ROHO Director Richard Cándida Smith and Project Coordinator Nadine Wilmot. (BAP photos)

Regional Oral History Office turns up the volume for hidden voices

By Bonnie Azab Powell, Public Affairs | 5 August 2003

BERKELEY - History is written by the victors, goes the saying, and the official record of significant events does seem to favor those who benefit most from their outcome. Yet ascertaining what really happened also means determining what role may have been played by those people not immortalized in newspaper articles, biographies, or carefully archived letters.

Sample ROHO's online archives "I think the greatest mistake in the history of the university was when Bob Sproul proposed the [loyalty] oath. The second greatest was when [then-Chancellor] Ed Strong told [Dean of Students] Katherine Towle to issue the September 14th order [in 1964, barring political activity and protest from the strip of sidewalk at Bancroft and Telegraph], because anybody who knew that campus knew how sacred the sacred Sather Gate tradition was. .So anybody knew that Berkeley, you know, valued that tradition, and particularly in the summer of '64, which was the long, hot summer in Alabama and Mississippi, the Goldwater-Johnson campaign was coming up, and remember Proposition 14 was on the state ballot, which had to do with segregation and desegregation. To take [the 26 feet] away without consulting with the faculty, consulting with the students, informing the state-wide administration, informing the regents, who after all had voted to make the area available, was just a crazy thing to do." —Clark Kerr, UC Berkeley Chancellor from 1952-1957 and UC President, 1958-1967, on the Free Speech Movement "This was before the war years. There weren't really many African Americans in the Bay Area, maybe 10,000 altogether. Many of those, or maybe most of them, were in San Francisco. I don't know what the percentages might have been. In junior high school days and beginning high school days, I had a lot of white friends. Occasionally, the blacks would go to parties given at the white kids' houses. .In college, there was never a black student in my class other than one engineering class that I took. It was just sort of a white world. I noticed in my Cal yearbook, there were only eight African Americans in class of 1940 which had 1874 members.. When you looked through the yearbook, you would just see a white world." —Lloyd Noel Ferguson, who in 1943 became the first African American to receive a Ph.D. in chemistry from UC Berkeley, on diversity at UC Berkeley before World War II "The funding came through [in 1970] and they started looking for a place to have the office. The university wasn't opening its doors to any of the buildings on campus exactly for us to be in. But the guys searched around and found an apartment at 2532 Durant Avenue, next door to Top Dog. There were stairs in front, but John and Larry couldn't get in that way. The students we were going to serve couldn't get in that way. They talked with the people who owned it and had this ramp built up the back. Now, the side of the building was a driveway so it meant that every wheelchair that came in was going down the side of the building, down the driveway, up the ramp. Okay, that is one thing coming in. Coming out, it meant they went down the ramp into the driveway and there were many times they held their breath and - as far as I know, no one was ever hit there."—Zona Roberts, mother of activist Ed Roberts, on the start of the Physically Disabled Students Program

That's where the Regional Oral History Office (ROHO), a division of UC Berkeley's Bancroft Library, comes in. "Everyday life is oral, not written," says Richard Cándida Smith, who since his appointment as ROHO's director last year has been working to broaden oral history's acceptance as an indispensable research tool. "We talk at the breakfast table, the bar, in the seminar room. Talk is messy, just like life: it's interaction and dialogue, not monologue. Oral history provides a window into those experiences."

Painting a community's portrait

Often it is a window that no other approach can open. For example, ROHO researchers are working on several projects relating to how the university has handled universal access to education for Californians in this century. In one, Project Coordinator Nadine Wilmot is interviewing 15 African Americans who were faculty members or senior staff before 1975. "If you were a person of color, the path into the mainstream white academy wasn't an easy or direct path. There were significant barriers," she explains. "So much of what happened before affirmative action was not included in the institution's documentation of hiring practices. Oral history privileges voices that are hidden or silenced."

And in other cases such as the arts, oral history may be the only record. As part of an earlier, non-ROHO project on the origins of modern dance, Cándida Smith interviewed Bella Lewitzky, a seminal modern dancer who cofounded the Dance Theater of Los Angeles in 1946. Together they spent several hours, he says, reconstructing the costumes, choreography, and music of one of her famous dances, for which only a handful of photographs exist.

Riveting subject matter

The Bancroft Library's oral history archives date back to the library's namesake, Hubert Howe Bancroft, who recognized that his vast collection of books, journals, maps, and manuscripts on western North America failed to include the living memories of many of the participants in the development of California and the West. In the 1860s he began interviewing pioneer Westerners; the resulting volumes, called "Dictations," remain a valuable primary source for historians.

And since ROHO was formed in 1954, staffers have added 2,000 interviews related to the history of California to the Bancroft's archives and to more than 700 libraries worldwide for use by historians and other scholars. Within general categories like the Arts and Community History are fascinating interviews with the major players of the Free Speech Movement, black alumni, and the instigators of the Disability Rights Movement. Many of these oral histories can be sampled online (see box, right). Nowadays, to augment its traditional transcripts, the office is also recording all of its interviews on digital video, which can be edited down for use in museum kiosks or posted on the Web as short video and audio clips.

ROHO's original mission was to record the memories of the movers and shakers of California, but it has never confined itself to just the history makers. By interviewing multiple witnesses to an event or an entire era, oral historians assemble a mosaic of a community's mood out of individual perspectives. In the case of ROHO's ongoing "Rosie the Riveter" project for a museum planned for Richmond, a center of shipbuilding and manufacturing during World War II, the researchers wanted to explore the broad effects of war mobilization on the home front and on people's lives. So in addition to interviewing the "Rosies" — women who went to work in war-time industry doing what had been male jobs, such as in factories — they also talked to women who worked in health and education, or held down office jobs, and to the policemen and firefighters who were dealing with crises over the influx of people into Richmond area.

"Oral history gets us into a variety of communities and lets us find out what people thought about what happened, through the perspective of individuals," says Cándida Smith. "If you do multiple interviews, you find the community's shared values and get a better sense of the its makeup."

Out of the library, into the barbershop

To the uninitiated, carrying out an oral history project means sitting down with a subject and turning the tape recorder on. There is, of course, a lot more to it than that. Merely finding the right subject takes more than Google or a trip to the stacks.

History major David Washburn, for example, interviewed nine people for his fall 2002 thesis on the Mexican-American community in Richmond during World War II, which became part of the Rosie the Riveter project. Finding those nine people began with a phone call to a church in nearby San Pablo that catered to Mexican-Americans, asking the person who answered the phone if any members of its congregation had lived in the area since the 1940s. One recommendation led to another, and eventually he found an older woman who fit the bill. He also spent many hours hanging out in Richmond itself, parked on a bar stool, visiting Mexican restaurants, and staking out a barbershop.

"I have a hard time now imagining how I would do a history thesis without using oral history," says Washburn, who now works for ROHO as a postgraduate researcher. "I'm extroverted; I have a lot of energy. The interviews are an interactive process. Instead of looking at microfilm in the library and copying down quotes, I'm calling people up and saying, 'Who are you?' or sitting in bars waiting to see who might walk in. It's like being a private detective and a journalist at the same time."

'Instead of looking at microfilm in the library and copying down quotes, I'm calling people up and saying, 'Who are you?' It's like being a private detective and a journalist at the same time.' -David Washburn, ROHO postgraduate researcher

Next comes the matter of persuading the potential source to talk. "The awkward part is trying to convince someone why they should talk to you, an outsider," says Washburn. "You feel like a salesman, telling them that they've been part of a very interesting history. They always say, 'Oh no, not me, nothing's ever happened to me.' The first interview is the hardest. Once you've got one in the bag, you can say, 'Well, so and so told me this' - use a few code words like people's names so they feel comfortable talking to you."

The challenges don't evaporate once a good source has been identified and coaxed into participating in the project. Oral historians have to be alert for factual inaccuracies. Sometimes faulty memories are the culprit, but in some cases people may be deliberately inflating (or minimizing) their role in events. According to Wilmot and Cándida Smith, that's when a well-prepared oral historian will gently cite conflicting newspaper or other sources to see if the source changes his story. If not, the contradictions can be illuminating. "Often there's a discrepancy between what historians can reconstruct and what people think happened. How people misremember and which bits they leave out are also part of the history," says Wilmot.

Ideally, interviewers should be well versed in the project's subject. "You have to have a sense of what the concerns are in this area, so you can know how this person might provide insight into the overall topic," explains Cándida Smith. "Good oral historians listen empathetically but critically - you can't just accept what people tell you. Even though sometimes you're dealing with tough times in people's lives, you can't softball the issues. That doesn't do people or history any good."

Call in the specialist

Cándida Smith reports that ROHO has recently added specialists in food and wine as well as biotechnology to the staff. More are still being recruited. It's an unusual title for a liberal-arts environment. "The specialist position is used extensively in science departments as a non-teaching academic appointment, someone with the qualifications of a faculty member but who primarily does research," he says. That does not mean they won't be dealing with students - increasing student awareness of and participation in oral history seems to be Cándida Smith's personal mission.

In addition to the two oral history classes that Cándida Smith has taught (he has a joint appointment to the history department), ROHO offers several undergraduate research positions through the Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program (URAP) and its summer counterpart, SRAP. ROHO is also offering an Advanced Oral History Summer Institute, a six-day course (starting August 10) that is designed to immerse graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, college faculty, and independent scholars in oral history's methodology, theory, and practice.

"There shouldn't be a divide between research and teaching. To give students the benefits of their four years here, you need to involve them in research activities," Cándida Smith says. "The sciences have done this quite effectively; the humanities and social sciences, less so. We're not going to solve the student-faculty ratio problem, but one of the ways we can help is to tap the talented staff. I have a staff of 40-some people who have a lot to give. By working with us, students learn how professionals formulate a research project and carry it out. They also learn that it's a group effort, developing in conversation and context." Washburn agrees, admitting that he might not have interviewed quite so many sources for his part in the Rosie the Riveter project without the interest and encouragement of the other ROHO staff members.

And in addition to getting history majors out of the library, helping the ROHO office with projects lends a significance often missing in their work. "Once students know that the work they're doing for an oral history is going to be available in the Bancroft, that changes the way they work," says Cándida Smith. "It becomes not just for the grade or the professor, but for future generations."