Partners

The University of North Carolina Press

The first university press in the South and one of the first in the nation, UNC Press has consistently earned widespread recognition for the quality of its books, which have received numerous prestigious awards from the leading scholarly organizations and societies. Among these are the Pulitzer Prize in history, the National Book Award, the Bancroft Prize (8), and the Parkman Prize (3).

With a strong record of publishing books about the South that dates back to its founding in 1922, UNC Press was one of the first to publish books in a variety of fields by and about African Americans, including the work of such distinguished scholars as John Hope Franklin. The Press continues to publish many award-winning books each year, with civil rights and social justice, broadly defined, remaining an cornerstone of its list. By helping to extend the definition of civil rights chronologically, geographically, demographically, and thematically, as well as by drawing on its carefully cultivated, national network of authors, advisers, and scholarly peer reviewers, UNC Press will play an important role both in the development and refinement of an emerging body of scholarship on the long civil rights movement and in exploring the changing landscape of scholarly communication and publication.

UNC-Chapel Hill University Library

The University Library at UNC-Chapel Hill supports inquiry and learning at the university and for the people of North Carolina. Library collections, services, staff, and facilities further the university’s mission. The library provides leadership in the development of scholarly communication systems and in the application of information technology to teaching, research and learning.

In January 2008, the University Library formally launched its new Carolina Digital Library and Archives, a program that includes technical, production, project management, and publishing activities to manage, preserve, and provide access to a wide range of the campus’s digital assets. The Carolina Digital Library and Archive will provide an ongoing institutional platform from which to experiment with technical approaches to the project’s goals.

The University Library’s longstanding commitment to innovation in digital publishing is represented by the success of “Documenting the American South,” the award-winning, open-access, digital library program. In recognition of that commitment to innovation, the Mellon Foundation recently awarded the University Library a significant planning grant to work with scholars and technologists to set priorities for the digitization of its premier special collection, the Southern Historical Collection. This will set the stage for an ongoing digitization program that will provide scholars and others with instant and global access to the largest assemblage of material about the American South anywhere in the world.

UNC-Chapel Hill Center for Civil Rights

Six years ago, with substantial support from the Ford Foundation, Knight Foundation, and Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, UNC-Chapel Hill established the Center for Civil Rights at its Law School. In the short time since its founding, the Center for Civil Rights has become the preeminent source of information on civil rights in the southeast. The Center is directed by Julius L. Chambers, cofounder of the nation’s most successful civil rights law firm and former director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.

The Center for Civil Rights engages in a variety of academic, research, and litigation activities to confront the legal, economic, political, and social issues of greatest concern to racial and ethnic minorities, to the poor, and to other potential beneficiaries of civil rights activities. The Center organizes annual themed conferences; conducts empirical and analytical research; produces policy papers, reports, and working papers; sponsors student research activities; trains post-J.D. and summer fellows; and regularly convenes smaller working groups of faculty, visiting scholars, policy advocates, and practicing attorneys.

Southern Oral History Program (SOHP)

Directed by Jacquelyn Dowd Hall since its inception in 1973, the Southern Oral History Program at UNC-Chapel Hill is among the nation’s leading oral history programs. The SOHP has created over 4000 first-person primary sources, which are among the University Library’s most heavily used archival materials; nearly a quarter of these interviews relate to civil rights and the struggles for social justice. The SOHP has also produced path-breaking scholarship in its own right. Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World, coauthored by Hall and a team of SOHP scholars, grew out of one of the program’s first major research initiatives. Published in 1987 by UNC Press, the book won an array of scholarly awards and wide recognition as a classic work of southern and working-class history. In addition, numerous dissertations and monographs, as well as films, plays, Web-based curriculum materials, state history textbooks, and collaborative local history projects have been generated by SOHP projects.

The SOHP is now well into its most ambitious initiative to date, “The Long Civil Rights Movement: The South since the 1960s.” This oral history-based research project focuses on the social justice struggles that emerged in the South after the 1960s, stressing three themes: race and the public schools, economic justice, and the women’s and gay rights movements. SOHP scholars have completed the fieldwork on the first of these themes and created a searchable database of interviews on race and the public schools. They have also completed the research and conducted preliminary interviews on economic justice issues in five southern locales and have laid the groundwork for interviews on the women’s and gay rights movements. Throughout the course of this collaborative project, the SOHP will significantly accelerate fieldwork on and analysis of issues of economic justice. This research, along with similar work under way at the Center for Civil Rights, will provide a test bed for stimulating new models of scholarly communication, production, and dissemination in collaboration with UNC Press and the University Library.

The Center for the Study of the American South (CSAS), administrative home of the SOHP, was created in 1992 to enhance the historic linkage between UNC-Chapel Hill and scholarship on the American South. Since its founding, CSAS has embraced a wide variety of interdisciplinary efforts that have civil rights as a central concern. These include summer grants to support research and the creation of new courses by faculty and graduate students; a post-doctoral fellowship program (in collaboration with UNC Press); a peer-reviewed quarterly journal, Southern Cultures (published by UNC Press); and a regular program of conferences, workshops, and invited speakers. These scholarly and public activities have made CSAS a crucial source of support for civil rights scholarship. In addition, CSAS has recently collaborated with the University Library in creating a Web-based project entitled “The Carolina Story: A Virtual Museum of University History,” which explores the University’s extensive connections, both positive and negative, to social justice movements during its 200-year history.