BLACK COMMUNITY PROJECT Bunch, retired state employee, discusses life in Centralia, Illinois as an African American; social conditions and school segregation, gambling and the Emancipation Day celebration. He also discusses Springfield neighborhoods, schools, and businesses in the 1930's and 40's, segregation and discrimination as both a citizen and state employee. He describes racially mixed neighborhoods, his 34 years as an employee of the state with the maintenance department, Illinois politicians, his poetry, family history, their education, and people who have influenced him. References are made to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jacob Bunn Jr., Simeon Osby (see OS2*), and Illinois Secretaries of State Edward J. Hughes, Richard Yates Rowe, Edward J. Barrett, Charles F. Carpentier, and Paul Powell.

4 tapes, 360 mins., 139 pp. Interview by Reverend Negil L. McPherson, 1974 OPEN See collateral file: Interviewer's notes, copies of Bunch's poems and photographs.