Inspired by the twenty-three Black parents and fifty-four children who challenged racial discrimination in the NAACP’s 1947 equalization case of Corbin v. County School Board of Pulaski County, Virginia, this project will directly engage with the lived experiences of Black parents and caregivers in Pulaski, Galax, Wytheville, and Christiansburg. Our objective is to chronicle the collective struggles of Black Appalachians who maintained community networks throughout the 20th and 21st centuries despite rampant inequality and discrimination. These stories of courage, resilience, sacrifice, and power have been shared generationally within Black communities yet have been marginalized and under-represented in public narratives of Appalachia. Our project aims to rectify this through formal oral history interviews, informal story-gathering events, community quiltmaking, online and touring exhibitions, and resources for Appalachian communities interested in conducting similar processes in the future.

