Durham's Civil Rights Heritage Remembered

There is a long tradition of civil rights activism in Durham, and it is the intention of the Durham Civil Rights Heritage Project, a four-year effort involving community members and faculty and staff from Duke, to ensure that this tradition is not lost or forgotten.

Since the project's inception in 2002, group members have collected more than 100 photographs and recorded more than a dozen oral histories of civil rights activists. Some of the photos are now on display at the American Tobacco Campus through Feb. 28.

Karen Glynn, visual materials archivist at the Rare Book, Manuscript and Special Collections Library at Perkins Library, is one of the Duke employees involved in the project. She said the idea for "Photo Day" came out of a 2002 meeting led by Duke faculty member Charles Payne.

"I suggested that we identify and copy photographs of Durham Civil Rights actions in the hands of Durham residents, with the goal of preserving and making these important local records accessible to the wider community," Glynn said.

"The work to uncover and identify the grass-roots efforts of local Civil Rights activists was driven by their age and a belief that their documents and stories of that tumultuous period belong in the public record," she said. "If we don't seek out and collect this information, it will be lost to history."

The photographs show major civil rights events, such as the 1960 visit of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the AllenBuilding takeover at Duke. But it also focuses on individual stories and events that are less well known, from efforts to integrate the Carolina Theatre to community activists such as Howard Fuller, who organized black political participation.

One panel depicts the events of June 1957, when six young African Americans sought table

Royal Ice Cream strikers pray before going to court.

service at the segregated Royal Ice Cream Bar on Roxboro Street. Interviewed in 2003, protester Virginia Williams recalled, "It was exciting, because we went where we dared not to go. I wasn't frightened or anything of that sort because either way we could have made history. If he had served us ice cream, he would have made history. But, by refusing to, I guess we made history!"

After the exhibit at American Tobacco, the photos will be on display at Northgate Mall from March 6 to April 3.

Friends of the Durham County Library provided funds for the exhibit and The Durham County Library is hosting the project's website, which includes images from the Royal Ice Cream protest, the takeover of Allen Building, the turmoil in the aftermath of Dr. King's assassination, sympathy protests following the shooting of African-American students at South Carolina State College, and many other events.

Virginia Williams travels to an organizing conference.

Glynn said an archive of the photo negatives and of the oral histories recorded for the project will remain with Duke's Rare Book, Manuscript and Special Collections Library. She added that project organizers are still looking for more civil rights materials for the archive and for new venues for the traveling art exhibit.

"It's important to make copies of this material that has been in private hands and put them into the public sphere where everyone has access to it," Glynn said. "This is rich material that tells a valuable story about Durham and its people."