Samuel Proctor Oral History Program (SPOHP), UF Department of Linguistics, and George A. Smathers Libraries are proud to announce the establishment of an NEH-funded collaborative project entitled, Reanimating African American Oral Histories of the Gulf South (RGS). The project’s foundation is the Joel Buchanan African American Oral History Archive, which is ongoing and currently contains over 1000 interviews with African Americans in the Gulf South, a population absent from many other oral history collections. Contained within this archive are the stories of African Americans who lived through the transatlantic slave trade, the Jim Crow era, the Civil Rights Movement, the wars of the 20th Century, and the first Black presidency, along with the voices of those typically marginalized in the study of African American histories such as the Gullah-Geechee and Black Seminoles. This project emphasizes the aforementioned subjects and an extensive analysis of African American Language in the Gulf South (AALGS). The RGS project organizes these elements into a curriculum with enormous potential for educators and their students, or in alternative educational environments such as teacher, adult, senior, or museum education programs. To access the project’s components, click on the selections below.
Mission Statement
Through the Reanimating African American Oral Histories of the Gulf South project, supported by the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH), educators and other community members will be able to access and engage with archived oral histories of over 700 African Americans who reside in the Gulf South.
