The Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project

I propose to discuss how the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project (http://www.civilrights.washington.edu) has connected the teaching of oral history methods to undergraduates with community partnership and online publishing.  The Civil Rights Project introduced oral history into the undergraduate and graduate student curriculum at the University of Washington, which had previously provided no training for this important method for studying recent history. It did so by incorporating oral history into undergraduate history majors’ capstone research seminar, and by focusing the topics of student oral history on local civil rights and labor movement history. The possibility for digital publication of the results of these oral histories transformed our teaching. First, it facilitated collaborations with community groups to conduct oral histories. Groups we partnered with included a group of black construction workers whose protests precipitated the creation of affirmative action law in Washington State; a group of veteran leaders of the local chapter of the Black Panther Party; the Electrical Workers Minority Caucus of a local labor union (IBEW Local 46); and dozens of individual civil rights movement veterans.