Tales told out of school : the Ball State University African American oral history project II

Abstract

This thesis was part of a larger project, The Ball State University African American Alumni Oral History Project II, which was the second phase of a project that was done in spring of 2015. The goal of this thesis was to document the life experiences of African American alumni of Ball State University so that others may learn from these experiences in the future, as well as to create a short documentary film that featured common themes from each of the alumni who were interviewed. The tasks of researching, conducting oral history interviews, creating transcriptions, and creating a quality documentary accumulated to be a lengthy and consuming process. The hope of this project is that the experiences recorded in the oral history interviews I conducted, and the overarching themes found in the documentary my classmates and I created, will be useful as a primary source for historians studying African American history and other related topics, and that they may be the basis for further research.