Welcome to the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program
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RADIO SPOHP IS ON THE AIR
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SPOHP 2010 SPRING PUBLIC LECTURE SERIES
The Samuel Proctor Oral History Program is proud to announce its 2010 Spring Public History Series. The theme of this year’s series is The History and Future of Community Organizing in America. Each event explores the ways that ordinary people, broadly defined, have created and sustained social movements for justice in the United States. We seek to promote dialog on civic engagement, social activism, and citizenship in an era of rapid change.
For general information as well as details on co-sponsoring or volunteering contact SPOHP at 392-7168 or
kwetherbee@ufl.edu.
City of Ocoee 4th Annual Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Unity Parade
Paul Ortiz gave the keynote address at this event, which was covered by the Orlando Sentinel. To read the article please click here. The text of the address is available here.
UF in the Mississippi Delta: Student Reflections on Recording the Civil Rights Movement
Date and Time: February 17, Wednesday, 6 to 8 p.m. Location: Civic Media Center, 433 South Main Street, Gainesville Florida.
During the summers of 2008 and 2009 students from the University of Florida traveled to the Mississippi Delta to interview pioneers of the civil rights movement. This program will bring the remarkable visual, musical, and political culture of the Delta to Florida.
Activists Among Us: the Gainesville Women's Movement Across Generations
Date and Time: April 8, Thursday, 6 to 8 p.m. Location: Matheson Museum, 513 E. University Avenue, Gainesville, Florida.
This panel discussion and multimedia event will bring together local activists from the 1950s through the present to discuss the ongoing struggle for social justice, gender equality, and human rights in Gainesville and beyond. Moderated by Dr. Patricia Hilliard-Nunn. Panelists include: Vivian Filer, Kathie Sarachild, Jane Hiers, Rosa B. Williams, Sallie Ann Harrison and Corky Culver.
Where Do We Go From Here? Translating King's Unfinished Agenda into the Era of Obama
Multimedia presentation by award-winning author and historian Mike Honey. Date and Time: April 14, Wednesday, 7 to 9 p.m. Location: Eastside Recreation Center, 2841 E. University Avenue, Gainesville, Florida
Dr. Mike Honey’s most recent book is Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign (2007), which won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. He is the president of the Labor and Working-Class History Association. Honey is also the author of Black Workers Remember: An Oral History of Segregation, Unionism, and the Freedom Struggle.
SPOHP NEWS ONLINE
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PODCASTS
SPOHP's podcasts are now available on iTunes.
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Listen to SPOHP podcasts directly from this site on our new PROCTOR PODCAST page.
RECENT EPISODES:
Sallie Harrison on womens' activism in Gainesville
Dale Twachtman on water management in Florida
LISTEN to SPOHP Director Paul Ortiz speaking about his own experiences conducting oral histories on UCF's Public History Podcast.
NEW PROJECTS
SPOHP is proud to announce two new projects that will document the lives of two very important legal legends. We recently began collecting interviews related to the lives of Hon. Stephan Mickle and Chesterfield Smith. MORE
UF AWARDS $150,000 GRANT TO PRESERVE ORAL HISTORIES OF LOCAL AFRICAN AMERICANS
The University of Florida Office of the Provost has awarded a $150,000 grant to the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program to preserve African-American history in Alachua County.
The Alachua County African-American History Project will enable the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program to conduct and transcribe oral histories with African-Americans in Alachua County, the University of Florida, and surrounding areas who came of age during the final decades of legal segregation. Researchers will explore themes such as landownership, labor, entrepreneurship, civil rights, education, and the histories of institutions such as schools, churches and civic organizations.
The project developed following conversations between UF President Bernie Machen and Paul Ortiz, the director of the oral history program, about the importance of preserving the memories of the rapidly passing generations of African-Americans born prior to the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954.
“We won’t have these people forever,” Machen said in his opening remarks at a March 2009 public program. “Nor will we have the many white and black Americans who went on the Freedom Rides, cheered at the ‘I Have a Dream Speech,’ and integrated the nation’s other secondary schools and universities. Now is the time to gather their memories — to add their stories to our story.”
The three-year research project will involve undergraduates and graduate students who will conduct oral histories as part of research seminars and community-based internships. These histories will be used to establish an expanded archive of black historical narratives on segregation and the civil rights movement.
“The archival collection will be a premier site for scholars to study African-American history as well as the histories of race relations, social change, and the modern South,” Ortiz said.
The research project will also produce educational materials, podcasts, a Web site, and a book on African-American history in Florida.
This project continues to generate significant notice in the press.The Gainesville Sun recently profiled this exciting new project. This article is available here. The Independent Florida Alligator also featured this program in an article on the importance of preserving black history. That article is available here.
WELCOME TO THE SAMUEL PROCTOR ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM!
One of our undergraduates describes the work we do at the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program as “history with a
pulse.” I think this phrase perfectly describes the vision of our founding director, Samuel Proctor. Within the past year we have sponsored a series of public history programs and lectures on topics including World War II, the Civil Rights Movement, faculty unionism at UF, and environmental history. We also initiated a national podcast documentary series on “iTunes” to bring our nation’s remarkable history to today’s media-savvy youth. The oral history interviews we conducted this past year reflect the increasing diversity of our society. We recorded the stories of retired African American educators, former governors, farm worker organizers, ranchers, as well as environmental activists in the southeast. We broadcast stories about the Islamic faith in Gainesville, Jewish American WWII veterans, and the epic controversy surrounding the Miami Jetport project among other topics.
We are embarking on new research projects. Along with leading environmental historians Jack Davis and Steve Noll, we are writing an oral history book on the crisis of water and the environment that will inform contemporary public policy debates on the “Oil of the 21st Century.” Our Community Organizing in America Oral History Project will focus on the lives and dreams of younger social justice activists who are transforming the meaning of civic engagement in our society. Join us the evening of April 8, 2010 for a special public program on the history of Women’s Activism in Gainesville. This will be held at the Matheson Museum in downtown Gainesville.
Please browse through our web site to learn more about us. I invite you to join us either by volunteering your time, telling a friend about us, or perhaps even making a modest donation to our program. Working together, we will preserve our fragile history for future generations!
Paul Ortiz
Director
ACTIVISTS AMONG US: THE GAINESVILLE WOMEN"S MOVEMENT ACROSS GENERATIONS
"Activists Among Us: the Gainesville Women's Movement Across Generations" will take place on Thursday, April 8, 2010 from 6:30-8:30 pm at the Matheson Museum. Sponsored by the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program, the panel discussion will bring together local activists from the 1950s through the present to discuss the ongoing struggle for social justice, gender equality, and human rights. The panel will also serve as a springboard for the collection and preservation of historical materials on the history of women's activism in Gainesville.
Panelists include: Vivian Filer, Kathie Sarachild, Jane Hiers, Rosa B. Williams, Sallie Ann Harrison and Corky Culver.
For more information please call the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at 352-392-7168 or email
kwetherbee@ufl.edu
SPOHP FEATURED IN USA TODAY
Our Native American collection was featured in a USA Today article on the preservation of oral histories by several major universities. This is our largest collection and it contains more than 900 interviews with Native Americans, including Seminoles, Cherokees, and Creeks. A selection of these interviews will be available as podcasts in the near future. The entire article can be found here.
UF BLACK ALUMNI WEEKEND 2009
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Left to right: Alicia Antone, director of development at UF Libraries; SPOHP interviewer Marna Weston; Sam Taylor, first UF black student government president (1972); and SPOHP Director Paul Ortiz. |
Sept. 4-6, SPOHP was invited by the UF Association of Black Alumni to conduct oral history interviews during the Black Alumni Reunion Weekend in Gainesville. In a few hours, SPOHP volunteers were able to collect 14 interviews on topics ranging from the social climate for African American students during their time at UF to the changes they would like to see implented at UF today to make it a more inclusive institution.
"This is a golden opportunity for the UF Oral History Program," said SPOHP Director Paul Ortiz. "We have approximately 1,000 interviews in our archival collection that discuss some aspect of the development of the University of Florida. In an academic sense, we serve as the institutional memory of the university. In our voluminous collection of oral histories, we have only about 40 interviews with African Americans who give their perspectives about UF. It is time to achieve a greater historical balance in our holdings, and this gives us the opportunity to begin to do just that."
MISSISSIPPI RESEARCH TRIP 2009
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During the week of Aug. 18-23, 2009, the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at UF returned to the Mississippi Delta to continue research on the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi with veteran Civil Rights activists and leading scholars of the Mississippi Freedom Movement. SPOHP brought a research team of UF undergraduate and graduate students, as well as one student from FSU, to collaborate with the Sunflower County Civil Rights Organization in conducting oral history interviews in the historic Mississippi Delta region. |
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The research team focused on uncovering the movement’s origins and researching its impact, as well as documenting contemporary legacies in a region that gave birth to one of the most vibrant social movements in American history. The trip was the second of its kind, the first one having taken place one year ago. |
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In 2008, SPOHP participants conducted interviews with veterans of the Civil Rights Movement on topics such as the formation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), the establishment of Freedom Schools, the leadership of local people in the Civil Rights Movement, and the personal histories from participants in Mississippi’s Freedom Summer of 1964. The 2009 team expanded geographic coverage of data collection under the supervision of Mississippi Valley State University Professor Stacy J. White, the Sunflower County Rights Organization, and SNCC veteran Margaret Block. The mayor of Cleveland, Mississippi, Billy Nowell, hosted a reception welcoming the research team to his city. 2010 will mark the 50th anniversary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), one of the main organizing groups in Mississippi, and SPOHP will be returning to collect another round of interviews.
A highlight of the 2009 trip included a scholars’ panel at Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi, on the legacies of the Civil Rights and Black Power eras. Along with SPOHP Director Paul Ortiz, participants included: Ohio State University Professor Hasan Jeffries, author of the newly released Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama's Black Belt; SUNY-Geneseo Professor Emilye Crosby, author of A Little Taste of Freedom: The Black Freedom Struggle in Claiborne County, Mississippi; University of Southern Mississippi Professor Curtis Austin, author of Up Against the Wall: Violence in the Making and Unmaking of the Black Panther Party.
Listen to an audio podcast featuring selected segments from the 2008 trip, including interviews with longtime SNCC activists and Civil Rights Movement educators Margaret Block and Hollis Watkins, who spoke about the history of SNCC, the importance of music in the Civil Rights Movement, and the ongoing fight for racial equality.
