Elizabeth Gritter
Ph.D. Student
egritter@email.unc.edu
Major Field: U. S. History
Other Fields: Social History, Political History, Civil Rights Movement Studies, Oral History
Advisor: Jacquelyn D. Hall
Research Interests: My dissertation uses Memphis, Tennessee, as a case study in order to explore the formal political efforts of southern blacks during the Jim Crow era. It is titled: “Black Politics in the Age of Jim Crow: The Story of Memphis, Tennessee, 1889 to 1954.” I received my master’s degree in history from UNC-Chapel Hill and bachelor’s degree in political science from American University in Washington, D.C. I have presented my research at numerous conferences, including ones in Little Rock, Arkansas; Honolulu, Hawaii; New York, New York; Baltimore, Maryland; and Chapel Hill, North Carolina. From 2004-2006, I worked as a research assistant for the Southern Oral History Program (SOHP). In that capacity, I took three trips to Louisville, Kentucky, and one trip to Charlotte, North Carolina, to conduct oral histories on school desegregation and economic justice for the SOHP’s Long Civil Rights Movement project. I have served on the Executive Council of the Southern Association for Women Historians and on its graduate student committee. I have three interviews published in the journal Southern Cultures, which may be accessed online via Project Muse. I also have recorded more than thirty oral histories of Memphians on politics and civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s; most of these interviews are housed in the UNC-CH Southern Historical Collection (as part of the SOHP collection) and the Memphis Public Library and Information Center (as part of the Everett Cook Collection). Some of these oral histories were featured extensively in Sherry L. Hoppe and Bruce W. Speck’s book Maxine Smith’s Unwilling Pupils: Lessons Learned in Memphis’s Civil Rights Classroom (Knoxville: Univ. of Tenn. Press, 2007). My most significant forthcoming publication is: “‘Women Did Everything Except Run’: Black Women’s Participation in the 1959 Volunteer Ticket Campaign in Memphis, Tennessee,” in Entering the Fray: Gender, Politics, and Culture in the New South, University of Missouri Press (December 2009). It builds on my master's and undergraduate honors theses, which respectively examined the campaign of four black men for public office in Memphis in 1959 and the civil rights movement in that city from 1955 to 1961. I am grateful to have received funding for my research from a variety of sources including the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum in Boston, UNC-CH History Department, and the UNC-CH Center for the Study of the American South. I also am honored to be a Harry S. Truman Scholar (selected in 2000 from Michigan, see www.truman.gov for more details on this award).