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Oral history interview with Don West, January 22, 1975 interview E-0016, Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007). Cover Image E-book

Oral history interview with Don West, January 22, 1975 interview E-0016, Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007)

Interview with Don West, January 22, 1975 (portion title)
Interview E-0016, Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) (other title)
West, Don 1906-1992 (interviewee). Faherty, Ray (interviewer). Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd (interviewer). Southern Oral History Program. (Added Author). University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Documenting the American South (Project) (Added Author). University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Library. (Added Author).

Summary: Activist, leftist, poet, and ordained minister Don West remembers a lifetime of union and civil rights activism in this interview. West's father, determined to give his children the education he never had, left his home in the mountains of Georgia for cotton country, hoping to support his family with sharecropping and send his children to local schools. West's family brought mountain values with them when they left their home, and those values--independence, respect, hard work, and faith--shaped West's life as a Christian left-wing activist. West worked his way through his undergraduate and graduate education, earning a doctoral degree in divinity from Vanderbilt University while acting as a labor organizer in high-profile strikes, including the 1929 cotton mill strike in Gastonia, North Carolina, and the coal strike in Wilder, Tennessee. West describes some of his experiences in union organizing. Hounded by local and federal law enforcement, as well as by journalists and even members of the Communist Party, West moved from community to community, allying himself with unions and other organizations across the South, infiltrating mines and meeting with governors, distributing literature, and teaching. This interview offers a detailed description of activism and organizing in the South of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, a region torn between traditions of white supremacy and anti-unionism and the need for social and economic progress.

Electronic resources

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Record details

  • Physical Description: electronic resource
    remote
  • Edition: Electronic edition
  • Publisher: [Chapel Hill, N.C.] : University Library, UNC-Chapel Hill, 2007.

Content descriptions

General Note:
Duration: 02:17:46.
Interview participants: Don West, interviewee; Jacquelyn Hall, interviewer; Ray Faherty, interviewer.
Text encoded by Jennifer Joyner. Sound recordings digitized by Aaron Smithers.
This electronic edition is part of the UNC-Chapel Hill digital library, Documenting the American South. It is a part of the collection Oral histories of the American South.
Title from menu page (viewed on Nov. 14, 2008).
Type of Computer File or Data Note:
Text (HTML and XML/TEI source file) and audio (MP3); 2 files: ca. 216 kilobytes, 252 megabytes.
Original Version Note:
Original version: Southern Oral History Program Collection, (#4007), Series E, labor, interview E-0016, Manuscripts Department, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Transcribed by Linda Killen. Original transcript: 74 p.
Funding Information Note:
Funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services supported the electronic publication of this interview.
System Details Note:
Mode of access: World Wide Web.
System requirements: Web browser with Javascript enabled and multimedia player.

Search for related items by subject

Subject:
West, Don 1906-1992 Interviews
Civil rights movements Southern States
Labor movement Southern States
Labor unions and communism Southern States
Labor unions Organizing Southern States
Political activists Southern States Interviews
Radicals Southern States Interviews
Social reformers Crimes against Southern States
Social reformers Southern States Interviews
Genre:
Oral histories.
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