UF awards $150,000 grant to preserve oral histories of local African-Americans

January 14, 2010

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — The University of Florida Office of the Provost has awarded a $150,000 grant to a project 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.