Civil Rights in Black and Brown

Civil Rights in Black and Brown: Oral Histories of the Multiracial Freedom Struggles in Texas

Lead investigators: Max Krochmal, W. Marvin Dulaney (UTA), Jose Angel Gutierrez (UTA), and Todd Moye (UNT)

Not one but two civil rights movements flourished in mid-twentieth century Texas, and they did so in intimate conversation with one another.  While most research on American race relations has utilized a binary analytical lens—examining either “black” vs. “white” or “Anglo” vs. “Mexican”—Civil Rights in Black and Brown brings together faculty and staff at three area universities to collect, interpret, and disseminate in digital form hundreds of new interviews with members of all three groups.  Led by TCU’s Max Krochmal, project staff spent the summer of 2015 interviewing movement participants in East Texas, the Rio Grande Valley, and El Paso.

In addition to serving as the basis for a multi-authored scholarly book, the project has already developed a publicly accessible, free, user-friendly multimedia website that provides access to video clips from the interviews to researchers as well as teachers, journalists, and the general public. Rather than simply streaming full interviews or displaying transcripts, the site indexes short clips of the videos and embeds them with thematic metadata codes and tags. End users are able to easily search for detailed subject information across the entire interview collection and add their own tags to help future users.  The project is supported by the Brown Foundation, the Summerlee Foundation, TCU, and other sources.  Visit it at crbb.tcu.edu/.