NC Humanities Awards Over $378,000 to Support Local History and Storytelling Projects

Comité de Fiestas Patrias y Tradiciones de Charlotte (Charlotte)
History of Hispanic Immigrants in Mecklenburg County
Grant Award: $20,000
As of 2024, Mecklenburg County has a population of 170,000 Hispanics. The journey of Hispanic people to Charlotte started 483 years ago with voyages of Spanish explorers through what would become the territories of the Carolinas. Presently, the Hispanic community represents 15% of the county’s population. To further the stories and cultures of this community, this project will capture oral histories and visual testimonies which will later be preserved and distributed through a comprehensive essay and website.

Davidson College (Davidson)
Dútα Bαhiisere Kus Ráˀhere/We Know Corn Together
Grant Award: $20,000
Davidson College is located on ancestral Catawba homeland. To further Davidson community members’ understanding of and support for Catawba history and culture, this grant will support a series of lecture events featuring Indigenous authors, artists, scholars, and chefs. In addition, Davidson students, staff, and faculty will research the history of settler colonialism in this region, conduct experiments and research projects under Catawba direction at their farm and woodlands, and grow kus (corn) at the Catawba and Davidson College farms.

FREEDOM ORG (Tarboro)
Basketball Heaven Student Production Program
Grant Award: $19,750
FREEDOM ORG is a 3-year documentary production program that connects students ages 13-16 to North Carolina’s rich Black history and concepts of environmental justice through documentary filmmaking. The program uses film as a device for students to travel through Kinston, past and present, while increasing their research, creative development, and technical skill sets. It allows students to work on a film from start to finish, giving them their first film credit, and preparing them to enter the industry as filmmakers upon graduation. This grant will support student’s participation in the impact campaign for the Sundance-supported, feature-length documentary, Basketball Heaven, which follows director and producer Resita Cox as she journeys back home to the land of basketball, bringing audiences the story of Kinston, a small town with a big stat: it is the single greatest producer of NBA players in the world. The goal of this film and its impact campaign is to enhance and develop a deeper understanding of local, state and national history for working students and film audiences.

Friends of The City of Raleigh Museum (Raleigh)
African American Cultural Programming
Grant Award: $10,000
This grant will support community programming centered around African American culture and history. Such programs include “The Doctor Is In”, a two-day program on 19th-century Black medical practices featuring a lecture and living history demonstrations presented in partnership with the Country Doctor Museum; and “Emancipation Day”, a two-day program featuring lectures, a historical trolley tour, a Civil War reenactment presented by Tryon Palace’s 35th Regiment of the United States Colored Troops, and two performances that will explore the intersection of abolitionism and culture. This grant will also support the 2025 African American Symposium, “Joy Cometh in the Morning! The Emancipation Experience in North Carolina”.

Gaston County Museum of Art & History (Dallas)
African American History in Gaston, a Community Curated Exhibit
Grant Award: $19,996
Using 11 previously collected oral history stories relating to African American history in Gaston County from 25 individuals, this grant funding will support the production of a community-curated exhibit created with direct input from the community members who gave their oral histories. This grant will also support the development of a curriculum guide for K-12 schools, educational programs that tie to the exhibit themes, and an exhibition book highlighting the exhibit and the individuals whose oral histories inspired its creation. Oral histories were collected thanks to a 2022 one-time grant program funded by the American Historical Association and National Endowment for the Humanities.

Independent Picture House (Charlotte)
Community Impact Film Series
Grant Award: $10,575
This grant will support the continuation of the Community Impact Film Series which seeks to inform audiences of the issues surrounding mental health, women’s health, immigration, and homelessness through film. Directly after the film screening, a panel of humanities experts will lead audiences in discussions about the issues depicted in the films and how they may affect community members and inform their personal experiences. Ultimately, this program aims to enhance human connections among people of different backgrounds to work toward meaningful goals and solutions.

Jane Austen Collaborative (Chapel Hill)
Medicine, Food, and Domestic Life in Regency England and Colonial North Carolina
Grant Award: $20,000
In many ways, Austen’s 1813 Sense and Sensibility acts as a bridge between 18th and 19th century moral aesthetics. As such, this grant will support plenaries, workshops, discussions, and readings that will explore domesticity, medicine, and military conflict in colonial North Carolina and Austen’s world. Many of these activities will take place at Tryon Palace in New Bern, North Carolina. This unique location will invite visitors to consider the tensions rooted in class, national identity, and religion felt between North Carolina settlers and their British colonial rulers. Such tensions inform and parallel Austen’s historical moment and the conflicts in her writing. New Bern’s coastal location opens further opportunities for exploring the slave trade and piracy.

John C. Campbell Folk School (Brasstown)
Walking Tour and Wayfinding Project
Grant Award: $20,000
This grant will support the creation of a self-guided walking tour of and informational signage for the Folk School’s campus to better contextualize the school’s historical sites, studios, landscape, and garden for public audiences. Started in 1925, the Folk School is the oldest Folk School in the country and plays a key part of preservation of far-western North Carolina history. Visitors will be able to see a map and/or read signage at various stops throughout the tour, and for fuller information, will be able to scan a QR code on the map/signage. Each webpage will also include written, visual, or audio histories from the school’s archives.

Neighborhood Data Works (Durham)
Reckoning With Racial Covenants in Durham
Grant Award: $20,000
This project will raise awareness of and foster community engagement around the history of racial covenant clauses in Durham County property deeds. These clauses were documented oaths that aimed to restrict non-white Durham citizens from owning residential properties, accessing public amenities, or even resting in certain cemeteries. In-person discussions and workshops will allow for greater exploration of the emotional impact of engaging with the covenants. Additionally, a traveling exhibit will be created to further narrate the story of racial covenants.

Odyssey for Democracy (Washington)
Black Oral Histories of Beaufort County
Grant Award: $5,000
This project will document the untold stories of members of the African American Washington, North Carolina community and surrounding eastern North Carolina areas. Their stories will be shared through support and collaboration with the Washington Waterfront Underground Railroad Museum, The P.S. Jones African American Education Museum, the Brown Library History Center, the Beaufort County Arts Council, the Center for Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights Studies at UNC Charlotte, and NPR’s StoryCorps, where they will be archived in the Library of Congress.

S.M.A.R.T BUS (Raleigh)
Preserving Our Voices
Grant Award: $18,970
Through intergenerational interactions, students will create a docuseries titled Preserving Our Voices: Documenting African American Experiences Under Jim Crow Laws as part of an ongoing project that is aimed at preserving the narratives of elderly African Americans who lived through this era through oral storytelling. The documentaries will be the culmination of research, planning, and interviews conducted by students ages 11-18. Additionally, students will create historical fiction children’s books based on the interviews, exploring storytelling and narrative construction. The project will also include community engagement activities such as screenings, panel discussions, and Q&A sessions to raise awareness and promote empathy and respect for diverse experiences.

Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy (Asheville)
A Life Reimagined: The George Masa Story
Grant Award: $20,000
This grant will support the documentary film about the groundbreaking life of Japanese immigrant George Masa. Based on the soon-to-be-published biography of Masa by director Paul Bonesteel and writer Janet McCue, the film will bring to PBS audiences the results of years of research by Bonesteel and other writers, historians, researchers, photographers, and naturalists. Masa was a passionate artist and advocate for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and the Appalachian Trail. He came to the mountains of Western North Carolina in 1915, reimagining his life, and leaving a legacy of photography, trail building, conservation, and inspiration in this region. Filmed in Western North Carolina, Japan and other locations, the story dives deep into Masa’s life. Through the challenges he faced as an artist, an immigrant, and businessman, audiences will see a deeper and richer possibility for themselves.

The Industrial Commons (Morganton)
Raising Cultural Diversity Awareness in Rural Communities
Grant Award: $20,000
This grant will support the Industrial Commons’ program, Hometown Walkabout, aimed at raising awareness of cultural and racial diversity through arts- and place-based tours and facilitated conversations. This grant will help organizations and individuals with financial constraints participate in the program at a free or lower cost. The program aims to strengthen trust, respect, and understanding of diverse racial and cultural populations through increased knowledge of Burke County history, origin stories of local ethnic groups, and the lived experiences, challenges and triumphs of community members in these groups.

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Chapel Hill) 
Celebrating and Reflecting on 50 Years of Women’s and Gender Studies in North Carolina
Grant Award: $20,000
This grant will support a series of events, workshops, and public performances throughout the 2025-2026 academic year to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at UNC Chapel Hill. Engaging public audiences and humanities experts alike, this diverse set of events will explore the histories, legacies, and challenges of women’s and gender studies, reflecting upon where the field has come from and where it is headed. Events will call attention to the deep roots of women’s and gender studies in the state and the continued significance of research, teaching, advocacy, and ongoing dialogue.

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Chapel Hill)      
Celebrating Diversity: Combatting Refugee Isolation Through Cross-Cultural Storytelling
Grant Award: $14,858
This project seeks to address the issue of cultural isolation and language barriers for Middle Eastern and Muslim refugees in the Triangle area. Journal articles and professionals in organizations that support refugees claim the primary focus of support is on the economic needs of their clients and “the resettlement process is devoid of cultural interventions.” (Diya Abdo, Every Campus a Refuge) Through this 12-month series of field trips to cultural heritage institutions and local historical sites, participants will encounter local North Carolina culture and heritage to increase their understanding of their new home’s traditions and grow their sense of belonging. Each field excursion will include on-site translation and a bilingual handout/booklet to help increase language exposure and give participants something to revisit. These activities will reinforce a sense of pride in their own culture and help them feel welcomed and valued in North Carolina.

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Chapel Hill)
Legacies of Lynching: An Inaugural Gathering
Grant Award: $20,000
The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) has documented over 4,000 lynchings of Black Americans that occurred between the close of Reconstruction and 1950. EJI identified 55 county sites of lynching in North Carolina. Following the work of EJI, 10 North Carolina county-based coalitions from Alamance, Buncombe, Chatham, Guilford, Mecklenburg, Orange, New Hanover, Rowan, Wake, and Warren Counties have taken significant steps towards documenting lynchings in their local communities and honoring their victims. As such, this grant will help support a gathering of leaders, university scholars, undergraduate students, and lifelong learners for a first-of-its-kind statewide convening to discuss and learn about the history of racial injustice, lynching, and descendant community-led public history work. 

Unmanageable (Nashville, TN-based nonprofit. Events to occur in Durham, NC.)
Biscuits & Banjos Festival
Grant Award: $19,800
This grant will support the new Biscuits & Banjos festival in April 2025 in Durham. The festival, curated by GRAMMY & Pulitzer Prize-winning artist Rhiannon Giddens of Greensboro, is dedicated to the reclamation and exploration of Black music, art, and culture. The two-day festival will include panels, workshops, walking tours and more that will allow participants to exchange ideas, celebrate traditions, and trace the musical and geographical connections of old time, country, Americana, folk and blues to highlight their often-forgotten Black origins.

Wake Forest University (Winston-Salem)
Documenting the Historic Odd Fellows Cemetery in Winston Salem
Grant Award: $20,000
This grant will support Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) surveying at Odd Fellows Cemetery. GPR surveying will aid in the research of the entire 12-acre African American cemetery. Research components also include mapping the locations of headstones and plots, using tablets to document headstone information, and developing a database to support the ongoing documentation of interred individuals. Building capacity, the Cultural Heritage and Archaeology Research Group (CHARG) at Wake Forest University will conduct the GPR surveying in partnership with New South Associates, who will help train CHARG staff so that they can later offer their services to other African American cemeteries in the area.

Women AdvaNCe (Durham)
Mapping the Women’s Movement
Grant Award: $20,000
To document the memory of women involved in advocacy work, this project will collect the oral histories of 30 women fighting for equal, just, and inclusive treatment of people of marginalized gender, racial, and LGBTQ+ identities, in North Carolina. These oral histories will be facilitated with guidance from the Southern Oral History Program at UNC Chapel Hill and will later be preserved in the archives at UNC Chapel Hill’s Wilson Library. The oral histories will also be accessible online in a digital exhibition. These oral histories will add to the public knowledge and history around activism in North Carolina.

^{Note: Project descriptions are shortened for length and clarity and reflect the project’s proposed activity at time of grant submission.}

^{About North Carolina Humanities: Through public humanities programs and grantmaking, North Carolina Humanities connects North Carolinians with cultural experiences that spur dialogue, deepen human connections, and inspire community. North Carolina Humanities is a statewide nonprofit and affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. To learn more, visit www.nchumanities.org.}