Administrative History
On May 12, 2009, the U.S. Congress authorized a national initiative by passing The Civil Rights History Project Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-19). The law directed the Library of Congress (LOC) and the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) to conduct a survey of existing oral history collections with relevance to the civil rights movement, and to record new interviews with people who participated in the movement.
The American Folklore Society (AFS) oversaw a research team of four scholars who gathered information for the survey in 2010. The information was compiled into the CRHP National Survey Database of Civil Rights Collections in 2011 by Washington State University's Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation.
The NMAAHC sponsored six initial interviews in late 2010. The NMAAHC contracted with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Southern Oral History Program to conduct 50 more interviews in 2011, recorded by Media Generation. An additional 52 interviews were conducted in 2013; and 37 interviews conducted in 2016. Videography and tech support was provided by the UNC Southern Oral History Program, Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, and Future View Inc.
Curation, preservation, and access to the interviews is a joint undertaking of the American Folklife Center and the NMAAHC.