Projects
Digital history collections and student research from Stokes Early College.
Featured Projects
Depression Era Narratives of North Carolina
About 170 life histories gathered by more than 30 writers for the Federal Writers’ Project Folklore Project, a New Deal program of the WPA. They portray North Carolinians from mountain tenant farmers to coastal tobacco growers, covering family, work, income, religion, politics, and daily life. Part of the U.S. Work Projects Administration Records.
Visit“Beneath the Underdog”: The Struggle for Human Rights within the Civil Rights Movement
A lesson plan on struggles over gender and sexuality inside the Civil Rights Movement, featuring Pauli Murray, James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, and Bayard Rustin alongside lesser-known activists such as Mandy Carter, Quinton Baker, and Joe Herzenberg — many with North Carolina ties and deep religious convictions.
VisitStokes Early College Amnesty International
A student chapter of the global human rights movement, founded in 2010 at Stokes Early College High School in Walnut Cove with nearly forty members. The group takes part in Write for Rights, One Billion Rising, Red Hand Day, and Democracy in Syria campaigns.
VisitStealing Home: The Battle Over Chavez Ravine
A lesson plan on how federal, state, and city policies displaced the largely Mexican American community of Chavez Ravine in Los Angeles, the residents’ fight against eminent domain, and the land’s eventual use for Dodger Stadium in 1962.
VisitAutobiography of an Abolitionist: Essays of Historical Fiction
From a 2014 American History class at Stokes Early College. Adapting a Zinn Education Project lesson by Bill Bigelow, students role-played members of the American Anti-Slavery Society and wrote narratives of their lives, compiled here for the public record.
VisitWithout Due Process
Inspired by Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Monroe Work, Stokes Early College students researched an 1881 extrajudicial killing in Stokes County and are petitioning the N.C. Highway Historical Marker Advisory Committee for a marker honoring the victims and the deputy sheriff who tried to protect them.
VisitAdditional Resources
Aframerindian Slave Narratives
Stories of enslaved Indians and Africans from the WPA Slave Narratives.
VisitWomen in the Slave Narratives
First-person accounts of women’s lives under slavery from the WPA Slave Narratives.
VisitIndians in the Indian Pioneer Papers
First-person accounts of Native American life in Indian Territory.
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