Abstract: Barbara Lau (1958- ), folklorist and program coordinator, has studied African-American shape-note singing groups in the midwest, coordinated the 1983 Shape-Note Singing Reunion in St. Louis, Mo., and documented the 1983 and 1984 Ohio-Indiana-Michigan Vocal Singing Conventions. While doing graduate work in folklore at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Lau worked with a Cambodian community in Greensboro, N.C., through the Greensboro Buddhist Center. In 1999, she became the community-based documentary programs coordinator at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. Materials, 1980-1995, include audio tapes, videotapes, photographs, slides, logs, and manuscripts from two of Barbara Lau’s folklife projects. Documentation of Lau’s work with African-American shape-note singing groups in the early 1980s includes her senior thesis, “Black Shape-Note Singing: A Beginning,” along with surveys on which she based her writing. Also included are photographs, audio recordings, and slides from the 1983 Shape-Note Singing Reunion in Saint Louis, Mo., and the Ohio-Indiana-Michigan Vocal Singing Convention, 1983-1984. Materials documenting the Cambodian community in Greensboro, N.C., include nearly 1,200 color slides and prints by Lau and photographer Cedric Chatterley of the 1995 Cambodian New Year celebration. There are also photographs of New Year celebrations in Lexington, N.C., and Charlotte, N.C., and videotapes by Jim White and photographs by Lau of a 1995 Cambodian wedding in Greensboro, N.C.. Lau also interviewed two Cambodian dancers, Chea Khan and Chaa Moly Sam, while they were in residence at the Greensboro Buddhist Center and photographed their classes. All photographs and interviews have extensive logs with commentary and field-note summaries by Lau. The Cambodian Immigrant Folklife series contains materials documenting interviews performed by Lau in preparation for a 2003 exhibit at the Greensboro Historical Museum entititled “From Cambodia to Greensboro: Tracing the Journeys of New North Carolinians.” It also includes a children’s book with text by Barbara Lau and photographs by Cedric Chatterly entitled Sokita Celebrates the New Year.

Repository: Southern Folklife Collection

Collection Highlights: Materials include audiotapes, videotapes, photographs, slides, logs, and manuscripts from two of Barbara Lau’s folklife projects. Documentation of Lau’s work with African-American shape-note singing groups in the early 1980s which helped produced her thesis “Black Shape-Note Singing: A Beginning,” along with surveys on which she based her writing. Also included are photographs, audio recordings, and slides from the 1983 Shape-Note Singing Reunion in St. Louis and the Ohio-Indiana-Michigan Vocal Singing Convention in Indianapolis in 1983 and Detroit in 1984. (See documentation and audio in Series 1)

Abstract: Itinerant Methodist minister in northern Virginia, the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, present-day West Virginia, and Baltimore, Md. Included are letters from Martin to his wife, Susan P. (Ruff) Martin, while he was away attending church conferences in the North, where the slave controversy was a major issue; letters from his father-in-law, John Ruff of Rockbridge County, Va., containing local news and political opinion; and letters, 1860-1861, from son J. Thomas R. Martin at Roanoke College, Salem, Va., describing college life.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: The dominant subject of most of the letters is the division of the Methodist Church over the issue of slavery. Includes letters of John Rubb complaining about abolitionists (1840-1850) and descriptions of Methodist Conference debates on slavery, from Indiana, New York, Maryland, and Virginia.

Abstract: Daniel A. Powell was born on 29 July 1911 in Wilson, N.C. In the 1930s Powell worked as a salesman for the American Circulation Company, the Pacific Mutual Life Insurance Company, and as advertising salesman for the Memphis Press-Scimitar. He was an account executive for the O’Callaghan Advertising Agency in 1939-1940 and served in the United States Army Air Force in World War II. Powell was briefly the Assistant Information Director for the West Tennessee Office of Price Administration in 1945 and in the same year became the Southern Director of the Political Action Committee of the Congress of Industrial Organizations.When the CIO merged with the American Federation of Labor in 1955, the AFL’s League for Labor Education joined with the CIO’s PAC to cbecome the Committee on Political Education (COPE). Powell then became director of COPE Region 5, roughly the same territory he had covered for PAC. Powell served in that position until his death, 6 Aug Correspondence, subject files, audio tapes and discs, photographs, and other material of Daniel Augustus Powell (1911-1983), labor union official and civic leader of Memphis, Tennessee. The great bulk of these papers relates to the work of the AFL-CIO Committee on Political Education (COPE) for Area 5, which Powell directed from 1955-1983. There is also material on Powell’s work as head of the CIO Political Action Committee (PAC) in the southeast from 1945-1955; his membership in the Newspaper Guild; and his activities with the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Memphis, the West Tennessee Civil Liberties Union, the Tennessee Council on Human Relations, the United States Civil Rights Commission, and the Tennessee Committee for the Humanities.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: Correspondence in Series 1 (AFL-CIO PAC/COPE: State Files) contains letters to and from PAC/COPE national officers discussing topics such as responding to issues of race, anti-union activity, and the rise of the radical right.

Series 3 contains Powell’s personal writings. Folder 293 contains materials relating to the Civil Rights Commission of 1966 – 1977.

Folders 297 – 300 contain texts of reports or notes for speeches on such subjects as the attitudes of African Americans in various American cities in 1964, the Memphis garbage strike in 1968, and the rise of the radical right in American politics.

Audiotape T-4364/32 consists of recordings from the 1970 Symposium, “The Emerging South” of the LCQ Lamar Society. Participants include George Esser and Maynard Jackson; topics discussed include “The Black Man in Southern Politics”

Image folder P-4364/26-32 contains an image of a parade in Memphis after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968.