Raymond Gavins (1942–2016) was a professor of history at Duke University and the project director of “Behind the Veil: Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow South,” an oral history project undertaken by Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. He was a co-editor, with William H. Chafe and Robert Korstad, of Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Talk About Life in the Segregated South (The New Press) and the author of The Perils and Prospects of Southern Black Leadership.