Oral History Interviews: African Americans and the University of Delaware
Posted on September 2, 2022 at: 10:59 am
In the Fall 2021 semester, history professor Roger Horowitz lead a class of 14 students to create an oral history project on African Americans and the University of Delaware. With essential support from Denise Hayman and her sisters in the Mu Pi chapter of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority, the class conducted 27 hours of interviews with 26 people, 9 men and 16 women. They include alumni of the university and longtime residents of Newark’s African American community known as New London Road.
The recorded memories of the interviewees convey a mixed message about their experiences at the university and in Newark. Interviewees shared many stories of personal experiences with racism and discrimination, as well as narratives of power and achievement in the community and at the university. The audio recordings are accompanied by a detailed summary indexed by time code, allowing a quick review of an interview’s contents and easy access to actual conversation.
The full set of interviews are available via a collection finding aid hosted by Special Collections at Morris Library: https://library.udel.edu/static/purl.php?mss0989. For a survey of selected topics included in the collection, including audio clips and transcripts, see the project’s digital exhibit: https://exhibitions.lib.udel.edu/oral-histories-african-americans-and-ud/.