Stories From The Stacks

In the late 1960s, the civil rights struggle had given way to a more militant black power movement. The Opportunities Industrialization Center (OIC) offered a business-friendly alternative: black empowerment through job training and economic advancement. In this episode, Jessica Levy (postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University's Department of African American Studies) talks with us about how OIC offered vocational and corporate education programs for African Americans in partnership with American companies like Gulf Oil and General Motors. Following their success in America, OIC and American businesses exported these methods to apartheid-era South Africa, arguing that the lessons of desegregation in the United States could apply there too.