The voices of the civil rights movement swelled into a wave of protest that profoundly changed America. This collection of interviews seeks to make this massive movement local and understandable by reducing it into its smallest parts--the people that participated, in small and large ways. These people were former slaves who taught their children the value of education, or high school principals who insisted on punctuality. Drawing together interviews from a variety of Southern Oral History Program collections, this cluster includes interviews with students and teachers at West Charlotte High School in Charlotte, North Carolina, where the successes of integration are encountering the realities of a segregated past; the difficult transition to integrated schooling for students at the all-black Lincoln High School in Chapel Hill, North Carolina; and the roles of black workers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This collection gives voice to the voices, loud and soft, of the movement to desegregate public life in the South.

The Civil Rights Digital Library received support from a National Leadership Grant for Libraries awarded to the University of Georgia by the Institute of Museum and Library Services for the aggregation and enhancement of partner metadata.

Southern Oral History Program Collection, Manuscripts Department, Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Forms part of Oral histories of the American South collection.