The North Carolina State University Libraries offers Red, White & Black, a mobile web app that allows users to employ their smart phones and other mobile devices to embark on a self-guided walking tour that highlights the rich history of African Americans at NC State. The app tells the story of African-American students and faculty in NCSU’s history. The Red, White & Black mobile tour is an audio and photographic guide to African-American history at NC State University for your mobile device. This historical walking tour of NC State uses a location-aware campus map. Users can browse events by date or place and view related historical images.
The app grew out of a popular walking tour that the school's African American Cultural Center gives a few times a year. A map of campus, highlighted with information, pictures, and audio recordings, tells the story of African-American students and faculty in NCSU’s history.
From 1939 when Ellen McGuire, a former slave who retired from NC State after working for fifty years mostly in the infirmary, to 1957 when Robert Clemons became the first African American to graduate from the university (with a professional degree in electrical engineering), to 2010 when students were confronted with racial epithets painted in the Freedom Expression Tunnel, this walking tour allows users to explore, at their own pace, spaces on NC State’s campus that have had significant impact on the lives and experiences of African American students, employees, and the larger community.
This tour integrates extensive existing digital collections from the NCSU Libraries with student research and student readings to provide access to events, images, and stories that help to tell this important history. The location-aware web app allows students to connect with university history in the places in which they learn every day, further engaging them with the people, events, and environment that have shaped their campus. Owners of devices that do not support GPS or other location-detection methods can still manually navigate through the website to enjoy a historical tour of African American history and achievement at NC State.
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