Tidewater Stories: an oral history collection
Tidewater Stories is a publicly available audio collection of oral histories, podcasts, and interviews of Black residents in the Hampton Roads region, with a particular focus on how these communities have experienced and fought against environmental racism and inequality. Their stories – drawn from interviewees in the Virginia coastal cities of Norfolk, Portsmouth, Newport News, and Hampton – shed light on the region’s 20th century social and environmental history.
Access the full collection here.
Photo (left): Lambert's Point in Norfolk, Virginia. Photo by Adrian Wood.
Oral Histories
Personal histories from Norfolk, Portsmouth, Newport News, & Hampton, Virginia
An intergenerational archive of oral histories highlights young people and elder residents living and working in the Hampton Roads region. In this collection, interviewees discuss their experiences living in these coastal cities shaped by segregation, housing inequality, and a changing environmental landscape. Many of these interviewees have been active in city politics, local civil rights campaigns, education, and environmental justice advocacy.
Access this sub-collection here.
Audio & Environmental Justice
Testimonies and interviews on environmental justice
Policymakers depend on residents' views in shaping the built environment. To shape policy, Black residents in the Hampton Roads region have discussed their experiences with environmental racism and advocated for better living conditions. In these interviews and official testimonies, activists speak about how sea level rise and environmental toxins including coal dust have had deadly consequences for their communities. These accounts provide a window into the ways that environmental crises continue to burden working class and Black communities daily. While there remains deep frustration about the government's inability to address environmental racism, these interviews illuminate how residents engage regulatory processes toward their own visions of environmental justice.
Access this sub-collection here.
Photo (above): Newport News, Virginia. Photo by Adrian Wood.
Podcast
"Wading Between Two Titans"
Tidewater Stories also digitally houses “Wading Between Two Titans,” a five-episode podcast that explores housing and race against the background of sea-level rise in coastal Norfolk. The podcast examines how a history of racist housing patterns has shaped new climate resiliency plans in the city. It also investigates the phenomenon of “climate gentrification.” The podcast was written, recorded, produced, edited, mixed, mastered and hosted by Adrian Wood.
Access this sub-collection here. Learn more at Twotitans.org.
Show art by Adrian Wood.Podcast
"Crosswinds"
The collection includes episodes from “Crosswinds,” a podcast that investigates how toxic coal dust impacts residents living in the shadow of coal terminals in Norfolk and Newport News. The port of Virginia is the largest coal export system in the United States. Residents of the predominantly Black neighborhoods of Southeast Newport News and Lambert’s Point in Norfolk, Virginia, have long experienced the health and housing costs of the dust, and continue to advocate for its containment and removal. This podcast was created by Adrian Wood.
Learn more at Coal Dust Kills.
Show art by Adrian Wood. 
University of Virginia Special Collections
These oral histories audio files are digitally open to the public through the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, housed by the University of Virginia.