Dr. Charles W. Crawford

A University of Memphis professor, this Local Treasure has spent a lifetime helping to bring the past into the present.

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Editor's Note: “Local Treasures” is an occasional series that celebrates our city’s senior celebrities, people whose impact over the decades has helped make Memphis a better place.

Although both gentlemen obviously share a deep interest in local history, Dr. Charles W. Crawford would probably never tolerate working with Vance Lauderdale for very long. This magazine’s history columnist often brags about the amount of time he spends sleeping, napping, or dozing. Meanwhile, the University of Memphis professor, and director of that institution’s long-running Oral History Project, doesn’t sleep much at all and never seems to stop working.

“I found out in graduate school that I could subsist on four-and-a-half hours of sleep at night,” he says, sitting in his office/library in Mitchell Hall, home of the U of M’s history department. “I mainly sleep on the weekends. And when my day here ends at 4:30, if I stay until midnight, I gain another day.” What’s more, when he is writing a book or journal article, which is quite often, he will write all night. “And then I get up and get ready for the morning class,” he says.

Only by putting in double-days and not wasting time sleeping, it seems, has Crawford been able to compile a curriculum vitae that spans 15 single-spaced pages, lined with lists of publications, honors, memberships, and other accomplishments. Along the way, he has befriended such politicians as former Tennessee governors Winfield Dunn and Lamar Alexander, whose portraits hang behind his desk, along with a photo of a young Albert Gore Jr., inscribed, “To my great friend and teacher.”

In the late 1960s, Gore was attending Harvard, and “they had a deprived curriculum there,” says Crawford, “since they did not teach Tennessee history. So he, or more likely his father, thought it was vital that he learn Tennessee history. He came here to take my class one summer before his senior year, and we got acquainted. I encouraged him to have his own political career.”

Crawford later worked for Gore, in small ways, when he was in the Senate, “handling travel and other things for him when he was in Congress, and then of course as vice president. I was working on a book during his first inauguration, but went to Washington for the second one. I was really hoping he would be president in 2000.”

Without naming anybody specifically, Crawford observes, “Tennessee could really use some good political leadership, and if they want to run for office, just let me know. I will make a small, teacher-sized contribution, but it would be the best kind of money, which is early money — before anyone believes in you.”

As a young boy growing up on the family farm along the Spring River in Arkansas, Crawford spent a lot of time alone. The farm was so isolated that when he joined the Boy Scouts, eventually reaching the rank of Star Scout, he had to take part in their “Lone Scout” program. “When there weren’t enough people to form a troop, they would appoint an advisor — usually your father — and you would earn merit badges and all that,” he says. “It was a remnant of the past, when a lot of America was rural.”

With few companions, “the farm was where I developed my lifelong habit of reading,” he says. “Even today, every time I have a break, or don’t have to watch when I’m driving, I’m usually reading a book or something.”

Crawford earned a bachelor’s degree from Harding College in Searcy, Arkansas, a master’s degree from the University of Arkansas, and a Ph.D. from the University of Mississippi — all in history. He landed his first teaching job at the high school in the little town of Lewisville, Arkansas, near the Texas border. “That was very educational for me,” he says, “because there were only four or five of us in the whole social sciences department, so I would teach political science, geography, history, and so forth.”

After pondering a career as an FBI agent (“Government service looked like fun,” he says), Crawford decided he would make a good history professor, since “you’d get to deal with things you were already interested in, and help people, too.” He started his long teaching career as a graduate assistant in history at Ole Miss, and in 1962 was hired as an assistant professor at then-Memphis State University, where he has remained ever since.

Along the way, he has earned an impressive number of accolades, including such honors as the Book of Golden Deeds Award from the Exchange Club of Memphis, the National Teacher of the Year Award from the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Meritorious Faculty Award from the University of Memphis, and a Resolution of Appreciation from the Tennessee State Senate.

These accolades (and many others) are a tribute to his teaching, writing, and editing skills. After serving as editor of Cal Alley, the 1973 biography of The Commercial Appeal’s longtime political cartoonist, Crawford published his first book, Yesterday’s Memphis, an illustrated history of this city, in 1976. Others followed, including Tennessee: Land, History, and Government (1984), Dynamic Tennessee (1990), and National Bank of Commerce: The First 120 Years (1993). Working on the NBC history presented special challenges. “People in the bank were very skeptical of what I was doing,” he recalls, laughing. “They thought I was a secret bank examiner or something.”

One of Crawford’s bookshelves is lined with gray-spined books that tell the history of almost every county in Tennessee, and he served as editor or co-editor of most of them. His contributions to local history also include work as a consultant on the 1984 film The Old Forest, associate editor of the Memphis Encyclopedia published by Rhodes College, manuscript reader for the Tennessee Historical Quarterly, book reviews and other articles for the West Tennessee Historical Society Quarterly, and commentary for history programs aired on local television (especially WKNO-TV) from the 1990s to the present day.

An especially valuable project was the compilation of Commercial Appeal columns written by historian Paul R. Coppock in the 1970s and 1980s. Co-edited by Crawford and Coppock’s wife, Helen, and published over a span of nine years, the four volumes of Paul Coppock’s Mid-South are almost essential reading for anyone interested in local history.

In the 1960s, Columbia University began to compile interviews from politicians who had been involved in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal program, designed to provide public-works jobs during the Depression. Their efforts were distributed to other researchers and libraries, and — thanks to the advent of portable tape recorders — other schools around the country began their own oral history programs.

“Retrieving memories is like dealing with a flood. You’re trying to save what you can.” 

— Dr. Charles Crawford

“In 1967, I was appointed by Cecil C. Humphries [U of M president from 1960 to 1972] to head up the Oral History Project here,” says Crawford. The department’s first task was an oral history of the Tennessee Valley Authority. “We had plenty of money for travel, and I would go to New York or California or Florida or Wisconsin and was able to interview most of the surviving high-level people who had been involved in the early days of TVA,” he says. “If anyone does serious research on that topic, they almost have to go through our collection.”

The Oral History Project contains thousands of taped interviews conducted by paid workers or students. Some of their efforts are rewarded with grant money, but “quite a lot of the interviews are done because people simply want to do them,” says Crawford. “At a university, people are supposed to have curiosity about knowledge.”

The collection includes such major topics as “Martin Luther King: Assassination in Memphis,” “The Centennial Oral History of the University of Memphis,” “Memphis During the Crump Era,” “Tennessee Political History: 1920s to the Present,” and dozens of others. Many of the interviews have been transcribed, but many are still available only as audiotapes, stored on reels.

One of the Project’s largest endeavors is “Memoirs of World War II Veterans in Memphis and the Mid-South.” That has proven to be especially challenging, because so many veterans — many of them in their twilight years now — are passing away. “Those interviews haven’t yet been transcribed, because at the rate they were disappearing, we thought we’d put the effort in getting the interviews done, and the transcriptions could come later,” says Crawford. “Let’s try to do one more, then one more, and so forth.” The collection currently contains more than 400 interviews.

Crawford is well aware of the hurdles facing many of these projects, because the work can get lost, or the fragile tapes can be damaged. His department was involved in a major oral history project with a local hospital, but when that facility moved its main campus east, all the tapes were misplaced in the move; they still haven’t been located. “Retrieving memories is like dealing with a flood,” he says. “You’re trying to save what you can before the flood waters get there. You’re always racing against death when you’re doing oral history interviews. You have to get them while the people are still living, and you have only a certain amount of time. If it’s not done, or” — referring to the hospital project — “if it’s done and then lost, it’s a tragedy.”

Space prevents listing all the history organizations that have benefitted from Crawford’s efforts. They include local groups such as the Memphis Arts Council, Leadership Memphis, Shelby County Historical Commission, West Tennessee Historical Society, Tennessee Historical Society, and Tennessee Humanities Council. On a national level, he has been involved with the Oral History Association, National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Organization of American Historians. He has put in many hours as an editor or editorial referee for university presses in Tennessee, Mississippi, Arkansas, Kentucky, Illinois, and Georgia. He has even served as a consultant to the American Red Cross, when that group compiled an oral history of its early days.

“But all that is just job stuff,” Crawford says. He seems most proud of the many students he has worked with over the years, and his résumé includes a long list of students he has mentored — as a teacher, adviser, or thesis or dissertation director — with many of them moving on to professional roles in education, libraries, journalism, and other fields.

“It’s not that West Tennessee finally has history. We’ve always had a lot of history,” he says. “But we have people in our department now who are committed to publishing it, and the work is getting recognition. I’ve enjoyed seeing that happen, and perhaps even to nudge them along a little.”

He certainly stays busy. On the afternoon of this interview, he was taking his Memphis history class on a tour of the Harahan Bridge and the Big River Crossing, the Church on the River, and even the WREG-TV studios (“since we’re also learning about the history of communication”). If time permits, the professor wants to show them Martyrs Park, “so they can learn about the yellow fever epidemic.” For Crawford, these places are also a classroom, “just a different kind of classroom.”

Don’t even mention the word “retirement” to him. This summer, he intends to take a brief respite from teaching to return to the Arkansas farm still owned by his family but doesn’t plan to stay there very long. “It’s a nice place to get away,” he says, “but I would be bored if I spent a long time in the country. I’ve learned to appreciate urban life. It’s good to have bright lights, music, things going on, places to go, lots of friends around.”

He will take some time off from teaching next year, because in the spring of 2020, the University of Memphis is offering him a sabbatical so he can write his memoirs. “It’s just some of the things I’ve been talking about, some of the things I’ve seen.”

For the man who has heard thousands of others tell their stories, Dr. Charles Crawford has decided it’s finally time to write his own.