First is our final installment of the Ella Baker Project. The last segment involves an oral history interview with Baker that is housed at the University of North Carolina as part of the university’s Documenting the South program.
This final segment of the Baker project involves you listening to (there also is a transcript) an interview done in 1977. The exercise associated with the project will have you write (untimed) a five-page brief that will do two things. First, you will be giving your impressions of the interview and of Baker. The brief should include at least three examples from the interview that caught your attention or intrigued you. BE SPECIFIC in citing these examples.
The second part of the brief will involve you putting Baker into a context established by an article by the historian, Jacqueline Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past.” You can find the article by going to JSTOR, click on “advanced search,” and type in the author’s name and/or the title of the article.
The second half of your brief, including the conclusion, should indicate how Hall’s interpretation helps you understand Baker’s contributions to the civil rights movement. Remember that Hall is providing a revisionist take on the movement — you may recall from the beginning of the semester our discussion of revision being the heart of historical scholarship. In short, does Hall’s revisionist take place more or less of an emphasis on someone like Baker? Explain your position.
