigators and whatever, but I think that if you're listening, it's an active process. Just because you're not saying anything, you're still, and you're involved. The inside of the word is that you're involved, and you can pick up on those nuances or indirection and go back to that. | 16:15 |
| Leslie Brown | I agree with the point we need to go and we have an agenda, there's something we want to find, but when we look at the places we'll cover over three years, we may hit well, 25, maybe more. 25 sort of geographic areas and there are geographic areas within that. And we'll talk to 2000 people and maybe everything everybody says is important, because we'll get a body of evidence about a very long period of time from a lot of people, from a lot of different places. So I don't know if we can have a single agenda. Maybe a point or a topic for a given interview at a given moment, but I don't know if there's a... | 16:45 |
| Charles Houston | Yeah, no, I just mean in terms of conceptualizing, I don't mean in terms of execution. I think that the way one—I was trying to suggest that the only way I can, out of this conversation, the only way I can conceive of controlling an interview is by clearly conceptualizing what it is you want. But in terms of the execution, you can't literally stick to that conceptualization. You have to be a bit, a lot more flexible. | 17:37 |
| Kate Ellis | Well you look in your binders, there's a list of the questions. I can't remember what it's headed, but it's a two or three or three page sheet of interview questions. Those are questions that we drew up last summer. If you look at them and then look at some of the interviews in the box, you'll be able to see, these were the people's guidelines, but then what actually came out of that. But there are some patterns you'll notice that question number one, a lot of interviews do start with that question, "When did you first come to whatever and why?" | 18:05 |
| Leslie Brown | And there's another set of questions that we mailed out very early on with the research narrative itself that outlined the rules of the project and some of the things that we hope to answer. You'll see that there are five paragraphs of things that we want to answer, and are they are really all over the place. And maybe the other thing that's happening with us, with the project whether is that it's a tension between collecting evidence and interpreting the evidence for research. There's researching and then there's what you do with this stuff you got. And one is a much more directed effort than the other. | 18:46 |
| Leslie Brown | Do you look at the evidence and see what it says and that's what you write, or do you have an idea and go out to pursue that to get those answers to validate the idea that you have? That's kind of the structure of, that's kind of the tension in this project and part of changing the way that we look at American Southern and African-American history is turning so we do let go of some of the control and allow our informants to tell us that we don't know what the story is already. So it's a tension that's there. We just need to [indistinct 00:20:11]. | 19:29 |
| Charles Houston | One thing that came up that I think you raised Kate, was early on yesterday, was an interest in racial self-identity. Some of that comes out in some of the material we read, where individuals talk about in the once upon a time when we were Colored narrative. There's a lot of description of relatives and acquaintances who were light-skinned. And so you mentioned about your interest in construction of race, and there's something else I was think that I've now forgotten, but there are lots of issues I suppose, things that we were going to talk about. Oh, class was another issue, social class. And these are perhaps—If issues of racial self identity, interracial self identity, social class hierarchy are introduced by respondents in an interview, these are opportunities, I suppose, to try to get behind the scenes perhaps, or to ask other questions. And it might be useful for me to have markers to know what some of these—And perhaps to discuss in advance the extent of our interest in interracial and social class constructions or skin color distinctions. | 20:12 |
| William (Bill) Chafe | I think that those issues are of course very delicate issues also. Depending who the interviewer is and what the context is, they may or may not lend themselves further exploration. But I think that they're among a series of things that we need to come to in our deliberations as sort of benchmark questions that we want to always have in our minds and as we proceed with these interviews. | 21:46 |
| William (Bill) Chafe | I think that this discussion has been useful both in terms of what it says to us about kinds of evidence, but also in terms of this methodology issue. And the answer, obviously, is that no interview should be totally controlled or totally passive, and yet if we don't get those constructs out there, we won't necessarily have a clearer sense of how we want to construct an interview so that it moves from one to the other, and so that there are certain ingredients in both parts of the interview that are going to be facilitative of gathering evidence. And also it's going to be very clear that we have to avoid a formulaic understanding of this too. We have to, I think always be responsive to the individuality of the interview. | 22:14 |
| William (Bill) Chafe | We're going to find, I mean we may set out with goal of there being two interviews per day or whatever the goal is that we come to, and yet we're going to find that on day four in this given community, we have discovered a treasure, and this person needs to have 10 hours of interview time, not just two hours of interview time, and we need to be able to respond to that and to just follow that lead and take it where it goes and understand that part of that is going to be the ability to adjust and have a Ned Cobb as well as someone to whom we are asking more specific investigative questions. And that in any event, every interview is going to be a combination of generating a level of comfort in self-expression, which is going to be more passive on the part of the interviewer, moving toward more specific questions. | 23:19 |
| William (Bill) Chafe | And from my point of view, at least, the thing is, as long as every part of that, we try to situate the narrative in some recognizable place and timeframe, as long as we're doing that, then we've already accomplished our major goal. I shouldn't be prejudging this, but you're going to see in some of the interviews you're going to be reading that we didn't do that last year, and that there is an effect. There's not enough contextualization historically to be able to understand some material. I think that that's a very important part of it. | 24:26 |
| Kate Ellis | Well, this is sort of a very basic question. I think yesterday it was mentioned that we're expected to do two research activities per day, and this also gets to the point of passive versus active interviewing. I don't really have any idea how long our interviews should be, minimally, how many times we should go back to see people. And I'm sort of wondering, well, the logistics. Sort of what your expectations are in terms of our collecting and being out in the field. Are you going to be upset if we find so many people that are just give us all these wonderful stories and we end up interviewing with five people in three weeks? Or what are your expectations? | 25:05 |
| Speaker 7 | You mean five a day. | 25:44 |
| Kate Ellis | No, I mean five people in three weeks. | 25:46 |
| Gregory Hunter (?) | Well that's [indistinct 00:25:55] two or three times [indistinct 00:25:58]. Staying at their house. | 25:48 |
| Leslie Brown | That's a judgment call. You need to kind of to figure out how you as a team feel about coming back with five interviews after three weeks. They could be five 12-hour interviews and they're really terrific and you're thinking that that's, you've got the essence of New Orleans in those five interviews, then that's great. Or you've got something in those stories that is so valuable to us, and that that's fine. You feel you need to get 120, but if they don't have anything in them. So you have number but no quality. | 25:57 |
| Kate Ellis | Well, in terms of length of interviews also, last year we seemed to average about 90 minutes for an interview, and then maybe another half an hour of doing forums and chatting and all this stuff. But they range from interviews that are maybe half an hour, 45 minutes long, to several that are four hours, maybe. But to a large extent, the interviewee is going to determine that. I mean, you'll get a short interview if you ask the wrong question and then the person says, "Bye, interview's over." Other people will not want to let you out the door. They're going to keep talking, and you may have to leave, because you have another interview scheduled. And then in that case, it's your call about do I go back and see this person or not? But that's just to give you the range of what we've found from last year. | 26:36 |
| William (Bill) Chafe | And I also think that one of the very positive aspects of operating in teams is that these are good questions to sort of talk out with each other and to come to some sense of judgment about and to feel free all with the call, [indistinct 00:28:07] and to talk about those kinds of questions. I think that what I wanted, I guess, emphasize was it's important to have guidelines, but it's really bad to have dogmatic rules. And so I think we want to be flexible within that framework for you to use your research insights and instincts and to arrive at your own judgements. And you'll know when you get an absolute jewel that you want to just come back to three or four times, and you'll also know when it's important to spread your net wider and stuff like that. | 27:43 |
| Kate Ellis | I have one little thing, because if you find an absolute jewel and you keep wanting to go back, you should probably write your dissertation about them. | 28:52 |
| Speaker 7 | Very, very good point. One of the things that might come out of this experience for all of you, or for some of you, at least, would be the desire to do that. | 29:00 |
| Felix Armfield | I'm not changing. | 29:07 |
| Group | [indistinct 00:29:19]. | 29:17 |
| Leslie Brown | The folks on the project, we follow a whole spectrum of where we stand on this. I tend to be the dogmatic one. I'm pretty honest about that. But my feeling on the issue of how much should you do, I will become concerned when after three or four days you haven't done anything. Do you know what I mean? So it's fully flexible, but within that flexibility, something needs be done. Something needs to be happening. When we say a research activity, that's as much tracking down interviews as it is doing them or actually doing research as it is finding your way around or identifying spaces and that sort of stuff. But while I spent four days kind of sitting in the office meditating at the artwork on the walls, some of us on the project might get a little bit [indistinct 00:30:24], a little bit concerned about that. So there's a wide range, but it's your own judgment. | 29:20 |
| Raymond Gavins (?) | We might revisit part of this. I do have some suggestions on those research activities. We are giving sort of major emphasis to the life history interviews, and these should take priority that you should seek to get them, to find them, to do them. If you're doing other kinds of collecting, and we talk about photographs, and then if people have family papers or letters, the kinds of things that are not necessarily in the public sector that we can't just get from the archives that we know about, then I do think that those kinds of things are valuable. But we have to make day-to-day, very discriminating judgments about what kinds of written things to collect, because some of the things that are available in libraries and archives are things that we can get to later on if we need to get to them. But there are those unique kinds of source materials within families. If they won't let you say you take these downtown and have them back in two hours, you get them and copy them and take them back, because that's unique material. | 30:32 |
| Speaker 7 | I think we need to break for lunch. | 31:47 |
| Felix Armfield | Which should also be noted that we're supposed to be back exactly 2:00. [indistinct 00:32:05]. | 31:48 |
| Group | [indistinct 00:32:16]. | 31:48 |
| Bill Chafe | library each area. Uh, and then it's gonna become part of a, a common collection, uh, not a common collection, non common collection, , uh, part of a collection of interviews that be used by scoff for the next 50 years. You could say, you could say it hundred years, but 50 years as much as most people can imagine . And, um, I think that, that, that would be okay. I think people would be pressed by that a little bit. I also tell 'em that it'll be available for teachers and students. and convincing are sometimes, yeah. | 0:01 |
| Speaker 2 | The thing that's the hardest for me, um, is that most of the people that I interview, I find that I really, really like them. Yeah. And it becomes hard to ask questions that I think are gonna be difficult questions. And this goes back to your point earlier, Kate, about information that you think is gonna be painful or information that you think is going to be, uh, somehow reflect critically on their experience in a negative way. And that, you know, I would rather just sit and like, enjoy them , and hopefully they would enjoy me. And, and rather than have to ask those hard questions mm-hmm. | 0:46 |
| Bill Chafe | , | 1:29 |
| Felix Armstrong | I'm just a little different, being a little nosy. | 1:31 |
| Bill Chafe | When, when nosy becomes, becomes quote unquote offensive , then you got, yeah. Then you've got another, uh, another problem. | 1:39 |
| Felix Armstrong | But that's one of the, um, reasons that we can be historians that legitimizes all of our nosy aspects. | 1:48 |
| Speaker 4 | But at least with the research documentary that I worked on last year, um, I had the opportunity to go back and talk with people about, like, after having, you know, painful interviews when women have cried and go back and talk about that situation. Mm-hmm. . And, um, at least one woman I'm thinking about said that it was, you know, very good for her that it was like a release and, you know, for someone to be concerned, you know, and to hear her story, it was like validating for her mm-hmm. and her experience. So yeah. | 1:58 |
| Bill Chafe | Growth experience. | 2:35 |
| Bill Chafe | In terms of this poll question of evidence, one of the things that we want most to be able to strive for, I think is, is, uh, interviews where there is some possibility of corroboration or ver verification. Um, so that if, for example, someone describes something happening in a town during a particular era, um, as many details as possible as can be evoked, that can then be used in another interview with someone else. It kind of, because to try to triangulate, so get as many different perspectives on a particular, um, could be an event, it could be a person, whatever, uh, but just so that, um, um, it's not just a shot in the dark. Rather it's, it's something which, which you can actually go back and try to work on. And it is something else the teams can do because you're gonna be able to discover something that happened, you know? | 2:38 |
| Bill Chafe | And I, uh, uh, and then as you discover that, then that becomes part of your common reservoir of information to be able to use, to try to generate more information about that. Uh, and, you know, it's that kind of thing that leads us to the Joanne Robinson, lady Nixons of the World. Uh, we did a, a workshop, uh, in 1974 as part of the oral history program on, on, uh, the Civil Rights Movement in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, about which a book has been written called The Free Men. The Free Man was a description of three individuals, two White and one Black, who allegedly had started the Civil Rights Movement in Chapel Hill . Uh, and it was a book that, it was a very well-written book. And, uh, uh, and we also had all had Xerox all the newspaper articles that existed from both the, the Black newspaper, Carolina Times, then North Carolina Central Newspaper, the Echo, and the Local Chapel Hill newspaper. | 3:40 |
| Bill Chafe | Uh, and then we sent people out in teams, biracial teams, not only biracial, but teams at least. Um, these are folks from various parts of the country. And, uh, to sort of begin to sort of investigate this all up. And the first night we all came, they all came back and said that movement didn't start in 1950. It started in 1957 when Velma Hopkins, uh, had a meeting at, uh, community church or something like that. Vema Hopkins was a, a Black activist, and who'd been the union at North Carolina, U n C, uh, the next night didn't start then. No, no. It started back in 1946 when the frame riots came through Chapel Hill and, uh, by Rustin and who know knows who else was arrested. And, you know, he kept on coming back with these reports, you know, and finally it became clear that, you know, the, the, the core of this was a, a bunch of, uh, young people who, uh, the core of the actual sit-in movement was a bunch of young people who went to Lincoln High School, which was the all Black high school in Lin Hill, who gathered on a certain street corner every afternoon and rap about what was going on in the community. | 4:47 |
| Bill Chafe | And that was the organizing center for what became the city movement, in which these two White guys from U N C and this Black guy from North Carolina Central had nothing to do with it. Uh, well, I mean, all that, yes. So many people | 6:02 |
| Felix Armstrong | Who started the movement in this | 6:18 |
| Bill Chafe | , right? | 6:20 |
| Felix Armstrong | I mean, I recall talking to, uh, attorney Gordon had to hear this story when he integrated the law | 6:21 |
| Bill Chafe | School. He started | 6:28 |
| Felix Armstrong | This movement stuff. It's a tough one. | 6:30 |
| Bill Chafe | But as you come back from your interviews, you're gonna have that kind of experience ideally, in which you're gonna basically be sharing with each other this kind of revelation, uh, and that those revelations are gonna become the basis for it, uh, cross verbalization of questions that are gonna generate material that's gonna help corroborate what you're hearing and in, in the various stories. So all this is to say is how important it's to, uh, I mean, you're going, you are gonna tired of each other in this project, and we know that, but no, but, but they will. But, but as much as possible, we hope that, that, that you will, uh, have opportunities to, uh, to help each other out and, um, and, and, uh, sort of generate suggestions for each other about avenues of exploration that are gonna be prepared, productive | 6:33 |
| Speaker 5 | . | 7:28 |
| Bill Chafe | Um, I guess that one of the other things that happens a lot in oral histories, and you most, those of you who've already done oral histories probably know already this is a big problem. But, uh, the old problem, the leading question , in which the answer is presumed in the question, um, I mean, that is probably the most common fallacy of the oral history interview, and one that until you really think about it, it's very easy to fall into. Um, I'm trying to think of an example. , um, would you say that Yeah, that, or, uh, or if you are, | 7:33 |
| Bill Chafe | Let's say that I'm asking, uh, the head of the school board in Greensboro, which is an all White school board with, with exception of one person, uh, a Black doctor, and am trying to, uh, I'm trying to get inside of the process by which they did, did or did not decide to comply with the Brown decision. Uh, now if, my first question is, when did you decide to desegregate the schools? I am making a very big assumption there, and I am gonna guide the answer to that question because this guy's gonna say to me, well, we decided to desegregate the school, so none, you know, and, and, and, uh, it, it, of course, it's missing the most important question of all, which is, you know, what decision did you make about the Brown decision ? Did you decide? How did you come to that decision? And what were the issues? And I, you know, if I, if I had started with that question, I never would've gotten to little, the hod quote . But you | 8:27 |
| Felix Armstrong | Know what, you know, for instance, a situation like that, I, I know for a lot of bull Eastern, uh, North Carolinians, um, the Brown decision didn't impact their lives. No, no. It didn't change anything. No. Um, | 9:37 |
| Bill Chafe | I think it's really important to get people to say that. Yeah. | 9:53 |
| Felix Armstrong | How do you get them to say that when, when they don't have a clue as to this thing we call the Brown decision | 9:57 |
| Bill Chafe | 54. Do you think? That's a really good question. Mm-hmm. , do you think they do or they don't? | 10:07 |
| Felix Armstrong | That that's what I'm saying is that I don't think that you're gonna find a lot of rural southerners who are going through, you know, from that, at least from that age bracket that we're talking about, because, you know, the 54 decision really didn't mm-hmm. change anything for my grandparents. | 10:12 |
| Bill Chafe | Could you ask, do you remember when the Brown decision came down as an entre mm-hmm. , or is that, does that assume too much, too little? I mean, it's a possibility to be, you could, you know, you could have a really in depth discussion about education and, you know, the, the interview talking about, you know, education in the forties, fifties, and sixties, and never mentioned the Brown Board decision. Mm-hmm. , I mean, that would be, | 10:30 |
| Felix Armstrong | Especially when you talk about Eastern North Carolina full scale integration until 68 | 11:01 |
| Bill Chafe | At the earliest mm-hmm. , yeah. | 11:08 |
| Felix Armstrong | Long after for | 11:11 |
| Bill Chafe | Decision. But the, we're gonna go have at least some experience in, uh, uh, some. And, um, it would be just interesting to know to what extent people even aware of the people who are 75, 85 years old now, uh, of someone like Reverend Jay mm-hmm. , well, they ever heard the names. We have the names of the plaintiffs too. Yeah. Well, they mm-hmm. They big wash. It's a fascinating question because when we were at the, uh, oral History Association meeting, uh, the people who were from, from the Brown Foundation, who, who did a project around, um, uh, around the part of the decision, there were a lot of people who didn't know that, that it was going on, who was involved, who were, you know, the people were, nobody came down that involved them, or, you know, sort of the awareness of, of this historic moment in their own area is not, you're right, it's not always there. But, but in order, we have to ask that order to testifying whether or not, you know, people have an, an analysis or implementation of it. Mm-hmm. , it doesn't make what they say any less valid if they don't know about it. Yeah. | 11:13 |
| Felix Armstrong | Mm-hmm. , it, it sells something too. | 12:36 |
| Bill Chafe | Um, I'm just reading this new book on Mississippi called Local People, uh, by John Dimmer. It's a brilliant, wonderful book, uh, which guess the world's been waiting for, for a long time. But, um, he's got some fantastic stuff in there on, uh, I, we have a student, Duke, uh, just finishing, just, just to finish this station on, uh, Robert Williams in Monroe, North Carolina, and, uh, the, uh, self-defense movement, um, and in North Carolina among at least sunglass, uh, in the late forties, fifties. And, and, uh, of course, Williams is known for its commitment to, uh, armed self-defense. Uh, we don't have a very clear, I think, historical knowledge of how widespread that was. Piter is showing us example after example, after example in rural Mississippi of, uh, especially Black veterans. Mm-hmm. , uh, engaging in armed self-defense. Mm-hmm. , uh, now presumably if we talk to some of those veterans, they may not even, they may not tell us about the Brown decision. They may not tell us about what the NAACP was doing, but they, they may will tell us about how they, uh, gathered around someone's house to defend that from, from being torched by the client. Mm-hmm. , | 12:40 |
| Felix Armstrong | I, I, I guess my, my, um, my thoughts at this point is that, um, one's lack of, um, knowledge of the Brown decision is in, is in nowhere mm-hmm. , indicat of ignorance, uh, perhaps lack of exposure. And, | 14:17 |
| Bill Chafe | Um, I've known so far, and also Barb Brown, we, in, in one of her articles, people do what makes sense in their lives. And these things that keep surprises make absolute sense when you think about the individual's lives you're talking about. | 14:35 |
| Felix Armstrong | That's thing we have to keep | 14:52 |
| Bill Chafe | Constantly in mind. Right. And, you know, it's kind of taking a combination of we have to know history, you know, first of all, then know something about local history, but then what would make sense in a given informants life, you know, that that, and maybe that helps us to find the, the line of questioning to, you know, to mm-hmm. to follow mm-hmm. . | 14:53 |
| Felix Armstrong | Yeah. I mean, and, and I guess I'm just sort of drawing that conclusion on my own personal experience. I, I said this, I'm this morning mother, should I speak in with my grandmother? Uh, she, you know, she doesn't talk about Fifth Report decision, but she had some very clear, uh, ideas of what school integration was like once it did occur. | 15:17 |
| Bill Chafe | Mm-hmm. | 15:40 |
| Felix Armstrong | . So your point of saying they don't have to talk about fifth Report decision to be able to give us some valuable information, I think it's valid. | 15:41 |
| Bill Chafe | It's also, I think, uh, just to reemphasize again, sort of my pet theme, which is to get to talk in as much detail as possible about events. Even something like if, uh, this discussion about | 15:53 |
| Bill Chafe | How the community came together to help, uh, provide food and sustenance to a family, and they got evicted, evicted from a, uh, for a plot of land because they were problem makers. I mean, any form of, of, uh, um, any, any example of how people came together to kind of support, reinforce each other. And this is where, in some ways, your ethnography in your history becomes very complimentary. I mean, uh, Carol Stack writes a book about akin about, uh, the informal networks of, uh, family support, uh, uh, in this community that she's looking at. Well, what we're trying to do is really to find out all examples of the ways in which, uh, communities endured and found the strength to resist and to per, so that, uh, to whatever extent that can get tied to specific illustrations, we are that much better off. Because then we've got something that we can talk about in concrete and vivid terms as opposed to simply using an abstraction like support networks, which doesn't mean anything unless you get on the track, another one of those academic terms, , | 16:12 |
| Felix Armstrong | You know? Um, and then at the same time, I think we need to give | 17:41 |
| Felix Armstrong | Our clients or the persons who's being interviewed some credit as well. Also, for instance, when I talk with my great aunt, again, I hate to keep doing these personal experiences in here, but I, I think I have rich history, I, well, myself, if I ever sit down and record it. But, um, when talking to her even about, what did you all think about, um, uh, what happened with the, um, with that stuff that was happening in Montgomery at, at Martin Luther ? You know, her response, uh, is we were country folk. We weren't concerned. Mm-hmm. , we riding nobody's bus. We knew we had to walk everywhere, we went anywhere. Um, but, uh, those folk, those city folk in, in Montgomery, uh, and that woman who refused to give up with us mm-hmm. , you know, that woman's name is not important to them, but news did spread to them that there was a Black woman in Montgomery who had caused the ruckus. So, and that's their perception. Mm-hmm. of, um, of the one company. | 17:47 |
| Bill Chafe | Okay. Well, I have got to go and have a meeting with somebody another meeting like the provost. Um, so, uh, we, we, we should break now. | 18:53 |
| Speaker 1 | 0:01 | |
| Bill Chafe | In case someone decides to speak , the sounds of science, the quote freely from our Michigan colleagues, I heard them say some things. I, | 0:04 |
| Speaker 1 | Um, | 1:02 |
| Felix Armstrong | Can I just sort of make an offbeat comment? Sure. Something that came out this morning, I didn't get a chance to call off. Mm-hmm. . Um, when we start to talk about he's interviewed and he's not interviewed mm-hmm. , uh, there's some very specific issues that come to mind. For instance, I know that, um, for a long time it has been talked about here in the area, at least amongst intellectuals for those who haven't expressed least in oral history. Uh, for instance, um, her daughter of, um, James Z. Shepherd is still alive. Mm-hmm. the oldest daughter. But, um, and, and we know that she would have some very valuable information to leave behind for oral history collection of any sort. But, um, she's a tough cookie to get at, uh, largely because, uh, she comes from, she's clearly seen as that. Um, as Leslie points out yesterday, that five family network. I don't know that the shepherds are in that five family, but it's clearly they're seen as the upper Black middle class here area. And to what, um, was brought up this morning about protecting that, that space and where they won't let you penetrate mm-hmm. . Um, we, I know that one time there was some suggestions, um, that perhaps there would have to be some real strategic steps as to who would interview her and, and who she would allow to come in and be and do the interviewing. Um, | 1:03 |
| Felix Armstrong | And I guess my question to say, I said all of that to say this, uh, project more or less is not dealing with those important figures like that. We, we we're more or less dealing with grassroots people. In a sense, and this is the question, | 2:47 |
| Bill Chafe | I think the answer to that is yes or no. Um, one of the things that you will find is that by definition, a sample of people that we're interviewing is going to be more middle class than the population is. Mm-hmm. , um, and to some extent disproportionately members of, uh, an elite, whether you call it an informal leader or formal elite. And that's largely because the people who are going to be most likely to come to our attention and who are prominent in the community are gonna be mentioned by our local sources as people to talk to, are people, uh, whose standing in the community and whose authority is such that they are not some kind of random selection at all. So, um, while it may be true that, um, the people we're talking to are not members of five families mm-hmm. , uh, it is also not true to say that they are, uh, representatives of the working class mm-hmm. | 3:06 |
| Bill Chafe | , uh, or the laboring classes. Uh, indeed. I think one of the things that we are concerned about on the basis of last someone's experience is that to some extent we, uh, need to be much more, uh, attentive to seeking out non-class people, um, and to make sure that the people we're talking to do not simply reflect one straight of the community. Uh, and it's also true that depending on the site that you're in, uh, where you are working, you may well end up trying to interview a Mrs. Shepherd or a daughter of Dr. Shepherd. Um, that it's not necessarily going to be only, uh, it may well be communities, and I'm not, I don't, one's not springing to my mind right now, but, um, well, in Birmingham mm-hmm. in Birmingham the summer, it's highly likely you're gonna be talking to people who would be, uh, at least some people who would be part of what, in Birmingham's case would be the top five families. Mm-hmm. | 4:25 |
| Speaker 4 | , and then those would be, I think, valuable additions to the | 5:27 |
| Bill Chafe | Collection. Yeah. I don't think there's | 5:30 |
| Speaker 4 | Anything wrong with that. Mm-hmm. | 5:31 |
| Bill Chafe | , | 5:32 |
| Speaker 4 | Someone has already suggested to us that we interview the mayor, and, uh, if we could the mayor, I'd be happy to do it. And I'm a working class torian, but I think | 5:33 |
| Bill Chafe | It would be a valuable | 5:44 |
| Speaker 4 | Position. Mm-hmm. | 5:47 |
| Felix Armstrong | , did my question | 5:47 |
| Bill Chafe | Make sense? Yeah, absolutely. I think what it also does though, is to suggest the importance, and I guess this is, this is implicit in our conversation this morning, but also listed in some of this, the importance of always sort of being attentive, whether in the forefront or the background of our minds to issues of class, color, gender, uh, occupational, religious, you know, those considerations need, I think always, uh, to, uh, to be there and, uh, to inform the way in which we conduct our interviews and how, what direction we pursue. And my sense is that everyone in this room is, uh, in some ways a product of the new social history. Um, and yet to be a product of the new social history in terms of the reading we've done and the, uh, the materials we've gone to school on, it's not the same thing necessarily as to pursue it in our research. So I think that, uh, that's not a challenge that we have to sort of come to grips with. | 5:49 |
| Speaker 4 | It's, and it's, um, it's a tactical question, and it's a question that I think each team is going to have to work on really, really hard. 'cause we have, you know, we have initial sets of contacts that we're receiving that are very valuable for interviews, but to really get at the, you know, the, whatever you want to call it, the base or the mass of, um, of the African American experience, we're gonna have to push ourselves to get out into broader areas. Um, uh, it's, it's, it's, that's gonna be one of the major challenges. | 6:56 |
| Speaker 5 | And the only guidance, unfortunately, that we can give are suggestions and resource people. And everything else has to happen by way of footwork. We talk about Birmingham wanting to look at the Endsley neighborhood, but we may, may or may not in the, in a series of contacts that we have that you'll make in the first day to find someone who knows anything about the Insley neighborhood, who's phony, insley neighborhood, you know, who knows what we're looking at, looking at about the ley neighborhood without going there and finding, you know, a church or an institution, you know, something there to set up a whole different, uh, line of, of interviews that's, that's groundwork that you have to lay, you know, yourselves. And much the way that in Durham, you know, those of us who are working on Durham and have been working on Durham, it's easy to identify the five families. It's something else to go to a completely different section of town and start and get, you know, something going in a series of context, probably easier now than five years ago. Um, but five years ago, you know, it was something new to go out and try to find out who were the tobacco workers. And it was something that now we know how to do it, but it's only by the experience of someone having done | 7:37 |
| Bill Chafe | That initially. And that comes out of Beverly Jones' own family connections, that that becomes a research project. So it's a very quiet group. Oh, that's, it's, it's satisfying. , the secret boxes is very satisfy . Uh, | 8:54 |
| Felix Armstrong | No, because that, that issue really troubles me with, uh, with Ms. Shepherd. I'm like, I don't want you tell us the story, you know, but, uh, here's some, an 80, probably almost 90 year old woman by now. And, uh, how do you convince her that, uh, she needs to share some of that intimate space with, uh, with the rest of us? She's probably wondering few people who would know Dr. Shepherd on an intimate basis. Right now, | 9:22 |
| Bill Chafe | You need to talk to a minister, | 9:52 |
| Speaker 1 | 9:53 | |
| Bill Chafe | or | 9:54 |
| Speaker 1 | . | 9:58 |
| Bill Chafe | Uh, lemme begin by sort of asking whether there are things that you, uh, want to come back to. We talked about this morning before we maybe move into this issue, these, these issues, other unfinished items of discussion that came up this morning. The feeling that we were at least, uh, playing out some of the, uh, multiple layers of the e d process and getting it, uh, and, and many, many of you have already done interviews will, uh, that will simply seem very familiar. But, uh, uh, and then I think, uh, understanding this dialectic that goes on between the historian and the, and the historical actor, and the ways in which any piece of evidence has to be contextualized. And we have to ask, | 10:01 |
| Bill Chafe | Why is this person saying this about that issue? Whether it be a letter that's being written, or whether it's being a comment made and answered your question. And we, we've think, got some sense that the balance, or they need to try to strike a balance between, um, simply encouraging people to narrate their lives and asking or directed in specific questions. Um, the nature of those specific questions, uh, at least as suggested in our research outline, uh, is what you've just take taken a look at. And I, I, um, maybe you want to comment a little bit on, um, in comment, either in terms of criticism or suggestions for additional issues. Um, this is essentially a departure point, and it may not even be an adequate departure point. Um, but I, I wonder whether some of these questions that are here, um, either suggest refinement or help to, uh, help us focus on the issue of what it is we are trying to find out, | 11:02 |
| Speaker 5 | You know, what the honor read these questions. And I know there comes a point in, in every semester when we, when we look at these again mm-hmm. , when I read these questions, I think these are interpretive questions. Mm-hmm. mm-hmm. . And I always struggle with how do you go from interpretive questions like, did those institutions functions that function as instruments of self preservation or vehicles for protests? Or did they do both? Mm-hmm. to asking somebody a question that's gonna give you some information that going lead to the answer to this question. I think that's like the crux. So what those of us who are researching and asking the questions are the struggle. It's a great thing for us to find out. | 12:08 |
| Speaker 4 | And, and even being, you know, critical about the question, you know, what do we mean by institutions? I mean, do, do we ask some rule and most, what is the most important institution in the community? I think we have a good guess answer. You know, however, I mean, perhaps we should broaden that notion of what is an institution, you know, what, uh, you know, what are the different institutional arrangements, uh, you know, in the communities? | 12:53 |
| Felix Armstrong | What do they perceive as institution? Mm-hmm. , you know, because the thing that comes to my mind when you start to ask the question like that here in Durham, what was the, um, the Black community's most important institution you may find among, um, those Blacks who were educated that they may say N C C U. | 13:19 |
| Speaker 5 | Mm-hmm. | 13:37 |
| Felix Armstrong | , however, you may find Blacks from the west end of Durham that may tell you that the Black institution, it provided them with the block papers mm-hmm. | 13:37 |
| Speaker 5 | Church. | 13:46 |
| Felix Armstrong | Exactly. And some will tell you the church, | 13:47 |
| Speaker 5 | Local elementary school | 13:50 |
| Felix Armstrong | Mm-hmm. . | 13:52 |
| Bill Chafe | So maybe the, | 13:54 |
| Speaker 5 | Well, | 13:55 |
| Bill Chafe | First of all, I think your point is very well taken. This because it's clearly an academics presentation on the issues. Get those | 13:55 |
| Speaker 5 | S I just wanted ask that question those guys, and tell | 14:06 |
| Bill Chafe | Now that it's slab stuff, , uh, I mean, even, even the word institution, I mean, it is not a word that one uses a non-academic conversation. Mm-hmm. . Uh, and so what you really wanna do in some ways, therefore, is to, uh, get much more real. | 14:14 |
| Speaker 4 | Yeah. | 14:31 |
| Speaker 5 | Yeah. That's a good, | 14:31 |
| Felix Armstrong | So you don't suggest we ask | 14:36 |
| Speaker 5 | This question? Oh | 14:38 |
| Bill Chafe | My God, God, when you read that question out, I said, oh, I just started to feel, I think you, as the, | 14:39 |
| Felix Armstrong | You as the interview were after having done | 14:47 |
| Bill Chafe | Weak, weak, no, that nice and wicked week after having done the interview, then you | 14:50 |
| Speaker 4 | Can provide the answer | 14:57 |
| Bill Chafe | For that question. Like you just said, question, should we ask to get an answer from which to draw this? Some sort of information for this analysis? | 14:59 |
| Speaker 6 | But couldn't you just break the question down? I mean, it's a good question. And just ask the individual if they ever joined any organizations or groups mm-hmm. , and, you know, if they answer yes and ask, you know, what the significance of the group was, or whether, whether it was a group that, uh, that was designed that, that in any way helped with, with the problems that Black people face or mm-hmm. or, uh, or, | 15:11 |
| Bill Chafe | Or a question like, you know, did you ever talk about politics? Where did you talk about politics? Uh, and, uh, and you know, what, what, what kinds of politics, which itself could be very interesting because of the different issues, but that would, could easily get you involved in church Barbershop. Mm-hmm. , you know, all lodge, all kinds of things, uh, which, uh, would then lead to a whole series of other kinds of issues. | 15:35 |
| Speaker 4 | So it's interesting so far, we've just really began this discussion, what we've come up with already, several different ways to ask one question. And that's a good, that's kind of a good lesson because it, I suggest that we're gonna have to have 'em as individuals a a real tremendous kind of flexibility mm-hmm. , in formulating these questions. I mean, we need to look at, uh, you know, the interviews that were done last year, and we need to look at the, uh, the interview questions. Um, but based on that, we're gonna have to make a lot of judgment calls. When we, when we go into a house, we interview somebody in their house, or, you know, wherever, uh, it sounds to me as if we're gonna have to ask different questions to get at the same issue. | 16:10 |
| Bill Chafe | Mm-hmm. mm-hmm. . | 16:59 |
| Speaker 4 | In other words, there's not gonna be one question we can ask everybody to, to, if that makes sense. | 17:02 |
| Bill Chafe | Mm-hmm. mm-hmm. . | 17:08 |
| Speaker 6 | What wouldn't happen if, if, if, if you, you obviously we we're going to have to translate, you put these questions in our own language mm-hmm. , we're, if we're going to be ourselves mm-hmm. , but what, what happens if, if we ask the question, you know, did you ever join an organization or group? Yes, I did. Which ones did you join? Which ones did you, which one did you get the most out of? And and the response is, well, you know, the most one I got the most out of was my Bridge Club. Mm-hmm. , um, because, uh, I really enjoyed getting together and seeing Bridge on Saturday nights, and, and the person wants to talk about that. Do you, you just let that go on? Or do you telling us | 17:11 |
| Bill Chafe | The Bridge Club's important, and I think there's historians, we haven't paid attention to the fact that bridge clubs are | 17:45 |
| Speaker 6 | Important, or Yeah. Or whatever it is, whatever the game is. But, but do we try, do we then try to explore that to see, well, do we ask, well, why was it important? Maybe, you know, what kinds of things did you talk about? Or, I mean, what, is there a way we should be exploring something that on the surface may seem, well, I don't know, may seem off the | 17:51 |
| Bill Chafe | Mark? Well, I think that any gathering, you could say, well, what, what kinds of things did you talk about at Bridge Club? And it may, may or may not go somewhere, who knows? Uh, but it could, and, uh, uh, it's worth going down that road to see where word leads. I | 18:13 |
| Felix Armstrong | Think another helpful thing that I found is using your surroundings to, um, the environment or the setting to encourage questions. | 18:31 |
| Bill Chafe | Yes, exactly. | 18:43 |
| Felix Armstrong | Um, family photos or photos of throughout the house. Well, where were you when you took that picture? Mm-hmm. | 18:44 |
| Bill Chafe | . And this is where some of the historic, some of the, uh, timeline stuff comes in. I mean, the war is gonna be very important no matter what vote wars. But we're gonna hear more about World War ii, and we're gonna hear about World War I simply by virtue of the age of people. And, and it's important to play that out and try to find out what impact happened in that community with your family, with your, uh, job, uh, with your participation in various organizations because of the war. Um, and because that's gonna be, you know, and then, and, and when we're talking about, uh, we may may not use the word depression. We may talk about hard times, uh, but it's really important to locate what happened, uh, particularly for tenant farmers and sharecroppers. I mean, did they in fact, get kicked off the land because of the new deals, agricultural policies? | 18:50 |
| Bill Chafe | Yeah. Mm-hmm. . Yeah. Uh, but we're not gonna say, did you get kicked out? Because policies, but you know, you're gonna get through that, and they're going to, you know, tell you what you know. Well, around, we just eventually got told to leave the land because, uh, there wasn't any more money and a crop because the crops got plowed under. Well, you know, you don't need to tell, I get, you get the name of the a a a in there because you know, you know what happened. Um, but just to locate those kinds of moments in time. And then, you know, even, even, uh, | 19:40 |
| Bill Chafe | Did you ever read a newspaper? What, what newspaper did you read? Norfolk Journal Guide. Well, how'd you, the Norfolk Journal guide, uh, or the defendant was, was down here. The defender was down here. Yeah. You know, just, I mean, just to get that kind of specificity, which then gives you a sense of, of, uh, you know, what was going on that night. 'cause you can go back and check what, what the defendant was writing about in 1933. I mean, you pretty much know what it was written about, but you can go back and, and check. And, and the important thing, I think is to, is to get as many different entry points into the actual historical context as possible. Mm-hmm. that then allow you to sort of relocate people in their heads in that time and place that you want, that you're asking about, that they're talking about. | 20:18 |
| Bill Chafe | Uh, I mean, it may be the Lewis smelling fight. There was a Lewis smelling fight, but yes, there was. Yes, there was . I used have, you know, I'm not a big fan boxing fan, but there, I remember there was a Lewis smelling fight. I don't remember. I wasn't lying, but I probably was actually . But, you know, that kind of thing. You know, where, uh, where, I mean, how many times have you seen that particular fight written about, uh, with the number of people gathered at the, at the only radio, radio in town? Uh, because this was such an important, now what does that mean? | 21:09 |
| Speaker 7 | It seems to me like we're interested in economic life, political life, social life, racial violence, families and social relationships, all kinds of different things. But that not every informant's gonna be able to tell you about all those things. Yeah. In the same degree of detail and vividness. Uh, but there probably is gonna be one or maybe two of those things. And that if it turns out to be the Bridge Club that they want to talk about, then the challenge is to find a way to get them to talk about the Bridge Club at a level of detail, specificity, vividness, that then becomes useful piece of information about social life. Yeah. And to try and connect it to as many things as you can. But it's not that you yourself don't have to evaluate. Well, I don't think the folks in Durham want to know about Bridge Clubs, so I've gotta get them to talk about unions mm-hmm. | 21:49 |
| Bill Chafe | , mm-hmm. . Mm-hmm. , | 22:55 |
| Speaker 7 | When, you know, they don't wanna talk about unions and they can't talk about 'em in the same detailed way that they talk about Bridge | 22:57 |
| Speaker 5 | Funds. I think it's a really good example. We go back to, we talked about Joan Gibson Robinson's book this morning. If we go back to, she writes about being late for her Bridge Club meeting, and people being really upset with her because she was late for a Bridge Club meeting after, you know, getting, running the flyers off. If we interviewed someone who was in her Bridge Club, for example, and they would at this point have to assess for importance. But let's say, you know, they didn't, or the book didn't exist. And we interviewed someone, interviewed Bridge Club that said, yeah, you know, and that Joanne, you know, she used to show up late. We have a very different interpretation, but it's still an thing for her to say, because it tells us a lot about how the members of the Bridge Club slash class perceived what she was doing, the importance of lack of importance in what she was doing. That to them, her being the Bridge Club, was much more important. And that tells us a lot about the dynamics of the community, but we have to draw that interpretation | 23:04 |
| Bill Chafe | In. Mm-hmm. . | 24:05 |
| Speaker 4 | Yeah. And it might be that if, if, if, if, when that book was written, I mean, if, uh, I mean, if we would've asked more questions about the Bridge Club, we might've found, found mean, we might've found out that it was, you know, bridge Partners who suggested, you know, this idea about a boycott. 'cause we, you know, and they might say, well, you know, why weren't we included in that book? You know, we, we talk about this all the time over grid, you know? | 24:05 |
| Bill Chafe | Yeah. One of the things that, sorry. | 24:34 |
| Speaker 5 | Well, I think the other thing is that we want that, I think the most common answers we know we'll get would be like, the church, what's most important institution, if the church, the school, whatever. How do we move people beyond saying that the church is important to saying things about the church that | 24:40 |
| Bill Chafe | Are specifically across specific, | 24:57 |
| Speaker 5 | And knowing not just why is the church important, spirituality is an important part of that. But if we are beginning to look at the church, a political institution, the church is from, can we be that person down the road where they begin to say that the church is political institution? Or is it a dead end for that given individual? Maybe somebody else has that. Well, we also wanna know who were the other people who were in your church, so that could tell us something about | 25:01 |
| Bill Chafe | Class. What were the | 25:27 |
| Speaker 4 | Activities mm-hmm. that you participated | 25:28 |
| Bill Chafe | In. How often, how often did you go? Right. Um, or Primi, what happened to Primi as opposed to Sunday service? Um, I mean, even, even I think things like, | 25:30 |
| Bill Chafe | You know, how the church re might respond to different, different kinds of issues. And one of the things that's critical here, but we're not always able to provide is a real sense of what the local history is in the place that we're gonna be working. Mm-hmm. , uh, in some places that's gonna be easier to do than others. Um, but particularly the extent that we can link up with and anchoring our questions in events and episodes that are important in local history, then we're also enabled to, um, get a much better sense of how these networks functioned and how people, uh, came to grips with, uh, with some of the issues. And, you know, it's gonna be different in each community. And I guess that, uh, one of the things we wanna try to find out in our first period of time there is, is as much as possible, but beyond what we've already able to tell you about what took place in these local sites and what, what, what events may be that stood out. I mean, it may be a, may be a lynching, maybe a, uh, uh, a major political event, uh, | 25:46 |
| Bill Chafe | That, uh, could be the appearance of, of someone who happens to come to that community and make an impact. Uh, but I think that to whatever extent it's possible to have those reference points, we also are very able to once again, relocate people's heads into a time and place where they can then proceed to pick up a narrative and to let it unfold. How much are we gonna be able to, we have a written, written form by each one of these patients, | 27:10 |
| Speaker 1 | . | 27:54 |
| Speaker 4 | We have, uh, boxes of information, have files, articles on each that pertain to each side. Yeah. Um, and actually I, you know, people, you know, can start even looking at that. Um, it's upstairs with the, with the interviews. | 27:55 |
| Bill Chafe | Can | 28:11 |
| Speaker 8 | We do copies of that stuff? Is that | 28:11 |
| Speaker 5 | Okay? It's actually there for you to | 28:13 |
| Speaker 8 | Take with you. Oh, to take 'cause you've gotten excess copies. Correct. Okay, great. For each, oh, I forgot what they were. Okay. Yeah. | 28:15 |
| Speaker 5 | Paul's been working on for each, for each geographic area. Great. Um, there, there are three boxes, one for each material about that, that area somewhere. Okay. And in addition, you know, we, we'll send you with the, the file that we've been working on has hints of information that we've gotten from people and, and leads and things that you can follow up on. So you have some information sort of to lean on over that. You know, only Georgia is in Southwest area of Georgia. | 28:22 |
| Speaker 8 | Another type of is how much, how much little sort of history gathering or whatever would you like us to do at the local areas. | 28:52 |
| Bill Chafe | I mean, yeah. | 28:59 |
| Speaker 8 | You know, how much would you like us, | 29:00 |
| Speaker 9 | Because you mentioned like local archives and things like that at some point in here, you know, like, and, and I was listening to what, uh, Dr. Galls was, was talking about earlier in terms of the accessibility of that, that may not be a primary concern. Um, so could you sort of tease out all those things? | 29:03 |
| Speaker 5 | Sure. Um, in the archives, we'd like to, what would probably be most helpful would be knowing what kinds of collections are there. Um, because from this distance, we don't necessarily know Okay. For, um, we know for example, at South Carolina State Archives, they are just boxes and boxes, materials from the, um, reports from extension workers, rural extension workers that have never been looked at. But that's one, that's just one thing that we know is there, you know, what other kinds of things are there that we might find of interest that we might want to go back and look at on. But I think the focus of what we'd like people to be doing, oral histories and then followed by copy photographs and identify you come across family records, know, let us know. Um, because we don't necessarily want to bring them here. And it doesn't really make a lot of sense to take for records out of Orangeburg. But there's other stuff in Orangeburg that, that | 29:20 |
| Felix Armstrong | No, I'm sorry. | 30:19 |
| Speaker 10 | I have a question. Um, one of the things when s in archives in Montgomery is that a lot of times they have war histories mm-hmm. | 30:21 |
| Speaker 5 | people | 30:28 |
| Speaker 10 | In the community. So would you want us to | 30:30 |
| Speaker 5 | Yeah, that's something I think that the team should know fairly early on if oral history already done, and maybe a sense in the context of, for example, we're going to Birmingham and there have been major oral history projects done with steelworkers there mm-hmm. , um, it doesn't then make a lot of sense for us to spend three weeks doing steelwork interviews when there are two 50 other math laws, . But, um, in our file, for example, there'll be information on, on an assessment by people who used it, uh, of how that, how that, um, collection is strong or weak, and what things we could look at that would relate to that collection. Um, and topics that haven't been considered by that collection at all. We should be pursuing, | 30:34 |
| Felix Armstrong | For instance, a place like Tulane, a collection that's there. | 31:19 |
| Speaker 5 | . | 31:25 |
| Felix Armstrong | Yeah. Mm-hmm. . I'm just thinking that it's | 31:25 |
| Speaker 5 | Rather expensive. Yeah. There's a lot, there's a lot of stuff there. And they probably have a finding aid of what's there. | 31:28 |
| Felix Armstrong | So a smart thing to do is when we get there, least one of us go over and check out what's there. | 31:35 |
| Speaker 5 | Well, we also found that they have, surprisingly, not very much on world history in, in New Orleans, there've been, um, an occasional neighborhood project or two. Yeah. But there's not an oral history collection about the city of, you know, African-American life in New Orleans. It's | 31:41 |
| Speaker 4 | A surprise. There is, there is one, but it's, again, it focuses on the civil rights movement. | 31:57 |
| Speaker 5 | Mm-hmm. Kim. And there's a lot of civil rights stuff out there. | 32:03 |
| Speaker 4 | Now. The good thing, the interesting thing about that book, in a way I've thought to use that, that book and, um, is is she publishes or she prints out, you know, a list of people at, she interviews the civil rights movement. Yeah. Why not go back and talk to these people about, you know mm-hmm. earlier, you know, Jim Crow, | 32:06 |
| Speaker 5 | Especially the older ones mean you could even call Kim and, and get, get a list of people | 32:24 |
| Felix Armstrong | Who are, their name is in your sixties and | 32:29 |
| Speaker 5 | Seventies. | 32:31 |
| Speaker 4 | Those are items Yeah. It's, it's in the file. | 32:32 |
| Speaker 5 | It's in | 32:35 |
| Felix Armstrong | The, it's, yeah. And I'm just wondering, there been a contact made with the stead to leave copies. | 32:35 |
| Speaker 5 | The copies of materials in New Orleans will go to Southern University of New Orleans | 32:46 |
| Felix Armstrong | To Southern, okay. | 32:50 |
| Speaker 5 | Mm-hmm. , um, Charles Fry, who's our contact person, who's also a research mm-hmm. advisor on the project. Okay. And, uh, his Archist is also one of our research advisors. Okay. And, um, they are building a different kind of archive as sooner than | 32:51 |
| Felix Armstrong | That's what, | 33:08 |
| Bill Chafe | Okay. And they have, uh, I mean, that's a, that's a site which we are full of history mm-hmm. because of, uh, of, of those types contacts. Mm-hmm. . But | 33:09 |
| Felix Armstrong | I feel almost overtaxed just | 33:24 |
| Speaker 5 | Thinking about it, , | 33:28 |
| Felix Armstrong | I mean, just how can we possibly get all of what's that Donald, to | 33:29 |
| Speaker 5 | Offer? You can't do it all. You can't do an archival review in three weeks. We couldn't even assess the moral history collection, whatever place. You can't ask all these questions of any one person. Yeah. And it's, it's probably gonna be | 33:36 |
| Felix Armstrong | The one place I, I mean, that I can think of that should clearly is gonna make you say, God, we need to go back, or, or, I wish we had more time. | 33:53 |
| Speaker 7 | I think the, the other thing that's important to emphasize is that you do have responsibility to us here in Durham, but that you're gonna have responsibility, and we're counting on you to work well as teams in your small teams. Mm-hmm. . And that you should be with the two or three people in your team figuring out what's the strategy we're going to use to approach New Orleans, uh, or wherever it is that you are, what are the things, having read through the information that we already have collected, and based on what you can know about New Orleans before you get there, what are the important issues? What are the important events, topics, groups of people that we think should be covered during the four weeks that we're here? And how are we gonna strategize to make sure that we can work together to do this? | 34:01 |
| Speaker 7 | Uh, and then, you know, and then if some, if you wanna divide it up so that one of you is gonna concentrate on interviewing people who have already been interviewed for the civil rights project, and somebody else is gonna concentrate on interviewing musicians and somebody else is gonna concentrate on interviewing, whatever, you can do that. Mm-hmm. , whatever. But, um, no, you're, you're capable of figuring, making those kinds of judgements. Um, and this is, this is related to something earlier, not to this necessarily, but, um, in terms of your sense of your responsibility towards each other, that goes for questions about how much work are we supposed to be doing and things like that. I mean, you, you need to work so that everybody on the team feels like everybody's holding up their weight and that everybody's contributing what they can to your work while you're there. | 34:56 |
| Speaker 5 | Mm-hmm. , you know, a lot of this, we set up time in the schedule. Well, we didn't set up time. We open time in the schedule for, for groups to have team meetings with us. And that's what, that's, that's what those team meetings will be about. You know, here, this is your material, these are the things that we know mm-hmm. , here are our context, here are the hints, you know, here, take your boxes and then spend your time going, going through it. At least it help you to think about questions and organizations and people. Um, and, and to do that as with, with, uh, with us and your group of three or four, rather than to try to cover all nine sites with all, you know, 13, 14 people sitting around the table. Be easier. So just, you know, set up, get with your group and set up a time to, to sit down with us and, you know, and we'll do that so that you'll have, you know, more concrete material to begin thinking about the, the, the place you're going. And probably the sooner you do that, uh, the better. And we can talk about, you know, after the session about how we can make adjustments on schedule to do that even earlier than Tuesday or Wednesday next week. We need to. | 35:57 |
| Speaker 5 | How, how many of you had experience doing oral history before? So, so most of you, what, what observations do you have about your, about the problems of doing or history? What, what do you, what's your experience been? The biggest problems? | 37:11 |
| Felix Armstrong | , | 37:34 |
| Speaker 5 | 37:35 | |
| Felix Armstrong | I think I sort of mentioned by the other night was how frustrating it is, um, with the little old lady who, um, tells you, turn that off. Um, such that I can tell you this bit of information. Yeah. And little does she know that that bit of information is perhaps the most important thing that she's had. | 37:40 |
| Speaker 5 | She knows that's | 38:02 |
| Speaker 7 | Why she, | 38:03 |
| Felix Armstrong | And I don't wanna say you don't work with those people anymore, say what you want to, but at the same time you have to sort of respect that | 38:06 |
| Speaker 5 | Mm-hmm. | 38:14 |
| Felix Armstrong | . And, uh, what do you do? | 38:14 |
| Speaker 5 | I also think that, you know, if you start off in the interview or just a process of talking to somebody without a tape recorder, and then as soon as you turn the damn thing on, one thing is also | 38:19 |
| Speaker 9 | Trying to follow agenda. It is, you may have, whether that be, you know, this sort of set of questions or sort of an idea that you want to really follow. Um, just because, uh, you know, once you get the conversation, not the conversation, but once you get the person talking, and then they sort of go off in their own different ways, you know, and the next sort of thing that you may have wanted to get to, it's like, it doesn't follow, it doesn't flow well with what they're talking, you know, so just sort of trying to get to get to the things that you want to get to mm-hmm. . Um, but then on the other hand, it's like on should just flow in a sense. And it's really difficult to try to find like points of intervention, right. To sort of continue a question or continue their thoughts or, you know, ask a different one or, | 38:33 |
| Bill Chafe | Yeah. It's almost, uh, something that you have to grow into being comfortable with mm-hmm. . And then there's no formula that you can follow, and there's no, uh, uh, there's no adequate preparation except experience. Mm-hmm. . Although there, there are guidelines which can shape you the way in which you carry out on it, | 39:22 |
| Felix Armstrong | Which is, I, I think, um, perhaps one time, one interview, but I sort of left kind of frustrated with the fact that I couldn't control the interview the way that I wanted to. Yeah. What I wasn't getting mm-hmm. , um, perhaps what I had went for, 'cause, um, related tended to want to talk about, um, everything else mm-hmm. , but the specifics of, uh, I went to her hoping to get a lot out of her about the women's role in union organized. And, uh, she didn't exactly give me that, but what | 39:45 |
| Bill Chafe | We, that was an academics question, , | 40:24 |
| Felix Armstrong | You know, what, what, what kind of things were you doing as the local women organizers of the union? Yeah. And, um, what I ended up getting is a tape full of a lot of other things. And one thing in particular that she went on and on about was how she had to, um, entertain, uh, her White copart within the industry just to be able to have a day without any kind of harassment. And what, uh, later discovered was that it really was a good interview because it gave us an inside glimpse of, uh, what Black women endured in those industries where she talked about where she had to sing. Whereas as if at some point she became a minstrel, you know, for these, uh, White cohorts just to be able to work near them. | 40:27 |
| Bill Chafe | My experience has been one of the hardest things to do in any oral history interview is to make a phone call. Mine too | 41:23 |
| Speaker 9 | Is to what? Make | 41:29 |
| Bill Chafe | A phone call. Call to set the appointment. | 41:30 |
| Speaker 4 | Yeah. | 41:33 |
| Bill Chafe | That's, um, it, it's, uh, is a heavy thing, is an anxiety level. There's a, uh, I mean, that's, that's when you are performing. And, uh, and, and you need there, you need their applause. And their applause, of course, is to say, well, I'd be happy to talk to you. Right. But you don't, you know, you have no confidence whatsoever. Uh, and it's, it's hard. It's very hard. So I think that, I mean, knowing that I hope will be at least a reassurance that, that it's a, it's a universal problem. Um, but it never gets any easier, no matter how often you do it, it doesn't get any, 'cause it's always, it's kind of like, uh, it's kind of like piling up dishes and knowing at some point you're gotta wash. | 41:34 |
| Bill Chafe | Yeah. You're always kind of, you know, oh, maybe I can wait and do it tomorrow, or, you know, half an hour from now or, and it's, and yet, you know, and it's always, it's very important to, to call a, as much as possible at a time, which is convenient, you know, how you feel if you get a phone call in the middle of dinner asking you for a hundred dollars for whatever local charity happens to have you on their mailing list, on your phone call list. And so you don't wanna call during dinner by the other hand you wanna call when they're still up, . Uh, and these are, these are just, uh, those are tough questions, but, | 42:29 |
| Speaker 4 | And, and, you know, it's important not to get discouraged too. Yeah. I mean, recently I had this experience of calling somebody for an interview. I, I've already interviewed this person two times and established we wanted to before, but, uh, you know, I call him up and, uh, who's at a good time. 'cause he told me what time to call him mm-hmm. . And so I called him and he said, um, yeah, uh, what do you want Ortiz? And, | 43:07 |
| Bill Chafe | Uh, what do you want ? | 43:32 |
| Speaker 4 | And, uh, and I said, well, you know, I didn't see, I wanted to see how you're doing. And, uh, that was not the right response because he knew what I wanted, you know, he knew that I was calling so another mm-hmm. mm-hmm. . And at once I just said, you know, we skipped over that transaction because it didn't work, . And I said, uh, well, I was, you know, I wanted, you know, to know I'd be interested in doing another interview. And he said, yeah. And, uh, you know, from that point on, we had a good conversation. Yeah. But it was that, that initial Yeah. Transaction. I just wanted to like, you know, hang up the phone or, you know, pretend I hadn't called before, you know, or whatever. But, you know, it was a difficult, you know, I recall | 43:34 |
| Speaker 6 | When you were looking for an, an analogy, I thought you were going to say it's, uh, you're making these, these canvas calls, these cold calls. It's like telemarketing. But is there a fairly high, uh, | 44:17 |
| Bill Chafe | Rate of negative response? No. No. Okay. No. The reason says yes, it said it, it, it's not, it's not the negative response, it's just the, uh, the fact that you sort of putting yourself in the line and, and, and you are therefore, at least symbolically and psychologically quite vulnerable. And none of us likes to put ourselves in a vulnerable position. And so that's why I think we feel so anxious about it. Uh, someone just referred to, I think it was Leslie, the fact that that, uh, that you will sometimes make an appointment, which the person well keep. And, and, uh, the thing to do there is just to persist. Mm-hmm. , | 44:30 |
| Speaker 8 | I, I just have to say that I spent so much time last summer waiting in front of Columbia University. I, I kept waiting like three different times, like in the pouring rain, in the boiling heat. And, you know, I'd call 'em later if they'd, you know, call me or I'd beat them and they'd call me back and I'd be, and they'd be like, oh, sorry. Or whatever. I'm like, that's fine, that's fine. When you free again. And I would just try over and over and I've never, you know, indicated that I got drenched or that . | 45:17 |
| Speaker 5 | The thing about the calls that we're making is that in a, in the way they're cold, but in another way, sometimes you revert by somebody else. Right. And that makes so much easier, you know, saying, I'm calling you because Ms. Lucy Johnson told me that I should call you. Oh, Ms. Johnson. Oh yeah. You know, the Johnson | 45:47 |
| Speaker 11 | , she making fruit cake. You don't wanna miss the cake. | 46:06 |
| Speaker 8 | I just add my own thing about what I think is hard. You're sort of getting at it. It's just kind of establishing a sense of trust in those few hours is just like somehow trying to convey that, you know, you really want to hear, I don't know. | 46:19 |
| Felix Armstrong | So I did have one interview who was just like, what, what are you gonna do with this? | 46:34 |
| Bill Chafe | Yeah. | 46:39 |
| Felix Armstrong | What are you gonna do with this? Who's gonna hear it? | 46:41 |
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