Scope and arrangement
The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow documentary research collection documents some aspects of the production of the PBS television series, and most notably consists of over a hundred transcripts of interviews conducted with academicians and individuals, many of whom lived in the South during the era of Jim Crow.
For the online version, there are content outlines, narration, and an overview and a rough script for episode III. Of particular use is a detailed overview of each of the four episodes of the series. There are scripts for the first three episodes and limited production records. The most significant part of the collection is the 112 transcripts of interviews conducted primarily by Richard Wormser, with some conducted by Bill Jersey and Sam Pollard. Fourteen interview transcripts discuss the Elaine race riot in Elaine, Arkansas, in 1919, during which a large number of black sharecroppers were killed by whites following a union meeting. The interviewees had relatives who grew up in Arkansas (a few had been sharecroppers themselves) and some were able to talk about the racial and working conditions in the early to mid-twentieth century. The several historians who were interviewed provide a scholarly perspective on the race riot.
The five interviewees who focused on elections primarily discussed politics, their experiences in voting and family life, in addition to lynchings and education, primarily in Georgia. Thirteen people were interviewed concerning the lynching of two married couples near the Moore's Ford Bridge in Georgia in 1946. This incident involved a white mob who grabbed the couples (both women were pregnant), tied them to a tree and shot them to death. The transcripts of two witnesses to the murders and a relative of one of the victims are included in the collection, as are those of former aides to President Truman, a former FBI agent, a Klansman, and Stetson Kennedy, who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the 1940s. In the Georgia Veterans files, six men and women, veterans of World War II, discussed their experiences before and after military service. Two journalists (Evelyn Cunningham of the Pittsburgh Courier and George Stoney of the Survey Graphic) described what it was like reporting in various states in the South. Several of the ten Mississippi veterans described both positive and negative encounters they experienced overseas while former state senator of Mississippi, Henry J. Kirksey, spoke about his upbringing in a log cabin and incidents while stationed in Asia. Lewella Newsome discussed her training on bases in the North and South, and former Mississippi Governor William Winters touched upon social problems from the 1940s-1960s.
Two other Mississippi citizens spoke: Miburn Crowe explained the history of Mound Bayou, an independent African American town founded by former enslaved persons; and Charles Evers, brother of Medgar Evers, who related his childhood experiences, how he learned of his brother's death, and the way he (Charles) became the field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Mississippi.
There are sixteen interview transcripts discussing the students who organized a strike in 1951, for a better school than their own, the segregated Robert Russa Moton High School, in Farmville, Virginia. Many former students and their parents, along with former teachers, described their childhood in the segregated small town of Farmville, the school building itself, and how ill-prepared the students were for college.
Forty-seven transcripts of academicians, primarily historians, provide an intellectual and historical background for the Jim Crow era. Among the individuals interviewed are: Ralph Cassimere, Margaret Clifford (granddaughter of Booker T. Washington), Paula Giddings (discussing Ida B. Wells), Glenda Gilmore (discussing Charlotte Hawkins Brown), Kenneth Goings, Jacqueline Dowd Hall, Charles Houston, Jr. and Charles Houston, III (discussing Charles Hamilton Houston), David Levering Lewis, and Leon Litwack.