In the mid-1960s James Etheredge and Thaddeus Bell joined a cohort of young African American men that the Department of the Interior recruited in an effort to diversify the workforce. The National Park Service assigned them to parks in the West, a region where most employees were white. Etheredge and Bell had seldom recalled the summer seasonal jobs until 2019, when they met NPS rangers and managers at an African American history conference in Charleston, South Carolina. To their surprise, they learned that they had helped to blaze a trail for African American employees and that their stories mattered. What were their experiences like? To find out, in 2021 Dr. Lu Ann Jones, Oral History Coordinator for the NPS Park History Program, collaborated with Dr. James Harper, Chair of the Department of History at North Carolina Central University, to record oral history interviews. Mr. Etheredge illustrated the conversation with photos he had taken to record his experiences.
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Source: U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service
