Interviews of the Black Women Oral History Project, 1976-1981

The Black Women Oral History Project collection consists of audiotapes and transcripts of the oral histories of 72 African-American women from across the United States. The interviews discuss family background, marriages, childhood, education and training, significant influences affecting their choice of primary career or activity, professional and voluntary accomplishments, union activities, the ways in which being black and a woman had affected their options and the choices made. For each oral history, the interviewer cooperated with the memoirist to record as full an account of her life as possible. The project's procedure was that after the tapes were transcribed, each memoirist was given an opportunity to edit and correct her oral history before the final copy was prepared. Due to the editing process afforded the memoirists, there are occasions when the transcripts do not precisely follow the audio recordings. All of transcripts are open for research with the exception of Merze Tate, which is not yet complete. All of the tapes are preserved at the Schlesinger Library, but the following five interviews are closed until 2027: Kathleen Adams, Margaret Walker Alexander, Lucy Mitchell, Ruth Temple, and Era Bell Thompson. In 1991, the Schlesinger Library in cooperation with Meckler Corporation, published a 10 volume set of many of the transcripts. For additional information on the project, see The Black Women Oral History Project: A Guide to the Transcripts (HOLLIS record), edited by Ruth Edmonds Hill and Patricia Miller King. Further information can be found in the Records of the Black Women Oral History Project. In 1981, photographer Judith Sedwick offered to photograph many of the participants, this project resulted in the exhibit Women of Courage (HOLLIS record) and the corresponding publication. All of these photographs are cataloged in HOLLIS Images, Harvard University's Visual Information Access database.