This oral history interview is an intimate conversation between two people, both of whom have generously agreed to share this recording with Oral History Summer School, and with you. Please listen in the spirit with which this was shared.
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Deirdre Grant is a mature student at Hawthorne University studying agriculture and a social & environmental justice activist. She is a 65 year old black woman and is married to Phil Grant, also in the archive. She has lived just outside Hudson for three years. In this interview she discusses her Childhood growing up in Pennsylvania's Appalachia where she was raised by her entrepreneurial Grandmother and in Brooklyn with her mother. Her adulthood was spent in Queens and Long Island before finally finding “home” in Columbia County. People who might be interested in this interview include those interested in: PA Appalachia, urban to rural migration, rural to urban migration, the Manhattan Project, environmental justice, racism, segregation, women's history, mothers, Hudson transplants, progressive agriculture.
I am a 29 year old white female at the time this interview was conducted. I am a project participant because of my enrollment in Oral History Summer School, which I've attended both for personal projects as well as for my work at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York City. I live in Brooklyn, New York and work there as a social public history educator and community organizer.
Oral history is an iterative process. In keeping with oral history values of anti-fixity, interviewees will have an opportunity to add, annotate and reflect upon their lives and interviews in perpetuity. Talking back to the archive is a form of “shared authority.”