Karen Fields Presentation: Things Done Regardless, and Practicum: Oral History Methodology, both at JCP Summer Institute, 1991 July 22

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Karen Fields	In a world made of a full scale human individual, you find something different than the bare facts about the era of segregation can easily cause you to expect human characters that do no more than reflect the conditions of segregation. Certainly you find some human characters who do, and you also find some human lives destroyed, but that is not all you find.	0:02
Karen Fields	Nor could it be all for there would've been no possibility of change of any sort if people's lives and minds could have been wholly determined by a political regime no more in the low country than in Eastern Europe. Now this part, now this subjective and personal part of the world, of that era, does not come to us usually as facts or as history such as usually taught such as it's usually taught in school for the events that belong to it are too small and too lacking in generality.	0:27
Karen Fields	But it does come to us if we look and are fortunate as memory and memory constructs, things as they were from a particular point of view, a point of view that has a personal identity, distinct from impersonal facts, even if also part of those that world comes to us through memory as things done regardless. And things done regardless are ultimately the human raw material of historical events. That is of the history that we do eventually learn in teaching school a history of worlds that were passed, but also a history of worlds that were transformed.	1:05
Karen Fields	Therefore, it is important to think about the era of segregation in both ways objectively and generally in ways you can do from census data, political roles, economic geography, laws, patterns of law enforcement and the like, and also subjectively and particularistic in ways you can do by listening to people talk about their lives from their own standpoints in terms of what they considered important, who they thought they were could become in working on Lemon Swamp and Other Places.	1:45
Karen Fields	With my grandmother, I did not, at first grasp the importance of conceiving these two ways of talking about history separately, and therefore, I could not always grasp what could be gained thereafter by putting those two ways of talking together.	2:20
Karen Fields	Now, let me not leave any impression that I learned early on or consistently these lessons that I'm telling you now, or even the import of fact abrupt moment we had talking about her voyage to Boston. For, I thought of myself as having to reconcile personal memory with the expectations of a reading audience to whom family stories would have limited interest or relevance without relationship to the framework of large facts and large events that the term era of segregation evokes. Some of the stories seem too personal to me and for that matter, and for that matter, they seem so to others who read early drafts, including publishers who kept rejecting the book.	2:37
Karen Fields	For five years, grandma had the annoying or disconcerting habit further of calling all her stories history, but the meaning of the term to her was not the same, to say the least as it's meaning to professional historians. So I listened and recorded and questioned with a certain unease about what was emerging.	3:21
Karen Fields	There were long and lovingly detailed descriptions of neighborhoods in Charleston differently ranked in terms of their respectability in Gram's eyes. I need not say that in her eyes. Her street was very definitely respectable. Short Court, was it.	3:45
Karen Fields	A certain neighborhood called Cool Blue was not. That was a place where you could find Black people shooting craps, talking loud, drinking. It was a neighborhood the police would be called to, which was the very antithesis of a respectable neighborhood. People settled their order among themselves in a respectable neighborhood.	3:58
Karen Fields	It was Charleston—Cool Blue was Charleston as portrayed in Porgy and Bess, which grandma despised. Uh, it was a place where one White cop with a club could terrify a thousand Negroes as she put (laughter). And a thousand Negroes. Um, and those thousand Negroes that the cop and Porgy and Bess terrified lived unrespectably as far as she was concerned.	4:19
Karen Fields	Still to stay with the facts about Short Court. She had to tell early on how a certain loose young woman named Mary got the police call that the short court was her street. The coming of the cops. The very idea of it emerged in the context of her storytelling as worse even than whatever that disreputable Mary might've been doing with her gentleman friends in the house facing grandma's.	4:45
Karen Fields	Gram's own image of her street began with the vigilance and rectitude of her Aunt Harriet, whose gardening and sweeping and also whose clothes epitomized uh, in a wonderful way. Her long skirts, high collars, embroidered or tattered cuffs. Her business-like aprons severe hairdo on and on in minute detail, this image of the street that went together with the image of a person, an important person in grandmother's life when she was young.	5:11
Karen Fields	Now, these recitals were sometimes terror tiresome, but I gradually got into them for a picturesque turn of the century world of city dwelling. Black people came forth with an amount of sensuous detail that made me finally see them. Tables were set each evening with claws and silver, some of which had migrated out of plantation houses at end of the war.	5:51
Karen Fields	Her cousins next door possessed an organ with mirrors on it and space to hold vases in. It was decorated with scarves that had fringes. The bench of the organ was adorned with needlepoint.	6:15
Karen Fields	Her uncle next door, a good looking bearded man who looked like White in the phrase they used, drove a baker's van drawn by a horse which meant that they had not only a house, but a stable next door. And grandma went on about the picnics that her relatives next door and her family would have aunts would emerge from that wonderful house with a stable in their long skirts, carrying baskets of food. And she would digress to say, "But not sandwiches like you all eat today. Real food," you know, red rice and (laughter) so forth.	6:28
Karen Fields	And then she'd tell about getting on the street car and arriving at the ferry to go to a place they called the Alhambra. And there crowds of Black people from families and churches and clubs throughout the city made a, made an excited parade and voyage out of a ferry trip to a place that was not far off and there would occur dusk hour trysts that prepared marriages of the future.	7:07
Karen Fields	There was always musical entertainment on those occasions, which was provided by little boys sometimes who made amazing music by rhythmically clicking bones together. Sometimes it was provided by singing ensembles from churches or clubs and any event of any scale at all. Hired the marching band from Jenkins orphanage, which every real sure enough, Charlestonian calls the Jenkin Orphanage Band. No s on it.	7:35
Karen Fields	Of course, it always had a high stepping, high stepping drum major and Bandsmen who were sharp as a tack and oh, how they played. Grandma told also what she could, what she had known of the churches, the clubs, the social organizations that used to arrange events like that and also concern themselves with other matters more directly related to big capital h history in her childhood, for example, she knew people who were still looking for loved ones who had been sold farther south or who had been separated in consequence of the war.	8:08
Karen Fields	And her great uncle James Middleton did a lot of this work of trying to find people. In addition to his Methodist pastoring, she told the parlor societies that worked like insurance insurers. She described neighborhoods, she described interiors, and Gram always had a comment about clothing, the hats that a certain widow wore in church, the frock coats, coats and wind collars of Sam Faber, the butler that he would wear as he drove around in his employer's carriage, or the shoes that her father bought just for her off the string of an itinerant peddler.	8:45
Karen Fields	Now, you know, Negroes couldn't generally try things on in those days. She said in this instance, filling in the gap for me without being asked. So you just bought them and hoped they fit. But at the same time, her point was also that she had been her father's favorite, and for that reason, that he would buy the pair of shoes off the peddler with the, with the string of them.	9:27
Karen Fields	Some of the personal recollections went to larger themes that by their nature cannot come out of flat facts of segregation color. For example, the statistics give you categories such as Negro and White or Whites and non-Whites. They tell nothing about light-skinned and dark skinned good hair and bad hair combinations and gradations in between. Neither do the laws written and unwritten, which were predicated on descent, not on appearance.	9:53
Karen Fields	The uncle, remember the uncle looked like White and which presumed two categories only White and not White. But descent and appearance did not always match, nor did they vary in any consistent manner within families. However, they varied in families and in communities in ways that mattered and that the general and the objective provide blunt in instruments for understanding or none at all.	10:24
Karen Fields	My grandmother had a great deal to say about color, and I'm told that some sectors of Charleston society privately fumes after the publication of Lemon Swamp at what she had to say times have changed.	10:51
Karen Fields	And the old hierarchy that once seemed clear if complex after the era of Black is beautiful, seemed weird and a complex. And so the, the dredging up of that was not well received everywhere, but be that as it may since her grandfather had been White, Gram's mother was listed in the 1890 census with an M by her name for Mulatto, her husband George Garvin, with an N for Negro. And so the children of this union were in Gram's words, a basket of colors in a society that ritualized Whiteness and so by extension lightness.	11:06
Karen Fields	Her brother Herbert, who was as dark as she, with curly rather than kinky hair, teased her mercilessly calling her Blackie Moon. And it was one of the convolutions of that system that allowed somebody, a man to who was as dark as she, to consider himself, nevertheless higher in the color hierarchy than she. But that's a story we can perhaps bring out in, in discussion.	11:48
Karen Fields	Now, Gram's mother ruthlessly suppressed stuff of this kind whenever she saw it among her children, and she could overcome it with parental authority. But of course, none of her victories was once and for all, because color consciousness was a pathogenic substance that the objective body of segregation secreted like digestive juice. It converted the spontaneous perceptions that people took in to stylized representation of people by color.	12:17
Karen Fields	It helped create in people special, internal and spiritual muscles that did some of the same work that the Jim Crow's policing of the laws did outwardly, but neither were the home front, temporary victories of people like Gram's, mother insecure as those victories were without usefulness, where they also created inward habits of contesting the outrageous, the ridiculous theological, the arguments and fights and punishments could keep people from learning their place in the ones and for all in total way that the architects of segregation dreamed of as they made their social blueprints law. Still Gram's accounts of this were small incidents, very personal, small battles engaged in and won even the tests even when she bested her brother and things that mattered it was only she could still come back with the matter of color. She tells various stories about it and we'll return to those.	12:48
Karen Fields	Well, as a listener and note taker, I took these things in after a while, feeling grateful indeed, that we had defined the project as memoir, not as history or even as oral history. Grateful as well that I was not working as a sociologist, obliged to concern myself with how representative I could claim that the small facts emerging to be the order and content of things were determined very much by the initiative of the person I was talking to.	13:56
Karen Fields	And I used the term, the person I was talking to, rather than informant, which is in the jargon of my discipline. 'cause I think I've said enough to make it clear that the conventional term informant could not be applied in the grandmother-granddaughter relation where, you know, who has the authority and (laughter). Who is the social researcher who gets back from an informant "Shucks, child, I'm not talking about this"? (laughter).	14:27
Karen Fields	After a time I began to regard my work on Lemon Swamp and other places as a vacation from the ordinary doing of social research and gradually began to take more lightly the running of methodological red lights than I did. Uh, and I stopped figuratively looking over my shoulder was a longer time still before I began to see that the image of vacation from doing solid research was a wrong one. That some of the methodological controls supposedly there to ensure the discovery of truth were well equipped to ensure quite the opposite.	14:54
Karen Fields	Suppose I had been free of the free talking authoritative grandmother who wouldn't sit still for the distorting questions that came naturally out of my equipment, of facts about the general and the objective. The trouble with working from those is precisely the fill in the gaps outlook that comes so naturally, you know what you don't know, and so your questions are designed to go after what you don't know.	15:29
Karen Fields	But research on a world that is passed is by its nature not so simple. It is that world is in a great many respects, alien and strange, and you have only the rudimentary bare bones of orientation provided by the general data you have. And the data is like walking around with a roadmap, trying to understand the life of a city. You can't get from one to the other in any simple way. In a real sense, you don't know what you don't know, and you can't get it by asking (laughter).	15:58
Karen Fields	So if you work only the map from the map filling in its gaps, you never will know. You begin to know in another sense, if you let somebody from the city tell you what is important to him or her. And since the city is not far past, and I mean the city in a, in its sense of a, of a conscious living environment you still, it's not like doing Rome. Uh, you don't have to work archeologically, (laughter) and guess about the inhabitants that it's still possible to communicate with them. They're not distinct.	16:39
Karen Fields	Now, this insight came to focus for me only gradually as I continued to sweat through interviews of the summer heat of Gram's kitchen table, sweating with the effort to keep personal details in mind, sweating also from the colossal effort those southern fans make to carry blasts of hot air from one side of the road to another one place.	17:16
Karen Fields	The insight came into focus for me was in the, the, that personage of Sam Faber. And he did not come out of the interviews all at once. He came up as the go-between in hiring Black teachers. As I told you, he came up in the context of romance. Also, it turned out that in Gram's phrase, he was liking her sister. So he had a personal reason for wanting to be helpful to the family and getting the job.	17:42
Karen Fields	The other side of this character who was an Uncle Tom character as far as Gram was concerned, was that he was quite a man about town. When his employers got a motorcar, he drove back too, just as he had the carriage and he gave the ladies driving lessons. He was a snappy dresser with his bow ties and his wing collars and his frock coats and his cigars. He built himself a private personage as a catch, in addition to his public personage as the "Black mayor of Charleston" as Grandma called him (laughter).	18:09
Karen Fields	When civic organizations got active in the 1920s, he turned up again now as somebody who had to be included because of his connections, but also as somebody who worked also because of his connections to abort or at least deflate the more ambitious plans. He was the one who carried tales to the mayor. Somebody Gram and her friends had to learn to work around since they could not exclude him, given his rank. Uh, and so they devised caucuses in advance of meetings, planning and maneuvering, and providing tales for favor to carry to the mayor.	18:45
Karen Fields	Um, now it turns out also that favor had actually gotten a job for Gram's sister Hattie, the sister he was liking in his home place upstate. And that Hattie then got grandma hired for a time. Gram somewhat exaggerated in her story of getting her own job through the super's office. 'cause the first job really was the one that hired Hattie, hired her for that favor, had gotten Hattie hired for.	19:25
Karen Fields	Thus I said, anyway, these pieces were scattered through various personal context that emerged from grandma's own string of stories. It was only after a while that I saw that through them I was being given nothing less than a very different sort of map. Uh, you know, the one than the one you could get with the streets or even a model of the city. It was one that contain nauseous places and objective facts, but consciousness about places and facts.	19:51
Karen Fields	And from that consciousness, I was learning a very great deal about how the life of a community was created and sustained. How the physical markers of it were meaningful to the inhabitants, how organized life was done through organizations, through groups of people, and also through tastes and choices and judgements of individuals.	20:25
Karen Fields	Organized life appeared also in a story about the memorial to Senator John C. Calhoun, the indefatigable defender of slavery and state's rights. Gram told about how she overheard conversations how the children overheard conversations of their elders and learned, understood enough to go out and deface the statue whenever they could. Let me quote from her a bit.	20:46
Karen Fields	"We hated all the Calhouns stood for. Our White city fathers wanted to keep what he stood for alive, so they, so they named after him a street parallel to Broad, which everybody kept calling Boundary for a while.	21:18
Karen Fields	But anyway, when I was a girl, they went further. They put up a life-sized figure of John C. Calhoun preaching and stood it up in the Citadel Green where it looked at you like another person in the park. Blacks took that statue personally as you passed by. Here was Calhoun looking at, looking you in the face and telling you, nigger, you may not be a slave, but I am back, to see you stay at your place. (laughter)	21:31
Karen Fields	Well, the niggers didn't like it. Even the nigger children didn't like it. We used to carry something with us. If we knew we would pass, it would be passing that way in order to deface that statue. Scratch up the coat, break the watch chain, try to knock off the nose because he looked like he was telling you there was a place for niggers to be, and, and niggers must stay there.	21:57
Karen Fields	Children and adults beat up John C. Calhoun so badly, (laughter) that the Whites had to come back and put him up high so we couldn't get to him. (laughter), that's where he stands today on a tall pedestal. He is so far away until you can hardly tell what he looks like."	22:21
Karen Fields	Now, I was fascinated by this because I thought here as was so seldom the case, I might find corresponding testimony to these personal stories from the other side of the color line. After all, there was an objective fact to account for the tall pillar on which Calhoun stands. When I looked, however, I was no more able to find corroboration for Black people's vandalizing the statue than for other things that she had told me. However, the story opened out in the most interesting way that I wanna share with you.	22:46
Karen Fields	It turns out that in 1854, the year of Calhoun died, the Ladies Calhoun Memorial Association began planning that statute. And by 1879, they were finally able to commission a sculptor from Philadelphia to execute this bronze. And it was to stand on a granite pedestal surrounded by allegorical figures, female figures, Justice, Truth, the Constitution and History, at a cost of $40,000. But Harnish in the end built the statue with only one of those figures. And she, in such a state of disenrobement—you know, those classical statues—that some of the ladies are said to have fainted at the unveiling (laughter).	23:24
Karen Fields	When the White folks recovered themselves sufficiently for straight thinking, they also found historical fault with the way Calhoun was dressed. Harnish had put him in the sculpture, had put him in a Prince Albert coat, and that was too, that was anachronistic.	24:14
Karen Fields	Now, Black Charlestonians figured in the citywide uproar over that is decent statue, in a curious way. The public work of art began to be called in Gullah syntax "Calhoun and he wife" (laughter). A newspaper, a newspaper article says, "Because of the females figures' state of disattire, the nickname greatly distressed the ladies of Charleston and Mrs. Calhoun, who was still alive. (laughter) Besides," they went on, I was fine digging this all up in the Charleston Historical Society.	24:33
Karen Fields	"Besides," they felt the construction of the statute was poor, the pose bad and his right index finger pointed in a different direction than the others. Now, a habit peculiar to him its speeches it seems, but in this instance, "exaggerated to the point of deformity." I'm quoting from the newspaper (laughter).	25:21
Karen Fields	The various discomforts about it continued into until 1895 when the Charleston Post was able to report that "The old statue," I'm quoting, "which has so long been a thorn in the flesh of the ladies of the Calhoun Monument Association, to say nothing of the general public, will be taken down and consigned to oblivion. Massey Rind of New York won the commission to execute Mr. Calhoun number two, erected in June of 1896."	25:44
Karen Fields	By that time, grandma was 13 or so, number one, found his resting place in the Confederate home yard of the Confederate home yard. A finger, it is not said which was placed in the Charleston Museum. There is the story obtainable of the Charleston Historical Society. There is no mention of the oddly tall pillar that stands on top of the grand wide conventional pedestal with luxuriating scrolls on the corners. You know, what you'd expect to see, and it's dignified plaques of speeches on each side. No explanation is offered for the remarkable disproportion of line that the pillar creates 'cause on this thing that you expect. Then there's this long pillar that goes up in the air. Nothing I could find I'm sorry, nothing is, no explanation is offered for the disproportionate of line that the pillar creates, nor for the fact that if you wanna study Calhoun's face with your eye or with that of a camera, you are interfered with by the sun in the sky, and you're up like that. Nothing I could find notices certain Charlestonians notice of the statue beyond the raucous Negro laughter implied by the nickname "Calhoun and he wife" (laughter). They knew the other people were looking at it (laughter), they admitted in print, at least to that point.	26:18
Karen Fields	But a myriad of personal reflections somehow led to the deformation of the monument. Gram's story began with graffiti by children. Um, and I never was able to make that one connect with the one I discovered from the archives. I cannot now say when it was that I finally saw how systematic the derailment would've been if it had been possible for me to redirect what my grandmother had to say toward the large economic, legal, political and so forth, themes of the era. Despite everything, I was stuck for a long time. And the idea of comparing the situation of Black South Carolinians to White ones of watching how the laws and customs worked themselves out incident after incident. In short, I got in the race relations mode of my discipline where a conflict between the races is in the front of one's mind.	27:53
Karen Fields	It is possible to become so carried along by this notion as to lose sight of the intended and real effect of legal segregation, which is not race relations. But on the contrary, absence of relations between the races, except in certain prescribed and limited respects, it created separate community life. What I was getting from my grandmother was an intimate gaze at the separate community life that resulted. I was learning how it was structured in organizations, how it was stratified in color and class, how it was led in the absence of elected leadership, how it functioned behind the walls of segregation.	28:51
Karen Fields	I should add as well that segregation also creates a, a separate community life of White South Carolinians whose inner dynamics ought to be studied as such, but which grandma only glimpsed occasionally. For example, when she told her school trustee of inviting certain White people who live near her school on John's Island, he told her, "Hold it. Those people are crackers and they don't want you to have so much as a painted bench." Now he allowed that White men, not crackers, should be invited to the school.	29:33
Karen Fields	Grandma said knowledge of this distinction came to her like a bolt of lightning (laughter). She had previously thought that White folks were just White folks. All equal to themselves. And here she was getting a glimpse of something very complicated and also very hilarious. When she went home and told grandfather Fields, they rolled (laughter).	30:08
Karen Fields	There's a whole tale to be told about the world segregation made for White people for White South Carolinians. And if you begin to compare, say, low levels of education for White South Carolinians, also with that available to others in the country, you begin to imagine the deep meaning of what the trustee was telling my grandmother about the difference between crackers and White men. But that is another story, which I have often thought it would be very interesting for a Black southerner and oral researcher, oral history researcher to investigate.	30:29
Karen Fields	Anyway, when I began to think in terms of segregation as having above all produced separate communities, many things fell into place. And I took serious note of expressions like Gram's "people," which, which meant Black unless she signified otherwise. "Everybody in Charleston," meant Black Charleston, referred to that community.	31:03
Karen Fields	She was describing the averages you could get about inequalities of income between Black and White or the median incomes you could assign. And the statistics you could get turned into quite different things. She would tell you about what people bought or wanted to buy or wore. And comparisons were generally with others in the same community who was really a leader, came in through a council, the doings of organizations in the twenties and thirties, not in talking about, well, we don't have the vote and we don't have the this and we don't have the, that people really led and there were leaders to be identified and how they led is as important a question as what aspects of political life they were excluded from. Um, I'm going on long, so I'm going to cut out some of this. I think, where am I in times of time? Seven o'clock. Yeah. Um,	31:24
Karen Fields	Okay. There was more about the separate communities and we'll come back to this. It's important. Uh, so just presume that I said a great deal (laughter) so that I can transition to my paragraph. I have said quite a lot about the separate communities built physically and mentally during the era of segregation. And I have emphasized my belief that some ways of telling facts cause us to lose sight of this construction, but would be quite wrong to end without noticing that these separate communities neighbored one another closely and that the building of one went on in relation to the building of the other. Um, pretty much as row houses are separate and distinct and yet have walls in common and windows through which you can witness a great deal if partially and in garbled form.	32:42
Karen Fields	Gram told me a story about the first Labor day parade in Charleston.The point of which for her was one of those occasions for oneupmanship over a White opposition that are remembered with a special glee by older Black Southerners. The men of Charleston really did themselves proud that day. And I want to read the passage to you.	33:45
Karen Fields	"The most memorable thing the Black working men did in Charleston was to help put on the first labor day parade the city ever had and the last. When the city fathers announced the parade, all our craftsmen got busy making displays to represent their various trades. The bakers made big braided loaves, which they decided to carry a certain way as they marched. The tenors made 10 umbrellas that opened and closed the brick layers carried large, well polished trowels. The carpenters decorated their hammers and so forth. Then each group of men wore the uniform of their trade. The bakers were in white hats and aprons. The carpenters and blue overalls, the brick layers in white overalls. Everything was colorful. The 10 umbrellas and trowels flashed in the sun. Black men strutted that day. They loved a parade.	34:08
Karen Fields	Now, of course, they marched in back while the White working men marched in the front of the parade. Because of that, and I guess because they were segregated during the preparations too, the Whites didn't know ahead of time that the Negroes had gone all out. So first in the parade were the Whites walking no kind of way in particular and wearing nothing but ordinary street clothes.	35:05
Karen Fields	Now, here come our fathers, our brother and our husbands, who had practiced beforehand how they were going to march and had arranged to have the Jenkin Orphanage band. At a certain signal, the bakers turned the loaves, the bricklayers raised the trowels and the tenors put the umbrellas to one side, another signal, and they made a different movement back and forth around and back again, and the sun was jumping off the umbrellas and the trays whenever they moved.	35:36
Karen Fields	Well, when the Whites saw that performance, they just about fell out. The blat boom, boom, boom, boom, taaka taaka, taaka taaka, boom boom, taaka taaka, boom, taaka boom, taaka boom, taaka. And the Whites, chickitychickitychickity—no order at all, a rabble moving down the middle of the street. The Black workers showed the White workers up so badly that the White people got mad. (laughter) They stopped the Labor Day parade after that. Charleston still doesn't hold one."	36:08
Karen Fields	Now wait a minute. The story about that parade was one of those stories that I had only from remembrance, and it was in not ever nothing about the Labor Day parade. No explanation for why it isn't there. I couldn't find that. I couldn't document what Gram said about their having taken the folks by surprise. And it was sometime after World War I, maybe in the early twenties or so that this happened. The only other version I got was from my father who remembered it's telling in childhood. It was rather like the Calhoun story in that way. Uh, I just couldn't find it.	36:54
Karen Fields	And then one day I happened, and it was after all the book was done, I happened to read Porgy, the novel on which the book was based. And he has in the parade in there, that stopped me short. And I wonder if you'll agree with me that his fictional parade is interesting, if elusive testimony about what I was looking for, when I tried to find a counterpart in White sources to grandma's statement about how the White people reacted to that parade.	37:33
Karen Fields	For anybody who wants to look at Porgy, this is in part four, and I'm just going to read a little part of it, but it's about a picnic. And so it picks up elements that I've uh, told you about this ceremony around picnics and stuff.	38:15
Karen Fields	"The drowsy old city had scarcely commenced its day, went down through King Charles Creek. The procession took its way." Check this out, "Superbly unconscious of the effect that it produced, it crashed through the slow restrained rhythm of the city's life like a while barbaric court," says DuBose Hey—	38:29
Karen Fields	"All the stately mansions along the way were serverless that day. And the aristocratic matron broke the ultimate canon of the social code and peered through the front windows at the procession as it swept flamboyantly across the town."	38:51
Karen Fields	And then goes on "First came an infinitesimal Negro boy scarlet-coated and a-glitter." Goes on then to talk about the band. "Yet these improvisations returned always to the eternal boom, boom, boom of an underlying rhythm and met with others in a sudden weaving and reveling of amazing chords, the Jenkins Orphanage Band and ecstasy of wild young bodies. Beat living into the blast that shook the windows of the solid houses, broad, dusty, blue Black feet shuffled and danced on the many colored cobbles and grass between them. And then came the carriages and suddenly the narrow street hummed and bloomed like a tropic garden. Six to a carriage stacked the ladies.	39:05
Karen Fields	The effect produced by the colors was strangely like that brought in the music. Scarlet purple, orange, flamingo, emerald, wild, clashing, unbelievable chords and dischords. Yet in their steady flow before the eye possessing a strange dominant rhythm that reconciled them to each other and made them unalterably right. The senses reached blindly out for reason. There was none, got it all mixed up. They intoxicated, they maddened, and finally they passed seeming to pull every ray of color from the dun buildings, leaving the sunlight itself sane, flat, and dead.	40:00
Karen Fields	For its one brief moment out of the year, that pageant had lasted out of its feathers of civilization. This people had risen, suddenly amazingly exotic as the Congo and still able to abandon themselves utterly to the wild joy of fantastic play. They had taken the reticent old Anglo-Saxon town and stamped their mood swiftly and indelibly into its heart. Then they passed, leaving behind them a wistful envy among those who had watched them grow, those whom the ages had rendered old and wise."	40:40
Karen Fields	I imagine this raises more questions and answers none for you and more, any more than it did for me. Still. I think it's wonderfully suggestive about things have heard and have seen rightly interpreted, terribly misinterpreted through the shared walls and not completely shaded front windows of the separate yet structurally connected row houses that segregation built.	41:18
Karen Fields	In conclusion, let me say that the lesson from doing, from doing—that I came in working with my grandmother, led me away from the general facts in which history is interested only to return to them again. By taking this detour, I outgrew my initial idea that the lives individuals lived were or every could be grasped simply as addenda to large events of history, capital h there are supplements to it filling in its gaps.	41:45
Karen Fields	As I worked on the project, concrete and personal events did indeed put flesh on the abstract facts, but they did more than that. They directed me to facts just as important as the general, but far more subtle to see for what they were. And they often have the special feature that consciousness gives to life at any one time. Statistics and laws on the books can give you cross-sectional slices of reality, but cross-sectional slices have no direction. They cannot even hint at the directionality that real life has or that is provided by people's consciousness about the world in which they live a world that is real to them as they understand and deal with it in their everyday lives, if not from the stretching and stepping forth that people ordinarily do in order to achieve purposes, they set themselves in order to live ordinarily. Where would we imagine the ferment for changes coming from?	42:17
Karen Fields	If we insisted upon inferring the scope and nature and caliber of people from external facts of their existence, we would gain diminished beings and then we could imagine the impulse toward liberty as coming only from liberal outsiders, but such in fact was not the case. It was Southerners who stirred the pots and kept the mixture in motion in small ways and large. That pot was positively boiling when the issue of segregation came onto the national agenda of Americans at large.	43:16
Karen Fields	From the fact flat facts, you get a static vision. In them, people do not talk back at the system. You have no idea of what they're saying among themselves or doing or preparing to do. What aspects of their private lives can teach about the room they would eventually demand in order to live those lives.	43:46
Karen Fields	We are more accustomed to gaining this element of consciousness from literature than from the history we write and teach. We tend to think of history as having happened, not as having been done or in the phrase of my title, having been done regardless. By this route, however, we avoid calling into account what was done and therefore how it was done. And to the extent that we diminish this in our understanding of the past, we in the end diminish as well our own conception for our own time of what can be done, regardless. Thank you. (applause)	44:07
Speaker 4	We have uh, we have time for some questions and Professor Fields has granted permission to do so. I'll stand up. I (laughter) you don't understand? No. Okay. I'll leave.	44:49
Speaker 5	I have a question in reference to the color conciousness in the Black community. If I understood you said something to the effect that colors the same as—in across and within the Black community. And I'm wondering if that's a maybe a slight overstatement. I mean, for instance, the book your grandmother—I mean color is obviously important— I think each person she talked about she probably described their complexion. And I'm from South Carolina about that. You know, one South Carolina psychology had to send picture, people, dark complexion, look at differently [indistinct], all of them are Black. I'm wondering how we conceptualize that given the fact that the Black control very few meaningful resources than most people—	45:19

Karen Fields	To make the strong claim that there was a separate Jim Crow produced within the Black community. I used a metaphor to get past you know, the difficulty of talking about a very, very complex phenomenon that the segregationist order secreted color consciousness, you know, from its ordinary working like the human body secretes a digestive juice, that our, you know, digestive juices convert food into muscle. And though it can, that can be damaging to our organs too. And similarly red color consciousness digested human contact, direct perception of human beings in terms of gradations of color. Now, this was the color gradation where it didn't stand free. They were related, of course, to the larger system of assigning people to one race or the other, and to differential privileges that sort of grew onto that larger system.	0:01
Karen Fields	Uh, people who managed can work as domestics in certain houses because they look light, for example. Or people who managed to become free people of color before the end of the Civil War as a result of action by a parent, and therefore, who end up better to have different resources in their hands during the era of in Crow. They're very, very, it's a very, very complex set of issues. And I think I was, I used a metaphor to avoid a big sort of causal looking conceptualization. 'cause I don't think we've even begun to describe it enough in order to talk in a terribly general way about it.	1:18
Speaker 2	On that same point—	2:05
Karen Fields	Yes,	2:06
Speaker 2	This wasn't a phenomenon—real quick. This wasn't a phenomenon that was restricted to South Carolina.	2:07
Karen Fields	No—	2:12
Speaker 2	Right. And in fact no some of the observations that were made by uh, Marcus Garvey, when he first came here in 1916, you said he traveled throughout 38 states, and the thing that was most striking to him was the was the privilege that was accorded bright skinned, bright skinned Whites—Bright skinned Blacks.	2:12
Speaker 2	And he particularly pointed a finger at Du Bois, whom he said, when he came first came to his office struck him as a, a person who was high yellow. And who was trying to maintain privilege through the NAACP for other bright skinned Blacks. And there was nothing that he saw that made him know that this man was proud of his Blackness in his heritage.	2:34
Karen Fields	Let me tell you, by the way, an interesting character called Madison Grant. I don't know if anybody has ever seen his books, one of which is called The Passing of the Great Race, a product of the 1920s.	3:02
Karen Fields	Uh, he's not a crack pot from far far afield. That book is published by Scribners. And he graduated from Yale Law School, and he was on the board of the Museum of Natural History in New York. But one of the things he said in it is that "We"—by we, he means members of the Great Race—"have made a mistake in rewarding the mixed race Negroes." (laughter). And sort of it's implicit that, sort of attraction based on resemblance or, or privilege that or privilege based on resemblance or feeling of kinship is built into that.	3:15
Karen Fields	But he says, "If we're going to be consistent about what we were, we are doing, racists that we are—" And he said, he says to his audience, his book sold as the bestseller in, in, its in, its in the 1920s. Then "the leaders we should be talking to are the dark skinned leaders of Black people."	4:02
Karen Fields	By the way, you know, that meant down with, not only Du Bois was a mistake, but Booker T Washington was a mistake, and Frederick Douglass was a mistake, and so many others were mistake.	4:20
Karen Fields	But you know, the dynamics of that is not one side or the other. I would not get on the side of, of Marcus Garvey and say, and agree with him that the issue of that mulatto privilege was the issue. And that's the way he put it. It's very, very complex and very much situated in local conditions, which is again, why I say that. Um, you know, another reason I think that memoir is a very important source, personal recollection, detailed texture of local situations or important. Yes.	4:32
Speaker 3	Um, I wanted to ask you a little bit about how this research with your grandmother, whole focus on memory, and I, I could as, as a way to get to history, has affected your later research or even your thoughts about later research. Uh, one of the things we've dealt with a lot here is or is this not a lot, we dealt with some point with the notion quantitative versus qualitative research, and I teach literature. So many of the things we were saying about the objective and the personal and how you get at those spaces in between facts I can identify with. And I'm interested as a social sciences, how you are. How has that changed or enhanced the way you now, what kinds of things are you sure to do now that you would not have done before that time of your grandmother?	5:08
Karen Fields	Um, one thing I'm sure to do is to shoot holes in a great many questionnaires and have done that you know, what they don't know. And invite informant to say strongly agree, strongly disagree, strongly, you know in that way as uh, sort of elaborately conceived and polished tools for producing falsehood (laughter). Uh, but that's one thing that I do. Although my own research has never been of that kind. It sort of haunts me like a ghost, but I've never done it. It's sort, it claims to being true research	6:12
Speaker 3	With the memoir as, as you understand it, we, we talked a little bit about the representative nature of the memoir, and, and that it doesn't have to be representative of anyone other than that person. Yes, indeed. Given the memoir. Um, do you, how do you answer?	6:56
Karen Fields	Doesn't have to be, but it is, of course. Doesn't have to be, but it is. But it's—	7:18
Speaker 3	Yes. Yes. Um, I, I guess I'm concerned with how you arrive at that. I, I have always thought that, but I felt that maybe that was a demon I would have to face, you know, once you say, well, I'm not saying this is anyone else's story, although I'm suggesting just intuitive that it's representative. And I just wonder how you arrived at that and settled with that.	7:23
Karen Fields	Well, let me tell you, I haven't done so thoroughly, and I haven't returned to the, the scene of the crime to stay. So I haven't had to call myself to account as much as my, the otherwise the case.	7:52
Karen Fields	But I did write a paper on memory for a conference that brought together oral historians with psychologists of memory where we talk about, we talked about what the nature of memory is, what its mechanisms are in the brain so far as the psychologists are concerned, and how the big, the big issue for everybody is why, what are we going to do deal, how are we gonna deal with the fact that memory is so often distorting and distorted and selective, and it doesn't work? And there was testimony after testimony from psychologists showing that people couldn't remember a very simplified drawing of an automobile accident, you know, after a period of time.	8:06
Karen Fields	And there are all kinds of experts who go in and lock down court testimony based on memory using this experimental stuff. It's basic. And I sort of had read through some of this, and then I said, but I wrote a paper that was deliberately perverse called What One Cannot Remember Mistakenly.	9:01
Karen Fields	That is, we are always focused on what memory, how memory fails. But much of what we do makes the assumption that memory is colossally effective. Anybody who interviews anyone has to assume memory is a resource about something. And then the methodological issues become, well, how are we going to purify it and clarify it? And, and, you know, and correct for bias and all of that. But that's weird, isn't it?	9:21
Karen Fields	I argued anyway to say, well, here's a past that I don't know about I can know about by memory, but while I'm listening to this person I'm interviewing, I'm also like a cop, you know, taking notes about how am I going to corroborate independently or sitting quiet while I know the person is lying?	9:52
Karen Fields	The very possibility of that, of querying people about the past assumes what we all human beings do, assume that memory is effective. And I, in that paper, evolved for this uh, what we find out or can find out about through interviewing about social worlds that are passed, what I call unintended memory.	10:12
Karen Fields	That is it's not anymore like the experiments where the psychologist says, here are seven objects, a banana and orange and Oldsmobile this and that, and come back 20 minutes later, see whether you can give the list. And most people, of course, can't.	10:38
Karen Fields	It's a matter of though the person has tried to remember, it's a matter of what you come to know and do not consciously learn as a feature of the environment. So there's some things you cannot tell otherwise than the way the environment was. And an example of that is the sort of flagging descriptions of people by their tone of color.	10:53
Karen Fields	There's no way in the world she said, well, I'm going to particularly try to think about what my uncle looked like. You know, that just went in as what I called unintended memory. And if you listen to other people, you hear the same kind of, of description. There's some levels of what people say that they cannot remember wrong, and they cannot tell falsely because they belong so much to the environment, even though that they're there, the more you remember, the more you remember that's, yeah. Yeah. And you, and you can it's construct it like that. Yes.	11:20
Speaker 4	Can you say a word about—The question I would like to raise, like to say a word about the role of the church in terms of leadership development of the family and the role that played in the education of your family. Statistics that minister families in terms the best record educating their children. Education has always been opinion. Now the second question is the role of the prosperous in the development of the community, would you, that kind of scenario that I, I found it very interesting. Would you say a word more about that?	11:59
Karen Fields	Uh, well, it I guess what's critical is the role of mission organizations after the Civil War in the South, which were the first and boldest in constructing education for the, for the creed slaves through the churches that they helped in establishing you couldn't talk about education for Black people in the south after, certainly after, after the pressure of reconstruction was gone without talking about the Sunday schools, the church schools, and the missionary connected schools, Avery Institute in Charleston being one created by the American Missionary Association without talking about churches that had been abolitionists before the war. And then after the war became supporters of the the construction of, of African Americans I made no su study of Parsonages. Uh, as such, though, I learned a lot about how they could function from grandma talking about the uncle her uncle James middleman.	12:43
Karen Fields	And then when we went down one time to go through the house, we found old notebooks, logs from his circuit writing to various congregations in South Carolina. That revealed just amazing things about some of the maintenance of discipline, the collection of funds and sort of the life of, of those little churches that are out in the country and won't fall, won't get on anybody's map, I think, as being a place where a church existed. There'd be a lay preacher in place, and the circuit writing, you know ordained minister would get to them, you know, every so many months perhaps.	13:56
Speaker 4	But the seminary—	14:39
Karen Fields	But there's got to be told.	14:40
Speaker 4	What about the seminary? You had not shared Methodist church that. That was an urban church.	14:41
Karen Fields	Yes. Yes. Well, that was an urban church that that exists until today. And,	14:47
Speaker 4	Uh, one of the things we show that, that Blacks, I think in terms of development of seminary, church, that's very church, church. After the, all of the Blacks immediately made exodus by the White church. Yes. Because they wanted the independent organizations. Uh, that's one more question in terms of race relations. I think you said something about during the segregation of Crow South, that was very little race relations. Uh, and, and I, I was wondering about that because there were certain people that is within the White race as certain people within the Black race did occasionally have—race relations.	14:54
Speaker 4	And certain places that and when I think of that, I think of Payne College in Augusta, Georgia, Uhhuh, that was one place. Occasionally folks, certain Blacks and certain Whites would come for more.	15:42
Karen Fields	Oh, yeah. Oh, you'll find a great many places. What I was trying to say is that the system the Jim Crow established was a system not about creating relations.	15:58
Karen Fields	So we're trying to understand how it works. Um, we shouldn't go without that idea. In our mind, it was a system for creating absence of relation except in prescribed of prescribed and if we follow the logic of the law, then, and that's what all I was saying, if we follow the logic that was built into that legislation, we would not be looking at contact. We would be looking at separation.	16:10
Karen Fields	And there's lots to be found. I didn't mean to say that there's no contact. And what I wanted to do with that image of row houses is to say there was in fact a great deal of contact. It distorted, you know, like what you hear listening through people's keyhole or sea passing by in front of the window distorted and judgemental and all that. But a great deal of context. Not just direct, but also indirect. 'cause the people living there together. Yeah.	16:40
Speaker 5	I, I think the story you told about your grandmother is a, is an important story. Um, one that I don't feel has to be reconciled within any tradition of study, whether it's your tradition or mine or anyone else's. But to the extent that you try to reconcile it, I think you do it a disservice. And there's almost this sense in which you're fighting the kind of qualitative work you've done against quantitative work. And I don't think that's a real fight. , so that's, I, I basically what—	17:16
Karen Fields	I think you're right. Well, there came a time I said to you that the book kept being rejected for five years. And there was a time when I looked at my grandmother, and my grandmother looked at me, and we said, we think this is worth doing, even if nobody publishes this. And that's how we kept doing it the way you know, the way that we did. I have acquired a certain habits of mind from the training I have. And willy-nilly I end up saying, well, how does this relate to what I would be doing otherwise? I hope I haven't. Um, I didn't give into it. Um, and because in the, in the way the book itself appears as an object, I know that I felt, I mean, to the, I really meant not to.	17:57
Karen Fields	And one of the reviews the book got—I—arrogant—I had the arrogant attitude toward it. The guy really didn't get it. Let—	19:00
Karen Fields	Julius Lester said she should have put an—and she's a professor and should show, should know better. She should have put an out outline at the beginning of each chapter to know where it fit chronologically and all that, and footnotes. And I said, please (laughter).	19:09
Karen Fields	And I just put him down. I thought one time he was pretty bright, and then I said to myself, he doesn't get it. So to that extent, I think that, you know, I'm, you know, I'm reconstructing today, the sort of back and forth I went through, but my intent in the end was to let it stand as a—	19:35
Speaker 6	Could it possibly be though? Um, his not getting it was because he read his story as history and not as a story. And, and it needed documentation because of that.	19:59
Karen Fields	I don't know why I say right up there in the front, this is not history (laughter). It's memoir, it's subjective, not objective. I say all that, say all that, but yeah. Yeah.	20:10
Speaker 5	But when—You talked about it today, you, you really wanted it to be history. I mean, the examples you called—the moving back and forth—	20:23
Karen Fields	That's to say it's to say that I, this is interesting to say that I was stuck in the mode of era of Jim Crow. That's a big historical chunk, which I personally was interested in as part of my not so distant past. And that's the sort of framework I was struggling with. Even if there hadn't been this, this academic apparatus that was distorting my own apparatus of questions about how that system worked. And what it meant was distorting and in a certain way, because the academic apparatus is from out that scene as I was and going south, there's some relationships between,	20:30
Speaker 7	That's historical, whether we want it to be or not, because it is your grandmother's story during a time period during the Jim Jim Crow era. And we cannot, we cannot dismiss it. No matter how you look at it, it is history and it's history from one person experience, or in the people that evolved in that participated in that experience.	21:22
Karen Fields	Heard the mediating—	21:44
Speaker 7	—Her story.	21:45
Karen Fields	It's—	21:46
Speaker 7	Her story. (laughter) History. Herstory.	21:47
Karen Fields	Okay. What—	21:54
Speaker 3	Does, what I would just want to follow up, Mary, when you say that she did this service, what, what do you mean	21:55
Karen Fields	No to this, to the extent that she feels now that you have to defend this thing as either one thing or another. You do the work of disservice, but the work stands well on its own. And this movement back and forth between the disadvantages and the advantages of quantitative versus qualitative research is, is not your grandma's story. No. You know what I mean? No.	22:01
Speaker 3	Well, what, what work must come under that scrutiny? What do you mean? In many of our other conversations we have put work to tax because it hasn't it hasn't addressed the very issue.	22:27
Karen Fields	This is a memoir.	22:42
Speaker 3	Addressed, but I mean, still, it's a, it's, it's, it's giving us some part of history. And, and I think what we, what we were trying to do here was to, which, which I really appreciated was be self conscious about what we were doing, what we were not doing as it relates to our job, largely as cultural historians. I think that's also what we're after. And I guess I just wanted you to talk. I see now what you mean, that she didn't, she was begging question. She didn't really have to talk about these issues, but it seems to me that, that that didn't diminish it in any way to me anyway. Course.	22:43
Karen Fields	No, I think she's saying that the story stands on its own. I just don't have to give her the name other than the name say that about	23:22
Speaker 3	Any research that it stands on its own that, that you don't,	23:28
Speaker 5	She's not pretentious about what she tries to do in terms of the canon of anything	23:32
Speaker 3	One person.	23:38
Speaker 5	Why even deal?	23:39
Karen Fields	Well, people absorb it as history, regardless. Know, it sits into goes into classes of southern history. It gets to represent Black women in forces.One of the most well, I said that we were rejected for five years by publishers, but we were accepted once in a way that we got offered and we had to refuse, (laughs) which was to be part of an anthology of women's stories. We were going to be the Black women, you know, (laughter).	23:42
Karen Fields	And there were going to be seven or eight chapters, and then there was going to be a Jim Crow chapter. We said, no thank you. You know, this is about an individual person. It's just not going to go under an agenda. Like that was for FIT press too. And we said, no thanks. We'll do it our way. And at the end, if it's only our family who reads it, that's up to us. Yeah. (laughter).	24:12
Karen Fields	But I'm interested in you know, very much that you all are thinking about what history is and isn't. And those are, you know, irritants as one tries to do curricula and tries to do teaching of people,	24:38
Speaker 7	And also this issue of color. Um, I think it's an important part of the African American experience. It evolved from the legacy of slavery and segregation. It is an issue in the 90 in terms of the case in Florida. Also, the NAACP here in North Carolina felt that it was a great issue in that they discussed it in the state convention. And, and also it has gone in, in terms of a cycle from privilege to being ostracized back to privilege.	24:56
Speaker 7	You can see with [indistinct] in the Cosby Show supposedly was created because those who were of a lighter hue were being excluded. But that show was supposed to provide employment for those who did not. Uh, yeah.	25:27
Karen Fields	That's hilarious.	25:44
Speaker 7	Yes. He said this, said this in a speech	25:45
Karen Fields	He did?	25:47
Speaker 7	Yes, he did.	25:49
Karen Fields	Good God Almighty.	25:50
Speaker 7	That one of the reasons that show the, the people that they have on that show find employment for those who were of lighter few because they were being excluded because everybody wanted those who were possibly Black. Is	25:52
Karen Fields	That, that's just incredible. Well, incredible. Yeah.	26:05
Speaker 8	That, that's a myth around that. You know, the old I went to school known as this university, everybody's had it existed for light-skinned people. And you look at me and see that's not necessarily true, frankly, he's about the same complexion.	26:11
Speaker 8	Uh, look at the original Jubilee Singers. They are pure Blacks and they are mixed people. And the number was true that they had to be likely to go to fifth. Just so happened that the lighter people had more money, and this was very expensive. Now I realize these schools were created in the south public incorporation with the local people who owned slaves. And frequently these were their kids. So some of these White slave owners did give money to these kids to go to school. I take an example, Avery Institute. Every day, these missionary teachers had to fill out a report, and that report is official document.	26:26
Speaker 8	And it said, very clear, did the pure Blacks perform as equally as the Mulattoes? And these are missionaries. They was trying to gain souls and gain students. And every instance I checked on, they said they did just as well or better. But missionaries are also biased and they're also White. So this is a very broad thing, and I think it's part of the myth that we created that White is right. You know, and brown stick around and Black get back. I can't document that. And I've been involved with this in a very, very long time now, about your parade. That parade was right. If you look at the September the 21st, 1922, front cover of Saturday evening, the Post, you can see an example of that. Oh, right. September the 21st, 1922, Saturday evening, the post, you'll see this man leading this man that is a Black man and ated and what it might not be the very same but rate, it's a symbol of, of what you would do when it's time to show off. We could really show up. And that goes way back.	27:01
Speaker 8	September the 21st, 1922 addition of sad, sad evils quote. Okay.	28:06
Speaker 9	Along that same line of color, that was a Black leader in the 1880s and nineties by the name of Joseph Charles Price, who was after the second known or best known Black leader in America after Frederick Douglass. He was founder of Livingstone College, president of African-American League, great orator, and so on.	28:13
Speaker 9	It's interesting that all the newspapers described him as coal Black. Especially the White newspaper. But the Black newspaper obviously never mentioned a name. I think the point here, and what he tried to say is, and he made a point of it that this stereotype about pure Blacks or coal Blacks not being intelligent, that he distorted that all together. And of course, I guess the Whites would always say, if they always have said, well, he is exception, you know, you always got exceptions.	28:30
Speaker 9	But the point is that in the newspaper, even the he was, he was born 1854 and died 1892 in the 1890s. And 1880s, 1890s, always described him as that coal Black leader. He was the best, the second best known Black leader in America after Frederick Douglass because he was president of the African-American League. He was president of the National Protective Association. He was called one of the 10 greatest Negroes who ever lived by the Indianapolis Freeman Newspaper. But they always, White newspapers always described him as coal Black.	29:02
Karen Fields	Well, that's, that's funny. There's a whole study to be made also of the race theories that, that were implicit in the popular conceptions of race and race mixture. There's a whole study to be made of those as they were taught for university podiums, places like University of Pennsylvania, where a man named Brenton would hold forth on anthropology at a time when WEB Du Bois was doing his classic study anti-racist study of Philadelphia.	29:46
Karen Fields	But there's a whole theory to be said about the scientific and quasi scientific theories about race and race mixing side by side with the popular theories of race and race, mixing how they were related to one another, and how they expressed in the ways the White media talk about Black people, but also in the ways that White, that Black people talk about their own group.	30:24
Karen Fields	It's a very, it hasn't been touched that much. 'cause it's a, it's a dreadful subject in many respects. It's still a rude subject. Spike Lee got in the neck for making School Daze, talking about how it's still a dreadful subject, you know, at the time when somebody who's 30 remembers it from college.	30:48
Karen Fields	So there's lots of the one, right. But then, so there's lots to do. And I do think that it's from this very, the only way to get to it here, talking about methodological issues and what will give you representative findings and not there is, I think there is no way to bypass qualitative research, very careful and sensitive qualitative research in getting at what the truth was or the truths were about the color system in the United States. Okay.	31:07
Speaker 10	Some of these questions, I'm sure you will pursue if Professor Fields consents to, to visit some of the small group discussions, which we will start at 1110. There's one announcement. The brown bag will be held in the Mary Lou Williams Center at 1215 Florence Borders will be presenting a video. Uh, it will be set up there so you can bring your lunches downstairs to the Mary Lou Williams Center and on behalf the Institute Round one. We'll see you again this afternoon. We thank you.	31:47

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Karen Fields Presentation: Things Done Regardless, and Practicum: Oral History Methodology, both at JCP Summer Institute, 1991 July 22

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July 22, 1991

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Behind the Veil

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Behind the Veil: Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow South interviews, photographs, and project records, circa 1864-2011, bulk 1990-2004

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The David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library acquired the Records of the Behind the Veil Oral History Project from the Duke University Center for Documentary Studies in 1997, 1998, 2000, and 2002.

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Karen Fields Presentation: Things Done Regardless, and Practicum: Oral History Methodology, both at JCP Summer Institute, 1991 July 22

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