Starting today, over 200 records from UNCG’s University Archives can be viewed online by people around the world due to a new partnership between the Google Cultural Institute and the UNCG University Libraries. Staff in the Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections and University Archives and the Libraries’ Electronic Resources and Information Technologies departments uploaded the records and built the online exhibit “African Americans at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 1892-1971.”

Pete [last name unknown] and Ezekiel Robinson, early 1890s

This exhibit traces the history of African American faculty, staff, and students at UNCG, from its opening as the State Normal and Industrial School in 1892 until 1971. Through digitized photographs and documents as well as audio clips from oral history interviews conducted as part of the African American Institutional Memory Project, viewers can learn more about African American employees on campus prior to desegregation, Jim Crow-era debates over the use of facilities by African Americans, the fight to integrate the student body, student involvements in the sit ins and protest movements of the early 1960s, the founding of the Neo-Black Society in 1968, and the hiring of the first African American faculty members.

JoAnne Smart and Bettye Tillman, 1956

The Google Cultural Institute and its partners are putting the world’s cultural treasures at the fingertips of Internet users and are building tools that allow the cultural sector to share more of its diverse heritage online. The Google Cultural Institute has partnered with more than 1,000 institutions giving a platform to over 250,000 thousand artworks and a total of 6 million photos, videos, manuscripts and other documents of art, culture and history. You can learn more about the broader project in this article.

Students in the Neo-Black Society Lounge, 1971

If you have questions about the exhibit, please contact Erin Lawrimore, University Archivist, at scua@uncg.edu.