From Anecdote to Analysis:
Oral Interviews and New
Scholarship in Educational History

Jack Dougherty

Nearly thirty years ago, when oral history was still young, William Cutler III sketched out its role in the rising field of the history of American education. Dozens of scholars had begun to experiment with how tape-recorded interviewing might change the nature of their work, yet by today's standards, its potential contributions were still quite modest. Cutler believed that oral history could help to "fill information gaps in the written record" or "help the historian to understand the atmosphere or milieu" of the times. On occasion, an interview might "corroborate or discredit other sources of information," he wrote, but beyond these simple uses, it was not clear at that time whether tape-recorded interviews would fundamentally change how educational historians interpreted the past. Oral history remained primarily a source of anecdotes; it had not yet become the basis for historical analysis.1	1
This essay reviews a handful of recent works on American educational history that demonstrate how oral history has gained interpretive ground and reoriented how scholars think about the field. Not only has educational history expanded beyond the realm of formal institutions and elite perspectives, but in the three decades since Cutler's article, our research has grown more interdisciplinary, drawing insights from the related fields of qualitative social science and literary theory. This essay illustrates these trends by focusing on two major topics that have sparked great interest—black education during segregation, and the working lives of women teachers—while also briefly commenting upon new directions in other areas.	2
Segregation and African American Education
Most interpretations of black schooling during the civil rights era trace the familiar path of the "Road to Brown," a journey that stretches far beyond the 1954 Supreme Court decision. Constance Curry's Silver Rights exemplifies the best of this tradition through her oral history of Mae Bertha Carter and her family's struggle to integrate schools in Sunflower County, Mississippi. When the federal government belatedly pressured southern districts to desegregate in 1965, many school boards resisted by adopting "freedom of choice" plans. In theory, the law offered black and white families the option of selecting any public school for their children, thus fulfilling the legal requirements of desegregation. But the economic realities of sharecropping cotton on the Delta's white-owned plantations made most blacks vulnerable to racial intimidation. Mae Bertha Carter recalled that the "White man didn't even have to go to the black's house and say, 'Don't send your child to the school,'" since he was "sure that [he] had fixed everything."2	3
But The Man had not "fixed" the Carters. On their own initiative, the family's seven school-age children volunteered to attend an all-white school, the only black children to do so in all of Sunflower County. For the next two years, the Carter family endured a nighttime shooting upon their home, the loss of credit at the plantation store, and verbal and physical harassment at school. Their stories are told through Curry, who first met them while working as a field representative for the American Friends Service Committee in the mid-1960s and then returned twenty-five years later as an oral historian. Ruth, the eldest daughter, remembered that "we jumped at the chance to integrate the school because at least we could get away from the cotton fields." The white schools operated on a continuous nine-month schedule, in contrast to black schools whose sessions were dictated by the needs of the cotton crop. But her younger sister Gloria reflected on the painful disappointment that soon followed. "I was really surprised that there were no other blacks there. . . . I couldn't believe we were the only ones who had decided to go. . . . Anybody ought to want a better or cleaner school. I just wasn't aware of the racism or the problems it was going to cause." At the end of every school day, Gloria prayed for the spitballs and racial epithets to stop raining down on her.3	. . .