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Civil Rights Oral History Project

The Civil Rights Oral History Project, created and collected by UNCG Department of History professor William A. Link includes 71 interviews with 66 people, conducted between December 1986 and June 1990. Link personally conducted 40 of the interviews, while Kathy Hoke participated in 14. Other interviewers for the project were Kathy Carter, Kevin Costello, Wayne Jordan, and Mark Dawson. Five additional interviews are considered part of UNCG’s collection. Four were donated to the project by Greensboro News and Record reporter Jim Schlosser, who conducted them with Ima Edwards, Jack Moebes, Jo Spivey, and Geneva Tisdale between 1997 and 2001. The collection was digitized and placed online as part of a collaborative project undertaken in 2005-2007 to provide online access to civil rights oral histories at UNC Greensboro and Greensboro Public Library. Digitization was funded through a grant from the Community Foundation of Greater Greensboro.

Oral history interview with Jo Spivey by Kathleen Hoke
In this transcript of an oral history interview conducted circa June, 1990, by Kathleen Hoke with Jo Spivey, Spivey primarily discusses race relations in Greensboro throughout the 1950s and 1960s, especially as they related to her career at the Greensboro News and Record. She describes her personal relationships with black people, school desegregation, and the impact of the Brown decision, the February 1, 1960, sit-in at Woolworth's and how she came to be there, the 1969 riot at NC A&T, threats she received, and her impressions of the Black Panthers and the Ku Klux Klan. Spivey also discusses other colleagues at the Record and policies of the newspaper.

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