Here are background materials to help explain contexts and themes that will be seen during the tour. Please check back periodically as we will continue to add material right up until the week of the conference.

African American Life

• Building and Landscapes article about similar African American neighborhoods in nearby Raleigh.

• W. E. B. Du Bois (William Edward Burghardt), 1868-1963. The Upbuilding of Black Durham. The Success of the Negroes and Their Value to a Tolerant and Helpful Southern City
  

• 2014 video by two North Carolina high school students: The Rosenwald Schools

• 2013 video (rough cut): The Russell School: The History and Restoration of a Rosenwald School, featuring members of the Friends of Russell Rosenwald School who will be on-site during the visit of the "From Farm to Factory in Durham County" tour on Friday, June 3. 

• The Durham County Library's North Carolina Collection has created the web site, Durham Civil Rights Heritage Project: Our Pictures and Stories.

• Videos on civil rights crusader Pauli Murray: Barbara Lau of the Pauli Murray Project on Pauli Murray and Pauli Murray: Imp, Crusader, Dude, Priest on the  2015 exhibit at the Duke Franklin Humanities Center on Murray. While there is not time during conference tours to visit Pauli Murray's Durham home, currently under restoration, vibrant murals portraying Murray will be seen throughout the city.

• The 12-minute video "Hayti and the Bull City," published by Onyechi Onyekan in 2013, blends jazz with still photos showing Durham's Hayti neighborhood in the early 20th century and just prior to and during the mid-1960s urban renewal projects that demolished most of the area.

• "Negro Durham Marches On," a 28-minute film made in 1948 by the Durham Business and Professional Chain (Durham’s oldest black business advocacy organization) that examines the Hayti neighborhood and its post-WWII economic prosperity. Most of the buildings that are shown in the film are gone, but several of those that remain will be seen during the Friday tours.

• Ernie Barnes's most famous painting, "Sugar Shack," depicts the Durham Armory, the site of the closing banquet of the conference. More on the artist is here.

Tobacco Industry

• Harvesting and Selling Tobacco

• Tobacco Farming in Eastern NC
  

• Chapter 3.2 from LEARN NC’s digital textbook North Carolina in the New South titled “Working in a Tobacco Factory,” which is a January 17, 1926, Durham Morning Herald interview of a longtime factory worker
• Photo essay from Durham County Library and photographer Laura Drey titled “The End of Tobacco Road: Scenes from Liggett & Myers Tobacco Company’s Final Days in Durham, North Carolina, 1999.”
• "Bright Leaves," a 2005 documentary by North Carolina native Ross McElwee, whose great-grandfather claimed to have created the Bull Durham brand, "takes viewers on an autobiographical journey across the state's social, economic and psychological tobacco terrain." Watch the trailer or, if you have an Amazon Prime membership, watch the entire 107-minute movie. 

Foodways

Durham, City of the New South

• The Museum of Durham History's latest Museum Without Walls exhibit, "Anonymous Ancestors and Bull City Soundscapes," is at the Trust Building Gallery, on the first floor of 212 W. Main St. Also on the first floor of this building is the Durham Convention and Visitors Bureau, which provides free material on Durham's history and historic sites.
• A brief illustrated history of Durham
• Durham as the New Silicon Valley?
• Context for the destruction of Hayti, Durham's largest African American neighborhood: Highways gutted American cities. So why did they build them?