University of Florida Homepage

Dr. Paul Ortiz, Director 2008-Present

Dr. Ortiz is on sabbatical through the Spring 2024 semester

Humans are wired to be story tellers…that’s kind of the signature element of oral history…in a way it kind of goes back to if you had a grandmother or grandfather, you remember the power of the story that they told.
-Dr. Paul Ortiz, AAHP-055

Image of the Director Paul Ortiz
Dr. Paul Ortíz, Director of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program 2008-present.

Oral History with Dr. Ortiz

  • Dr. Paul Ortiz’s oral history interview, conducted with Joseph DeFrancisco, is available online through the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program archives in the University of Florida collection.

Dr. Paul Ortiz is a PEN award-winning author and historian. He served as a consultant and featured narrator for the PBS series from Henry Louis Gates, Jr. titled: The Black Church: This is Our Story, This is Our Song. He is director of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program and professor of history at the University of Florida.

Professor Ortiz has been the director of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program since the fall semester, 2008. Under his leadership, SPOHP has received several national academic awards. He has helped to raise more than two million dollars in grants, donations, and contracts for the program. In an external review of SPOHP conducted in 2020, the Doris Duke Charitable Trust noted that, “The program’s social justice research methodologies are the focus of scholars and oral history programs across the globe.”

In the past decade, SPOHP has logistically supported hundreds of undergraduates and graduate students who have embarked on oral history field work worldwide. SPOHP-supported students have presented their research at academic conferences, community organizing workshops, and public history panels. SPOHP alumni have become public-facing professors at institutions such as UCLA, Emory University, Texas A & M, Virginia Tech, and the University of Kentucky. Undergraduate alumni have parlayed the research skills they learned at SPOHP to matriculate to elite law schools including Duke, Harvard, Howard, Florida A&M, the University of Pennsylvania, Georgetown, UF and many others.

Paul’s publications include Emancipation Betrayed (University of California Press), a history of the Black Freedom struggle in Florida, and Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Jim Crow South (New Press), which went into its fourth printing in 2014.

His book, An African American and Latinx History of the United States, was identified by Bustle as one of “Ten Books About Race to Read Instead of Asking a Person of Color to Explain Things to You.” Fortune Magazine listed it as one of the “10 books on American history that actually reflect the United States.” An African American and Latinx History has been featured in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the National Anti-Racist Book Festival, and the National Anti-Racist Teach-In among other venues. Since 2018, he has given invited lectures at Harvard, UC-Berkeley, Northwestern, UCLA, Duke, New York University, University of Central Florida, Powell’s Books, Busboys and Poets Books, Microsoft, Wayfair and many other venues.

His latest book is a co-edited volume with Wesley Hogan that features many of the leading scholar activists in the United States, titled: People Power: History, Organizing and Larry Goodwyn’s Democratic Vision in the Twenty-First Century.

Dr. Ortiz was president of the Oral History Association for the 2014-2015 term, exactly forty years after our program’s founder, Dr. Samuel Proctor served in the same capacity.

He is currently the president of the United Faculty of Florida-UF (NEA/AFT/FEA/AFL-CIO).

Professor Ortiz is the faculty adviser for CHISPAS, Por Colombia, and UF NextGen. He was awarded the 2013 César E. Chávez Action and Commitment Award by the Florida Education Association, AFL-CIO. The Samuel Proctor Oral History Program received the Oral History Association’s 2013 Stetson Kennedy Vox Populi Award for outstanding achievement in using oral history to create a more humane and just world. He was the recipient of the Rosa Parks Quiet Courage Award in 2014 for contributions to civil rights and social justice. Ortiz received the Resource Center for Nonviolence’s inaugural Inspirator Award in 2020 for contributions to scholarship and organizing.

Paul serves on the editorial boards for the University of North Carolina’s Latinx Histories book series;  Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies as well as for Palgrave Studies in Oral History, Palgrave Macmillan Books. In 2020-21, he was as an expert reviewer for the State of Connecticut’s new public school curriculum on Black and Latino Studies. He has been a Post-Doctoral Faculty Mentor for the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation as well as for the Ford Foundation Fellowship Program.

Professor Ortiz received his Ph.D. in history from Duke University in 2000.  He earned his Bachelor’s degree from the Evergreen State College in 1990 in History and Political Economy after earning his Associate of Arts Degree from Olympic Community College in 1988.

Ortiz is a third-generation military veteran. He served in the 82nd Airborne Division and 7th Special Forces Group in Central America in the mid-1980s as a radio operator and trainer on mobile teams. He is the recipient of numerous medals and citations including the US Armed Forces Humanitarian Service Medal for meritorious action in the wake of the eruption of the Nevado del Ruiz stratovolcano in Tolima, Colombia in November, 1985. He received an honorable discharge the following year at the rank of Sergeant/E5.

 


Books

Image of the book Emancipation Betrayed“Emancipation Betrayed”
by Dr. Paul Ortiz
University of California Press (2006)
Book available through University of California Press

In this penetrating examination of African American politics and culture, Paul Ortiz throws a powerful light on the struggle of black Floridians to create the first statewide civil rights movement against Jim Crow. Concentrating on the period between the end of slavery and the election of 1920, Emancipation Betrayed vividly demonstrates that the decades leading up to the historic voter registration drive of 1919-20 were marked by intense battles during which African Americans struck for higher wages, took up arms to prevent lynching, forged independent political alliances, boycotted segregated streetcars, and created a democratic historical memory of the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Contrary to previous claims that African Americans made few strides toward building an effective civil rights movement during this period, Ortiz documents how black Floridians formed mutual aid organizations—secret societies, women’s clubs, labor unions, and churches—to bolster dignity and survival in the harsh climate of Florida, which had the highest lynching rate of any state in the union. African Americans called on these institutions to build a statewide movement to regain the right to vote after World War I. African American women played a decisive role in the campaign as they mobilized in the months leading up to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. The 1920 contest culminated in the bloodiest Election Day in modern American history, when white supremacists and the Ku Klux Klan violently, and with state sanction, prevented African Americans from voting.

Ortiz’s eloquent interpretation of the many ways that black Floridians fought to expand the meaning of freedom beyond formal equality and his broader consideration of how people resist oppression and create new social movements illuminate a strategic era of United States history and reveal how the legacy of legal segregation continues to play itself out to this day.

 

Image of the book Remembering Jim Crow Director“Remembering Jim Crow”
by William H. Chafe (Editor), Raymond Gavins (Editor), Robert Korstad (Editor), with Dr. Paul Ortiz and others
New Press (2008)
Book available through Amazon

Hailed as “viscerally powerful” (Publishers Weekly) and “a multimedia triumph” (Kansas City Star), Remembering Jim Crow is a searing story of survival enriched by vivid memories of individual, family, and community triumphs and tragedies.

This landmark in African American oral history is now available in an affordable paperback edition with a remastered MP3 CD of the companion radio documentary program produced by American RadioWorks.

Based on interviews collected by the Behind the Veil Project at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies, this extraordinary book-and-CD set makes available for the first time the most extensive oral history ever recorded of African American life under segregation. In vivid, compelling accounts, men and women from all walks of life tell how their day-to-day activity was subjected to profound and unrelenting racial oppression. At the same time, Remembering Jim Crow is a testament to how black southerners fought back against the system, raising children, building churches and schools, running businesses, and struggling for respect in a society that denied them the most basic rights. This new edition of the original volume makes the recordings available for the first time in MP3 audio CDs.

The audio for this new edition is on MP3 compact discs. MP3 audio books on compact disc can be played on newer CD players that support MP3 technology and accept a standard-sized CD, on any personal computer that has Apple’s iTunes, Microsoft’s Media Player or similar software, and on an iPod and other personal MP3 players.

That makes what we do here a little different than some of the other research centers…the oral history center is going to be a place that tries to bridge the gaps between the broader community, the state, and the university.

-Dr. Paul Ortiz, AAHP-055

For additional information, contact SPOHP, call the offices at (352) 392-7168, and connect with us online today.