Celebrating Freedom: The Freedom Summer Oral History Digitization Project

• In Event: Documenting the Black Freedom Struggle, Then and Now

Abstract

The proposed paper will detail a collaborative digitization project at the University of Florida, which celebrates an important historical anniversary, the 50th anniversary of the national Civil Rights movement campaign called Freedom Summer. Freedom Summer was a highly publicized campaign which brought approximately 1,000 young college students and other activists from other parts of the USA to the state of Mississippi, to register blacks to vote despite a history of violence and intimidation by authorities. This bloody and turbulent period of social unrest has been documented by the University of Florida Samuel Proctor Oral History Program (SPOHP). SPOHP owns over 150 recorded interviews with Civil Rights Movement veterans in their archives. The collection includes interviews with such well-known figures as Lawrence Guyot, Director of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in 1964, and Liz Fusco, who served as the Mississippi Statewide Coordinator of Freedom Schools. Other oral histories contain reflections on the interviewees’ work with organizers such as Fannie Lou Hamer, and Stokely Carmichael, as well as organizations such as CORE, SNCC and the SCLC. The project also includes interviews with activist Rosa Parks, concerning the Montgomery Bus boycott of 1955 and other events leading up to 1964. The Rosa Parks interviews are part of the James S. Haskins Collection, George A. Smathers Libraries. The Freedom Summer Oral History Digitization Project has been mounted to make these fascinating, informative interviews accessible to the public by placing the actual sound files and transcripts of the oral histories in the UF Institutional Repository, accompanied by rich metadata for enhanced retrieval by search engines. Beyond making these unique and hidden oral history primary resources available to scholars, students and the public, the team is also creating promotional and instructional materials including a library subject guide to relevant scholarly information and outreach plans.

Author

• Jana Ronan, University of Florida