The Granville County Library System was recently awarded a $15,000 grant from the Council of Library and Information Resources to digitize and make publicly available interviews with 20th Century Granville County African American educators.
Recorded by local businessman and historian James Eddie McCoy between 1981 and 2016, the 240 hours of taped conversations explore the challenges and joys of teaching during the decades of school segregation and the coming of integrated public schools. Grant funds will enable the Library System to digitize and preserve McCoy’s interviews and circulate them to all users starting in 2025.
Copies of these recordings will also be deposited at North Carolina Central University for the use of students and researchers there. This digitized content will be made visible and available nationally and globally through the Library’s partnership with DigitalNC and the Digital Public Library of America.
McCoy’s oral histories capture the story of Granville County’s African American educators, who like their counterparts in other areas, did much more than teach reading, writing, and arithmetic. They worked hard to