"The Gods Bring Threads
to Webs Begun"

William H. Chafe

In the summer of 1974, twenty graduate students gathered at Duke University to explore the history of the civil rights movement in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Half black, half white, the students set out in racially mixed teams to interview nearly two hundred participants in the Chapel Hill struggle, testing the hypothesis that oral history offers an ideal vehicle for developing a multiracial source base for a history that has been written about previously from a predominantly white perspective.	1
The first night, the interviewers returned saying, "the movement didn't start in 1963, it started in 1960 when University of North Carolina students joined sit-ins in Durham." The next night others corrected that information. "No," they said, "the movement started at Lincoln High School in the early 1950s when students at the all-black school organized to protest having second-hand textbooks." And on the third night, the students returned with still more "beginning" dates—1947, when freedom riders came on interstate buses through Chapel Hill; 1939, when Pauli Murray applied to the University of North Carolina Law School; and the mid-1930s, when members of the all-black First Baptist Church in Chapel Hill mobilized to demand improvements in the community.	2
This story tells us many things, including the relationship between national events and local, indigenous initiatives and the role of individuals who dared to challenge white supremacy. But most important, it speaks to the abiding role of institutions in the black community as rallying points for movements toward social change. It also warns us of how foolhardy it is to try to segment history into finely demarcated eras. Although terms such as Jim Crow and the civil rights revolution are helpful in providing a framework for understanding events in different times and places, it is crucial to remember the continuity of human experience and the degree to which each generation's story—however different it may be from that of its predecessors—builds upon the efforts of those who have gone before.	3
This last point is particularly critical, I think, when studying the history of African Americans. It is easy to define one period as a time of accommodation and another as an era of protest. But using such labels can obscure the more important truth that the black experience in America has been one of constant struggle. To be sure, the possibilities for collective action and self-expression have been shaped by the peculiar context of different moments—clearly the New Deal made a difference, as did World War II and the impact of the postwar red scare; but abiding through these moments has been the quest for dignity, self-definition, and community improvement. Thus, even as the parameters for potential activism have shifted, the impulse for community preservation and black advancement has remained a constant. Indeed, without that impulse, no mere shift in the political economy would have been sufficient to break down the walls of Jim Crow.	. . .