These stories are brought to light in "Behind the Veil: Documenting African American Life 

 in the Jim Crow South," an exciting and revealing oral history project undertaken by the Center 

 for Documentary Studies, based at Duke University. Over the last five years, graduate students from Duke, 

 the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina Central University and other Southern 

 universities have interviewed an astonishing 1,200 African- Americans from Virginia to Mississippi. 

 Among them were more than 70 elderly men and women along the North Carolina coast. 



Recently I had the opportunity to 

 review the "Behind the Veil" interviews 

 for New Bern and Craven County. The 

 oral history collection isn't open to the 

 general public yet. Much of it still has to 

 be cataloged, indexed and transcribed. 

 But I introduced the project's directors — 

 Raymond Gavins, Bill Chafe and Bob 

 Korstad — to many of the interviewees in 

 Craven County, and they showed their 

 gratitude by opening the collection on a 

 limited basis for my historical research. 



I want to give Coastwatch's readers 

 a preview of what "Behind the Veil" 

 tapes will tell us about our history. The 

 interviews focus on the period of 

 Southern history called the Jim Crow era. 

 Named for an antebellum minstrel act 

 that amounted to a racist parody of 

 African-Americans, Jim Crow was the 

 system of American apartheid that 

 prevailed from the 1 890s until the civil 

 rights movement of the 1 960s. 



The forced separation of black and 

 white people was the cornerstone of Jim 

 Crow. "I went to a black church, I had 

 black friends, I lived in a black neighbor- 

 hood," Ronald White of New Bern tells a 

 Duke interviewer. "The only time I had 

 contact with white people was when I 

 went downtown with my father." New 

 Bern segregated by race its schools, 

 hospitals, graveyards, theaters, restau- 

 rants, trolleys and buses, even its water 

 fountains and swimming beaches. 



"And you were not even allowed in a 

 restroom in the bus station," recalls 

 Dorcas E. Carter, a retired teacher born in 

 New Bern in 1913. "That got to be 

 devastating." 



A black man who defied Jim Crow 

 risked his family's livelihood and put his 



life in jeopardy. If he insisted on sitting 

 near the front of a bus or tried to order a 

 drink at a soda fountain, he was bound at 

 least for the "Black Maria," the police 

 paddy wagon. He might well lose his job, 

 have his credit revoked or face a visit 

 from the Ku Klux Klan. 



But the "Behind the Veil" inter- 

 views reveal that Jim Crow demanded 

 more than racial segregation. It also 

 demanded an outward show of total 

 deference. The Ku Klux Klan — "the 

 businessmen from downtown," a New 

 Bern woman's father explained — 

 terrorized blacks for the simplest things: 

 coming to the front door of a white 

 family's house instead of the back or not 

 yielding to a white person on a sidewalk. 



A black man could not even look a 

 white man in the eye. "They would put a 

 black man in jail for direct eyeballing," 

 remembers the Rev. William Hickman, 

 who was born and raised at Hickman 

 Hill, a small community off U.S. 70 

 between New Bern and Havelock. 



African-Americans also faced risks 

 if they showed their intelligence in a way 

 that upstaged a white man. Several 

 interviewees remember a black physician 

 who was driven from New Bern after he 

 healed a white man. Black doctors 

 usually were not allowed to examine 

 whites, but this man's wife insisted that 

 the black physician, a recent graduate 

 of a prestigious medical school, see 

 her husband after the town's white 

 doctors could not heal him. The black 

 physician's medical skill meant his exile. 



Many interviews describe farm life 

 under Jim Crow. Sharecropping, the lot 

 of most black farmers, often seemed like 

 slavery. Bessie Spicer, an 80-year-old 



New Bern resident, recalls how her 

 family sharecropped at Wyse Fork near 

 Kinston. After her stepfather died, she ran 

 the farm with her mother and sisters. No 

 matter how many "sunups to sundowns" 

 they sweated in the fields, they always 

 owed "the man" at the year's end. 



Debt peonage was a way of life. 

 "What the boss man said, went," Spicer 

 states matter-of-factly. Her family had to 

 buy food at a commissary owned by the 

 landlord, and he insisted that children 

 work as a requirement for living in his 

 tenant houses. Spicer' s own schooling 

 stopped at the fourth grade. And when 

 they settled with the landlord after the 

 tobacco harvest, Jim Crow decreed that 

 they dare not question his accounting. 



Poverty was a fact of life. To go to 

 church, Spicer recalls, they borrowed 

 clothes "from the boss lady" and returned 

 them before dinner. 



These oral histories portray much 

 more than Jim Crow's hardships and 

 perils. They also describe quiet struggles 

 for dignity and equality, of perseverance 

 and faith, and of triumph. Most of the 

 elderly black men and women inter- 

 viewed by the students remember tight- 

 knit families, caring neighborhoods and 

 strong churches that helped them survive. 



"We had a lot of love," explains 

 Clarita Wordlaw, later a leader of New 

 Bern's civil rights movement. Many also 

 recall with great pride the African- 

 American schools, especially the West 

 Street School in New Bern. 



Several things surprised me in the 

 "Behind the Veil" interviews. One was 

 how often rural black and white people 

 defied Jim Crow by having friendships 

 that crossed racial lines. Janie Williams, a 



22 JULY/AUGUST 1997 



