Speech, Lexicon and Modeling Lab

The Joel Buchanan Archive of African American Oral History contains over 700 oral history interviews with African American elders throughout Florida and the wider Gulf South. These interviews and the overall projects associated with them have resulted in numerous public programs, university seminars on African American history and Ethnic Studies, and community-based oral history workshops.

The Buchanan archive contains interviews from numerous different projects at the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program, including the African American History Project (AAHP) which began in 2009 through the efforts of Paul Ortiz, Marna Weston, and Joel Buchanan; the Fifth Avenue Blacks collection (FAB) created by Joel Buchanan in 1981; the Mississippi Freedom Project (MFP) which derives from SPOHP’s annual trip to the Mississippi Delta to interview Civil Rights Movement veterans; the Oscar Mack Project (OMP), detailing the remarkable story and legacy of Oscar Mack and his family; the Underground Railroad collection (URR) which includes interviews with Black Seminoles and Gullah-Geechee elders and leaders; the Civil Rights in St. Augustine collection begun by David Colburn in the late 1970s; the St. Augustine African American History collection (SAAH), begun by Raja Rahim and Annemarie Nichols in 2016; and many more.

These interviews offer a wealth of African American narratives and complex reflections on topics, events and themes including:

• Life under Jim Crow, including institution-building, educational philosophies and methods, food security, community-based healthcare, support and service organizations, displacement and dispossession, labor, armed self-defense, and tactics of resistance.
• Civil Rights activism, including the Tallahassee Bus Boycott movement and numerous sit-ins and wade-ins.
• Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Southern Regional Council (SRC), local movement organizations, and the integration of public institutions, facilities, and higher education, including SEC sports.
• Personal memories of luminaries such as Mary Mcleod Bethune, Ralph Abernathy, Howard Thurman, Harry T. Moore, Benjamin Mays, Martin Luther King Jr., and Zora Neale Hurston.
• Interviews with pastors and leaders of historic Black churches throughout Florida.
• Veterans of World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and the Gulf Wars.
• Gullah-Geechee elders and Black Seminoles discussing coastal slavery, cultural traditions, and the legacies of the Seminole wars.
• African diasporic heritage from North America and the Caribbean.
• Narratives of forced slavery migration into Florida from the 1850s.
• The continued significance of the presidency of Barack Obama.