Jim Crow Era A Forgotten Period Of American History, Duke Professor Says
The four-part PBS series "Rise and Fall of Jim Crow" focuses on a period of American history that people tend to overlook, says Duke history professor Raymond Gavins, who was a consultant on the series.
The victories of the Civil Rights era should not prompt Americans to forget the long period of racial segregation that preceded it, says a Duke University history professor who co-edited an award-winning book on the Jim Crow era.
That's why a series such as "The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow," a four-part documentary that begins tonight (Oct. 1) on PBS, is important to help Americans understand this period, said Professor Raymond Gavins, who was a consultant on the series.
"It's a reminder of a period that we have tended to forget about," said Gavins. "The overriding value of the series is to remind us of that long journey with an emphasis not just on white oppressors, but also on the African-American communities and how they struggled to build a life for themselves of meaning, purpose and citizenship."
He said it's important for all Americans to understand the Jim Crow era, when laws and practices segregated public space. "This is American history. Focused on the South, that's for sure. But it certainly had its counterparts of support and sanction elsewhere in the nation," he said.
Gavins, with fellow Duke professors William H. Chafe and Robert Korstad and the staff of the "Behind the Veil" project at the Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) at Duke, are editors of "Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South. Remembering Jim Crow," published by The New Press in association with CDS's Lyndhurst Books, collects the voices of the men and women who were firsthand witnesses to the oppression of the segregated South.
Inspired by W.E.B. DuBois's revelation in his 1903 classic, "The Souls of Black Folk," of the moment when a "veil descended" between himself as a black child and his white schoolmates, the "Behind the Veil" project set out to uncover the history of everyday life in the segregated South. Because of the advancing age of those black Southerners who experienced the Jim Crow laws firsthand, the project saw an opportunity to understand and document history that would otherwise slip away. More than 1,200 interviews were conducted over three years in the mid-1990s. "Remembering Jim Crow" has won the 2002 Lillian Smith Book Award and the Carey McWilliams Award.
Gavins can be reached for additional comment at (919) 684-2508 or at rgavins@duke.edu. Chafe can be reached after Wednesday at (919) 684-4510 or chafe@asdean.eduke.edu.