Similarly, when the black informants discussed their situations, they did so with a new framing of race that allowed them to be more critical of the past. In this situation, the modern framing of race allowed for them to discuss more freely their feelings about the situation and how the racism affected their daily lives. Society had created an open space for their conversational narrative that had been closed for many years. Had the interviews taken place in the same years mentioned above, certainly the stories would have been framed differently. But in the new century, their stories took on an almost religious evocation, where stories of injustice and ignorance were defeated by courage, truth and a commitment to righteousness. This abstraction of the interview relationship is the most significant, according to Grele, because it reveals not just the historical recollection, but the “larger community and its history” as each informant and interviewer views it. They expose “hidden levels of discourse” which open up new understandings as to how both groups view their history and their place within it.36
“People kill me today,” Norman Smith said as he shook his head. “They really don't realize the price that we paid for freedom here (in Warren ).” In his interview, Fred Harris said: “When I die, I'm no longer here, I'm the last of my group – we was the last group that actually faced legal discrimination, so when we're no longer here, our children, our grandchildren, they have no idea what we went through. My son doesn't know – he's never heard this, ‘cause I've never told him.” Muriel Robinson shook her head and somberly stated: “As we tell the world we are a great nation, there is nothing great about being racist, prejudice against a people because of the color of their skin.” The Warren oral history projects revealed how racism and segregation in this northeast Ohio city made black residents invisible within their community. But more importantly, it allowed the community to be witness to these same people coming out from the shadows and perhaps allowed both sides to see their memories as collective and thus open the potential for future histories of this tumultuous era to be written with more attention to the personal and individual participant.37
