Students complete History Channel project

Local community college and high school students recently completed a project to preserve the Wiregrass’ segregation era history, documenting the experience of students who attended segregated schools and saw the dawn of integration.

Funded by a $9,700 Save Our History grant to Wallace Community College’s Philip J. Hamm Library, the project partnered Wallace with Dale County High School and the Dale County Historical Society to record the stories of local African American residents.

Their video production, “The Forgotten Schools: An Oral History of African-American Schools in Dale County,” will debut Thursday at 6 p.m. in Cherry Hall at the Wallace Campus in Dothan. Another showing will be held Feb. 25, at 10:50 a.m., at the Bevill Center at the WCC Sparks Campus in Eufaula. The project may be aired by The History Channel at a later date.

Linda York, a Wallace history instructor, said the project captured an important part of segregation history and local history in danger of being lost.

“The Wiregrass area has been a kind of lost world to history — so little written about us, so few archives saved,” she said.

About 25 local residents were interviewed over a period of 18 months. Getting the interviews wasn’t easy. The segregation era remains a painful memory to many who lived through it, and a large number of the people contacted for interviews were reluctant to speak about it.

“When we started the project we had a lot of people say yes, but when it came time to do the interviews they said it was too painful,” said Isaac J. Thomas, a Wallace student who worked on the project. “It was a bad time, they said, a bad time.”

York said the project revealed the sacrifices the black community made to educated their children during the era of segregation.

“They were, in essence, taxed twice, once to support the white schools and then they paid for what they needed for their schools out of their own pockets,” she said.

Sally Buchanan, a Wallace spokesperson, said The History Channel and its cable partners have given $1 million to fund community preservation projects across the country. These grants fund innovative preservation projects designed to bring communities together, actively engage children in the preservation of their local history and communicate the importance of saving local history for future generations.