series which explores historic supreme court decisions including marbury versus madison, korematsu versus united states, brown versus the board of education, miranda versus arizona, and roe vs wade. veteran supreme court journalist tony mauro and published by c-span. landmark cases is available for $8.95. >> over the next few weeks, c-span's american history tv will air a selection of oral histories with african-american community leaders. the project titled explorations was ack leadership collaboration between university of virginia professor phyllis leffler and julian bond.

in 10 minutes, we will hear from julian bond as he remembers his career as a civil rights leader. thealks about growing up in segregated south, his involvement with the student nonviolent coordinating committee, and his later political career. first project or rector phyllis leffler discusses the origins of this oral history collection and its historical importance. this program is a little over 90 minutes. phyllis leffler, what is the explorations in black leadership project? >> it's a videotaped oral history interview series that was carried out at the university of virginia. it was done with the co-directorship of the late julian bond and myself. broughtproject that prominent african-american leaders to the university in order to talk about their own personal life histories and also

to talk about leadership in general. >> when did you start the project? >> i first talked to julian about it in 1998 and asked if he would be my collaborator. we actually invited the first 2000 and theyear project ended in 2014. >> how did the idea come up? >> initially it was my idea. i was creating for the university and institute for public history and i was trying to design some projects that would fall within the category of public history and of course part of public history, oral history is a big component of how public historians think of themselves going out and collecting materials and stories that would otherwise not be available. and once julian bond came into the history department at uva, i realized this was a great opportunity. the university was also seeking to highlight some of its diversity initiatives.

so this seemed like a great opportunity to do something significant and important. so i approached him. i said, i'm interested in doing this series and i'd really like your collaboration. i know your name would really be important in terms of bringing people in and would you be interested in partnering with me? and it was as simple as that. >> how many interviews did you do? >> 51. >> how did you decide who to talk to? towe started out trying think of categories of leaders. first we wanted to start with people who we felt had had a major impact on the african-american community. you think about that, you think educators, lawyers, and ministers. or members of the clergy. once we came up with categories, then we started to think about

who in those categories could best represent those areas. and then we also wanted to get people who we thought we might lose because they were aging. and then we wanted a diversity of age and then we wanted a diversity geographically and by gender. so those were some of the considerations that helped define who exactly we would reach out to. and then finally as my friend julian bond always said when he was asked this question, sometimes it would just depend on who you could get to and who was available. might have people we wanted to get to were simply not available at the time. we asked and then we chose other people. an bond himself sat down for one of these interviews. >> he did. he was one of the 51. he couldn't interview himself. so i ended up as the codirector of the project during the

interview with him and it was just a wonderful experience to do that. don't knoweople who julian bond, tell us why he was so important to this project and why his life story was important. >> at me start with the life story. -- let me start with the life story. was one of the young african-american leaders who founded the student nonviolent coordinating committee in 1960. he became the communications director and for six years, he was really on the front of fighting the civil rights movement. organization that staged so many of the citizens in the south. otherollaborated with organizations that organized the freedom rides to segregate -- desegregate buses. they fought that battle in a nonviolent but really aggressive way to change some of the

normative behaviors and laws of the american south and the country as a whole. in 1968, he ran for the georgia legislature. he was not seated by the legislature and he ran three different times and one each won each time. they refused to seat him because against theion vietnam war. he always believed there was racism contained within that. case all the way to the supreme court and finally won. he was then nominated for vice president of the united states. he couldn't accept it because he was too young to serve. hishe went on all through

life to fight for the causes he believed in. then in 1987, he decided to run for the united states congress and lost that election. then went into a variety of other ways of being an activist including teaching on the college level, where he brought the story of the civil rights movement to thousands of people. when he was1998 older, he became the national chair of the preeminent civil rights organization in america and100 years, and the naacp he served in that role for 12 years. so he was a leader throughout his life. he said that he had seen how individuals had stepped up. is that part of the motivation behind this project? to share those leadership stories? >> absolutely. these stories are stories of weree whose lives

motivated by service most of all in a variety of capacities. and they come from all different areas. they are educators and lawyers and nine members of congress and playwrights and poets and dancers. but in each and every case, these are people who felt that expertise,ir craft, and discipline, they needed to somehow send a larger message. and that was an important way that we defined leadership. himself thought that was incredibly important as a way to defined leadership. but i also feel that these interviews have an intimacy about them, because you have one civil rights leader who was so revered. every person who came for an

interview came in large measure because of julian bond. he was so revered in the african-american community. and so many of them felt it was an honor to sit down with him. and then in fact, you feel this notmacy of two people, necessarily having walked the same path, but two people with really shared appreciation for one another having this conversation about what it meant to be black in america. what it meant to overcome the obstacles. whether they came from families of affluence and extended education as julian did, or whether they came from deep poverty. they somehow had this intimacy because they understood that they shared some of the basic experiences of people making assumptions about you simply because of the color of your skin. >> how did this project fit into

the larger african-american oral history tradition? >> there is a deep oral history tradition of witnessing. of talking through words. does go back to a time when there was much more limited literacy and it was through the word that ideas and values were spread. first and foremost through the church and then through elders. and there are many interviews in the series in which people talk about the stories their elders told them. was reading from the bible or telling stories about growing up. but every single one of them had an implied lesson within them. so i think this tradition of witnessing through the oral word is deeply embedded in the african-american tradition. we could even trace it further back to africa and the tradition of elders gathering the clans

and talking about the stories of the past and remembering history in that way. >> how can the rest of us access the stories? >> all of the interviews are on a website. blacebsite is called kleadership.virginia.edu. and every single interview is digitized and online and fully accessible and free. >> who is your intended audience? historians, journalists, students? >> i think these interviews are so accessible that they are available to anybody who wants to understand more about the country of america. educators will use them on all levels. i think they can be used in secondary schools, middle

schools. i think they can be used by journalists, historians, sociologists. there are enormous capacities that these materials can be used and people would find rich things in them. they are also fully searchable. the website is fully searchable by keyword and that means you could go to the website and type in civil rights and you would get a list of every single aspect of every interview that mentions civil rights. >> what do you hope people take away from these stories? >> there are so many things. but first and foremost, i want people to understand the these 51value of individuals and of course there could have been so many more. but the enormous value to our

country. these people's stories are rich vignettes. and every story that people tell has an embedded lesson in it. so i want these interviews and these stories to help us think much more deeply about the kind of society we want to create and the kind of america we want to live in. because we don't do nearly venerate thelly success stories. failureso focus on the and the faults. so that's my first and foremost biggest take away. on another level, i think you can look at these interviews and synthesize them and there are certain themes that emerge. and these are the themes related to the book that i wrote about

the project. so the common themes that emerge as people talk about their lives are the importance of families and of course within families there are all kinds of more narrowly defined assumptions and expectations that come out of family life. there's a chapter on education and the enormous value that the black community placed on education. we often talk about the failures of education for the black community. and somehow by extension, we come to assume that people value education enough where they would have succeeded. but that's just not true at all. and these interviews help us to understand the enormous importance that successful black leaders and their families put on education. third, there is a chapter on the ande of community networking. i think a concept that we often forget.