Oral history interview with Billy E. Barnes, October 7, 2003
Subtitle: interview O-0037, Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007)
Contributors: Gritter, Elizabeth, interviewer; Southern Oral History Program; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Documenting the American South (Project); University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Library
Edition: Electronic ed.
Publisher: University Library, UNC-Chapel Hill
Published: 2008
Place of publication: [Chapel Hill, N.C.]
Language: eng
Subjects: Interviews; Community development corporations; Employees; Social reformers; Photographers; Community development; Documentary photography; Poverty; North Carolina Fund
Other titles: Interview O-0037, Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007); Interview with Billy E. Barnes, October 7, 2003; Oral histories of the American South.
Description: Billy E. Barnes is a photographer known for his documentary work on racial and economic justice issues in the 1950s and 1960s. Barnes begins the interview by explaining how he grew interested in issues of inequality while working as a photographer for McGraw-Hill Publishing in Atlanta, Georgia, during the 1950s and early 1960s. After establishing a reputation for himself, Barnes was offered a job with the newly formed North Carolina Fund in 1963. Founded by Governor Terry Sanford and shaped by executive director George Esser, the North Carolina Fund was a precursor to President Lyndon Baines Johnson's more broadly conceived War on Poverty. Barnes describes the aims of the North Carolina Fund at length, emphasizing how the black power movement was demonstrative of the need to involve people in decision-making processes. He also discusses the Fund's ideology of providing people with opportunities and training rather than welfare, and its overall goal of breaking the cycle of poverty. Throughout the interview, Barnes describes the work of North Carolina Fund volunteers, who sought to educate children and implemented programs like Head Start. Researchers interested in the history of the North Carolina Fund, the photography of Barnes, or the uses of documentary photography in social justice movements of the South will find particularly useful material in the second half of the interview, in which Barnes describes a number of his most memorable photographs to the interviewer. The interview concludes with Barnes's brief discussion of his accumulated records about the North Carolina Fund and his failed effort to establish a radio station, owned and operated by the people, in Wautauga County, North Carolina. Barnes places the work of the North Carolina Fund within the broader context of economic justice and community empowerment, while paying attention to the political tensions that shaped the War on Poverty in the South.
Notes: Title from menu page (viewed on Nov. 10, 2008).

Interview participants: Billy E. Barnes, interviewee; Elizabeth Gritter, interviewer.

Duration: 02:32:10.

This electronic edition is part of the UNC-Chapel Hill digital library, Documenting the American South.  It is a part of the collection Oral histories of the American South.

Text encoded by Jennifer Joyner.  Sound recordings digitized by Aaron Smithers.

Text (HTML and XML/TEI source file) and audio (MP3); 2 files: ca. 193.1 kilobytes, 278 megabytes.

Original version: Southern Oral History Program Collection, (#4007), Series O, Foundation history, interview O-0037, Manuscripts Department, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Transcribed by Elizabeth Gritter. Original transcript: 58 p.

Funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services supported the electronic publication of this interview.

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

System requirements:  Web browser with Javascript enabled and multimedia player.