Past Programs

Parallel and Crossover Lives:
Texas Before and After Desegregation

In 2000, Humanities Texas (then the Texas Council for the Humanities) introduced Parallel and Crossover Lives: Texas Before and After Desegregation, an initiative developed in partnership with the Texas Association of Developing Colleges (Dallas) and the Texas African American Heritage Association (Austin). This pilot oral history project, conducted at Jarvis Christian College in Hawkins and Huston-Tillotson University in Austin, was created to document personal experiences with school desegregation in Texas communities.

Interview transcripts are available below. In addition, each project site produced a video from the interviews they recorded, which can be viewed in the column to the right.


Interview Transcripts

Watch Parallel and Crossover Lives: Recollections of Austin, Texas.

Watch Parallel and Crossover Lives: Recollections of Fouke, Hawkins, and Big Sandy, Texas.

Big Sandy High School graduating class of 1967. Courtesy the Reverend Dr. S. L. Curry Jr.