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SOHP
Home > Projects > The Walter Royal Davis
Oral History Fund
The Walter Royal Davis Oral History Fund
SOHP Benefactor
Walter Royal Davis
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A generous and farsighted gift from Walter Royal Davis in 1994 enabled
the Southern Oral History Program to join the Academic Affairs Library
in establishing the Davis Oral History Fund at UNC-CH. With its support,
the SOHP and the Southern Historical Collection embarked upon the North
Carolina Challenge, a series of five projects that united students,
professors, and citizens in an investigation of North Carolina history
since the Great Depression. A total of 503 interviews were collected,
and are archived in the Southern
Historical Collection.
A native of Elizabeth City, North Carolina, Walter Davis worked as a
clerk and truck driver after high school because he could not afford
to attend college. He eventually settled in Texas, where he borrowed
$1,000 to buy five trucks that could carry crude oil from wells in the
Permian Basin to distant refineries. By 1968, this investment had grown
into the Permian Corporation, a multi-million dollar business. Davis
has become one of the most prominent philanthropists in North Carolina.
Because he did not have the chance to go to college himself, education
has been one of Davis' central concerns. His contributions to the SOHP
have supported many oral history projects, strengthening the bonds between
UNC-CH and North Carolina citizens.
The Davis Fund provided for over 200 interviews conducted by the SOHP's
Women's Leadership and Grassroots Activism
project to document how, why, and when North Carolina women have acted
collectively. Those interviews became the basis for the video documentary
Leading Women, which was
sponsored in part by the Davis Fund. Interviews generated by the SOHP's
North Carolina Business History
initiative with support from the Davis Fund contain a wealth of material
on North Carolina's industrial history. And, because the state's industrial
history cannot be understood separately from its political history,
the SOHP used the Davis Fund to sustain the North
Carolina Politics Project for which more than 40 of the state's
political leaders were interviewed about such topics as the reemergence
of the Republican Party, the transformation of Democratic Party politics,
and black political participation since the Voting Rights Act. Two final
initiatives sponsored by the Davis Fund linked North Carolina politics
to grassroots activism and everyday life. The
North Carolina Poverty Fund project included interviews with volunteers
and community organizers who worked with North Carolina's version of
the War on Poverty in the 1960s. The Coastal
North Carolina Project examined the impact of World War II mobilization
on the eastern portions of the state.
These research projects and scholarly works made possible by the Davis
Fund have etched an indelible portrait of recent North Carolina history.
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