The University of Virginia has introduced a new online archive containing oral histories of the civil rights movement. The William Elwood Civil Rights Lawyers Project includes firsthand accounts given by scores of attorneys and scholars who were active in the civil rights movement. Among those interviewed were Julius L. Chambers, Robert L. Carter, William T. Coleman, A. Leon Higginbotham, and John Hope Franklin.
The interviews were conducted in the 1980s by students who worked with William Ellwood, an administrator at the University of Virginia’s College of Arts and Sciences. Elwood died in 2002. The tapes were donated to the university’s special collections library. Later, the interviews, on 273 tapes, were restored and digitized.
The archive can be accessed here.
