The Salem County Historical Society premieres a new film this month about the history of the county’s black population, part of a multimedia effort called the African-American Oral History Project.
The historical society’s executive director, Tamara Barnes, 30, spearheaded the film project, working alongside three volunteers who interviewed local residents about African-Americans in Salem County from the nineteenth century through the present. “I realize that my peers and people younger than me don’t realize how much the generation before us went through during the civil rights movement,” Barnes says. “I don’t want that to be lost.”
The filmmakers created a 55-minute documentary from more than 20 hours of interviews and footage. The surplus material will be catalogued in the society’s library database, which will be available to researchers this summer. The film’s first showing, which is free, will take place at 7:30 pm on the 9th at Salem Community College in Carneys Point.