Samuel Proctor Oral History Program

When Samuel Proctor established the Oral History Program in 1967, he sought to advance the contributions of people who are generally left out of history's master narratives. Our program's commitment is to gathering, preserving, and promoting oral history narratives that emphasize human rights and social justice. SPOHP has been a forum for the current generation of rising activists and community organizers to learn from their predecessors and to teach our students the arts of interviewing and storytelling as tools of social change. Fundamentally, we seek to promote civic engagement and activism. We use a broad variety of tools including podcasts, radio, and public programs to attempt to make an educational impact on our state as well as the world in general.

As a testament to our commitment to social justice initiatives, SPOHP and the P.K. Yonge Library of Florida History were selected for the honor of preparing Stetson Kennedy's writings, recordings, and papers for public access through the University of Florida libraries.

SPOHP preserves the personal narratives of communities such as Seminole, Cherokee, Creek, and Lumbee Indians in the southeastern United States. SPOHP also promotes the experiences of Florida's working people, including laborers in the citrus industry, physical plant operatives, water management engineers, nurses, teachers, and active members of various labor unions in Right-to-Work Florida.

We feature over 5,300 interviews through our online archives, and understand the importance of making this information accessible. SPOHP relies on the creativity of our students, staff, and community volunteers to share this research with the public through podcasts, videos, and research projects. These resources are a toolbox for educators in Florida and in the Gulf South who are hungry for fresh historical material.

After taking a workshop at SPOHP, a high school teacher from McComb, Mississippi instructed her students on learning about their community through oral history interviews and other modes of primary research. By hearing about the lived experience of grassroots activists, the students could understand with greater depth how African Americans worked to end Jim Crow laws in the Deep South. This teacher is Falana McDaniel, the coordinator of the McComb Legacies Project at McComb High School, who won the Oral History Association's Martha Ross Teaching Award.

SPOHP has local partnerships with social justice groups such as churches, Gainesville Women's Liberation, Gainesville Veterans for Peace, and the Civic Media Center, which is a community activism center and library for alternative and non-corporate publications in Gainesville. Gainesville's progressive newspaper, The Gainesville Iguana, features our interviews both online and in their print editions.

SPOHP has also maintains a network of partnerships with similar organizations across the country, including Student Action with Farmworkers in Durham, North Carolina, the Sunflower County Freedom Project in the Mississippi Delta, Teaching for Change in McComb, Mississippi, and the Library of Congress's Veterans History Project through the National Folklife Center. SPOHP's contribution to these partnerships is carried out by facilitating and processing interviews to generate more educational materials. These partnerships allow each organization to advance their goals by sharing resources and audiences.

SPOHP's African American History Program (AAHP) began three years ago pending approval of a grant through the University of Florida Office of the Provost. The initial intention of the project was to collect oral histories with African Americans at UF and in Gainesville. The program shifted rapidly, expanding to additional counties in Florida, the United States, Mexico and the Bahamas. Furthermore, the project brought to light the experiences of lesser-known civil rights activists involved in the Tallahassee Bus Boycott, the Congress of Racial Equality, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. AAHP's graduate coordinators have used the interviews as teaching materials in university and K-12 classrooms to highlight the struggles that transformed the social, educational, and racial fabric of the Gulf South. In the summer of 2012, AAHP partnered with the National Park Service's Underground Railroad Conference to conduct oral history interviews with descendants of Black Seminole warriors who left the state at the conclusion of the 2^nd Seminole War in 1842.

Public programs enable SPOHP to share exceptional works of scholarship using oral history, but the programs also facilitate a unique opportunity for our audiences to dialog with high-profile speakers. We put our scarce resources where our values are and we have provided funds and have co-sponsored the annual Gainesville Latino Film festival, as well as public programs on campus and in the region on the histories of academic freedom of speech, COINTELPRO, feminism, labor organizing, Hispanic Heritage Month and other events. We always have our entire public program series professionally videotaped and we donate these tapes to area teachers, libraries, and community organizers, and share them on our website.

In March 2013, marriage and family historian Stephanie Coontz spoke on the 50^th anniversary of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. In February 2013, Alan Rosen gave a public lecture on his book about the first series of interviews conducted with Holocaust survivors in 1946. In November 2012, Dr. Larry Rivers, historian and president of Fort Valley State University gave a lecture on his book, Rebels and Runaways: Slave Resistance in 19^th Century Florida. Rivers and many Florida historians agree that the Second Seminole War in northeast Florida was a slave rebellion, and stressed that many slaves who fought for their freedom have been previously overlooked.

College of Liberal Arts and Sciences #nbsp;