A University Web site that provides a search engine for information about African-Americans living in the Charlottesville-Albemarle County area during the Jim Crow period has received a $100,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The University's Center for Digital History and the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies will use the grant to fund the expansion of their Web site, entitled "Race and Place: An African-American Community in the Jim Crow South."
The site includes databases of primary sources such as photographs, newspaper records and census data, and historical exhibits on African-American life.
The grant also will help start similar sites at historically black colleges and universities around the state.
Reginald D. Butler, director of the Woodson Institute, and William G. Thomas, director of the Center for Digital History, already are working with Norfolk State University to develop a Tidewater African-American history archive.
Scot French, assistant director of the Woodson Institute, said the funds will be used at the University to hire graduate and undergraduate students to research information for the site.
French said the purpose of the site is to allow users to "get a better understanding of a time period that is often overlooked in African-American history."
The Web site originated from student research into the Rufus W. Holsinger Studio Collection Digital Image Database, which includes about 550 photographs, taken between 1908 and 1927, of African-Americans in Charlottesville.
The Emerging Scholars Program at the Woodson Institute has researched the Holsinger collection and obtained information about African-Americans at the time the photographs were taken.
"Race and Place" has taken two years to complete and is still a work in progress, French said.
He said the current site was compiled as a prototype in order to receive the grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
In the future, the directors plan to add census data from 1870, 1880, 1900 and 1920, and also courthouse information such as deeds and property records.
Many students from the Emerging Scholars Program have worked on the "Race and Place" site for several years.
Deva Woodly, a third-year College student and political and social thought major, has donated much of her time in the past year to researching and entering information into this database.
"The site is an amazing search engine that allows research with materials that would not normally be available or very difficult to find," Woodly said. "The most unique thing about the site is that it is student-run and it includes data along with analysis of the data."
French said the "Race and Place" Web site is modeled after another site called the Valley of the Shadow site, which focuses on two counties around the time of the Civil War.
The Valley of the Shadow site includes primary sources that allow researchers to get an idea about what life was like in the Civil War period, he said.
He added that the directors of the "Race and Place" Web site wanted Internet users to have similar access to a variety of information.
The Virginia Center for Digital History was founded in 1998 to provide accurate historical information on the Web, and the Woodson Institute organizes African-American studies at the graduate and undergraduate level.
The Internet address of "Race and Place: An African American Community in the Jim Crow South" is www.vcdh.virginia.edu/afam/cvilleenter.html
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