Keywords: civil rights era, community partnerships, digital age, ethics, informed consent and access, legal ownership

History runs deep in the small, storied town of Yellow Springs, Ohio. Arguably a champion of early racial and cultural diversity since its establishment, the village was a cultural nook in the conservative Ohio valley in post–World War II times. High-ranking blacks stationed at nearby Wright Patterson Air Force Base joined the community, many purchasing property during a time when access to home loans was very difficult. Blacks were leaders of the police force, the village council, and the public schools, prior to the social activism that marked the late 1960s. But Yellow Springs’ racial diversity did not excuse the community from a rough-and-tumble time during the nationwide struggle for civil rights. The village witnessed its own downtown riot due to the continued refusal of a local barber to cut black hair. During the riot, an attending black police chief, county forces, and eager college youth amplified and added complexity to the already intense times. While still considered a haven of diversity by many, the village has become statistically whiter and more affluent over time, and its excellent public schools consistently and persistently bring about less excellent results for youth of color.
Under these circumstances, it came as no surprise that multiple community organizations were planning to interview community members about historical and contemporary diversity in Yellow Springs. One, the James A. McKee Group, founded by the village’s first black police chief, was seeking to return to its roots. The products of an earlier series of interviews with community elders from the 1980s were thought to exist in a previous member’s home, but the boxes of cassette tapes could not be located. Inspired by the ease of recording and sharing interviews with contemporary technology, the group’s members sought to collect a contemporary series of interviews, recorded by volunteers at the local public access channel and broadcast as a series on television and online. The Yellow Springs Historical Society would help, and the Greene County African American Genealogy Study Group brought a connection to the county library system that could prove important as the project unfolded.
Meanwhile, WYSO Public Radio, whose roots and studios are in Yellow Springs, had just completed the work of an American Archive Pilot Project Grant from the Corporation of Public Broadcasting. WYSO was one of a few radio stations nationwide to receive funding based on its impressive civil rights–era holdings. These holdings included raw recordings of the riot in downtown Yellow Springs, Black Panther meetings held in Antioch College student spaces, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech on the mound at commencement in 1965. The pilot project allowed the station to hire an archivist, organize its collections, and build the foundations of a digital repository using the streamlined PB Core standards. WYSO designed a further partnership with the Greene County Public Library to bring some two hundred hours of newly digitized recordings into MARC records, making the audio accessible worldwide through a simple library search.
When the two groups learned of each other, WYSO was in the midst of an application to the local community foundation for a small grant to fund the purchase of six field recording kits, with plans to train a core of volunteers who would interview community elders. These first-person narratives would supplement the historical recordings now digitized in the WYSO Audio Archive. The first meeting between the various organizations that made up these two efforts brought a clear consensus: the groups would form a consortium and do this work together.

First Steps

Members representing each organization met together as a planning committee, and a WYSO graduate assistant (myself) was appointed to function as the project coordinator. The first question to arise was fairly straightforward: what was the goal of our interview project? The interests of those on the committee ranged from purely historical questions about what had happened in the community at a certain time to very contemporary questions about racial parity and how those of color experience living in the village now. The historically strong role of African American leaders in the community was a common thread through everything the committee discussed, and there was certainty that the initiative should not focus on the African American perspective so exclusively that the role of white citizen activists during the Civil Rights Movement would be excluded.
These questions remained on the table for many months, only to be reexamined each time the committee met. As we dug deeper into how the interviews would be conducted, under what guidelines and standards, and within what timeline, a few things became apparent. We decided it would be wise to allow ourselves to consider the project in phases. This freed us up to make decisions about how to conduct the first phase of interviewing, without having to close ourselves off from possibility, growth, and new ideas.
The audio from key moments in Yellow Springs’ history provided a taproot for the project’s first phase focus and gave us cause to focus intensely on the village’s civil rights milestones. As a result, the first phase interviewees revealed themselves: the many community members with direct experience of the struggle for civil rights who were now in their eighties. Each member of the planning committee nominated individuals they thought might have a perspective to share. These names were entered into a spreadsheet. We tracked which planning committee members nominated which community members in one column of our spreadsheet, and then we flagged those who were estimated to be 80 years of age or older. This first stage process found us with the names of 108 individuals, of which 20 to 40 were considered a priority for interviews because of their advanced age and multiple nominations.

Interview Methodology

We introduced the Principles and Best Practices document of the Oral History Association early in our process as the guiding standard for interview methodology in a community interview project. As most members were unfamiliar with the document, in some ways it led to more questions than it answered: Was there a right way and a wrong way to have conversations within our community?
Would our interviews be conducted by historically well-versed volunteers in a structured attempt to glean historical information? We felt that we did want to better understand the village’s history through these interviews—the archived historical audio would benefit from our effort. But what the group really wanted was to catch the character of the time. We came to the understanding that we wanted stories: memories of people and places that could no longer be experienced and a more nuanced understanding of a particular moment recorded a long time ago. In this way, we knew we were conducting a historically focused project.
On the other hand, we recognized that how things are in the present would soon be history. That is, if our narrators talked about contemporary issues surrounding diversity and race relations in Yellow Springs, we would welcome those conversations. Contemporary times always color our view of the past, and we felt our collection of interviews would be stronger (with more context and nuance for future researchers) if we allowed for and encouraged conversation on the present state of life in Yellow Springs.
In the end, we decided to adopt a life story interview approach. Through the pre-interview consultation, our narrators would come to understand that they were participating in a project driven by an interest in the community’s civil rights history. But the interviews would begin with reflection on each interviewee’s origins and how they came to find themselves in Yellow Springs. Next, a focused set of questions developed by the planning committee would gird the center of each interview in an attempt to ensure depth and some consistency of topics across the interviews. Then the interviews would be allowed to float toward contemporary times and take a reflective turn. Toward the end, interviewers would ask questions about the implications of events or trends and create an opportunity for each interviewee to pause on any topic that seemed rich. In the digital age, interview length is only restricted by the size of a memory card; thus, we felt we could allow the breadth of each interview to unfold in an organic fashion, as long as we sought the depth we desired with focused questions that highlighted the historical timeline we sought to explore.

Brooke Bryan

To be continued…

Source:
The Oral History Review 2013, Vol. 40, No. 1, pp. 75–82



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