Chesapeake Heartland’s digital archive serves as a launching pad and repository for several oral history projects, defined and directed by many collaborators. Some project leaders use a life history approach. Others focus on specific themes, places, or historical moments. Still others experiment with unique interview and recording methods.

The oral history projects featured in this exhibit record the voices of three distinct generations, including retired elders, mid-career professionals, and high school and college students. Narrators across all three generations grappled with the complexities of racial integration. Listen closely to these excerpts and you will hear how integration on the Eastern Shore, and America more broadly, was a far more complicated and ongoing process than contemporary textbooks report—a nuanced and often individualized experience that oral histories can help us better understand. Together, these narrators suggest that part of the solution to America’s continued struggle against racial inequality must be a careful reconsideration of what it means to integrate—on whose grounds? on what terms? to which ends?