The oral historians camera turned on. Vivian Washington Filer lifted her head and looked into the lens. After decades of waiting, she had a chance to set a record in Gainesville, Florida by sharing what it took her and her friend to consolidate the Alachua County doctor’s office in 1964.
“Today is April 4th, 2019” University of Florida historian he began, and when Ms. Filer, then 80 years old, heard her name, looked straight ahead and smiled.
The people who marched and organized in their teens and 20s during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s, when segregation was legal and disenfranchisement was widespread, are now in their 70s and 80s.
Every year fewer activists of that era, a monumental period of activity burst, survive. It was one of the most important periods in American history, mired in bloody beatings and deaths and remembered for the epoch-making laws passed after it.
While the experiences of the most prominent civil rights activists are well documented, the views of many of the tens of thousands of people who stood beside them were shared in a much more limited way or were not recorded at all. Eventually, the movement spread across the country, historians say, to thousands of locations such as Gainesville.
Attempts to record the oral histories of these activists have been made in parts of the country for decades. But the coronavirus pandemic has forced historians to act. Many see the coming years as their last chance to collect testimony from those who have never been quoted in articles or mentioned in the history books, despite devoting their youth to seeking justice.
“Many people my age who fought for freedom know so much that others don’t know because our stories die with us,” Ms Filer said on a recent afternoon. “Therefore, there is an urgent need to tell our story here and now.”
This urgency was felt by David Kline, professor of history at San Diego State University and one of the oral historians, who was asked to be interviewed in 2013 for Civil Rights History Project. A joint initiative of the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture collects testimonies from members of the civil rights movement.
Professor Kline said he knew what he was dealing with: time.
He packed his light brown suit, donned a collared shirt, and traveled the country looking for local activists.
Professor Kline went to Chester, Virginia, he said, where Wyatt T Walker, a key strategist in the civil rights protests, was waiting for him at the nursing home, looking “wonderfully present and strong” as he sat in his wheelchair telling stories. Mr Walker died four years later in 2018.
In 2016, Mr. Kline traveled to Santa Rosa, California to interview Elbert Howard, whose wife warned the historian: “He is unwell.” According to her, this is their last chance to record his story for posterity. Mr. Howard, known as the Big Man and founder of the Black Panther party in Oakland, California, died two years after the interview at the age of 80.
“There are so many people dying in the wider civil rights movement,” said Guha Shankar, who helped Professor Kline and other historians interview and coordinated the project.
According to him, a fifth of the 178 people interviewed by the project have died in recent years.
“There will always be too many people to count, but the best thing we can do is find as many as we can now, before it’s too late,” said Cortland Cox, 81, former field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. . a civil rights group that drew its power from youth and grassroots organizations in the 1960s.
Mr. Cox and historians at Duke University helped start SNCC Digital Gatewayan oral history project to gather testimonies from as many SNCC activists as possible.
Of course, he said, people know about President Lyndon B. Johnson and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But what about black children who were pointed with a white fire hose? Or teenagers thrown into hot prison cells?
Now oral historians are focused on finding activists in undocumented rural areas and small towns.
“After all, these are important people,” Mr. Cox said. “After all, if they didn’t exist and activate, we couldn’t exist.”
Briana Salas, Ph.D. a Texas Christian University student and oral historian, said the pandemic has complicated her efforts over the past two years to recruit activists of that generation.
“We want to be able to protect them,” she said. “This is a serious problem.”
These stories not only acknowledge and capture the role of activists in history, but also give educators and their students a new way to discuss that era in the classroom,” said John Gartrell, director of the John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and Culture. at Duke University.
“Activists share the goal of spreading the word,” Mr. Gartrell said.
Seth Kotch, director Southern Oral History Programa project at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which has collected evidence from the civil rights movement for decades, said it saw “disturbing evidence all around us” that people were unfamiliar with this period of American history.
He listened to President Biden Speech on voting rights in Atlantaduring which the president asked elected officials, “Do you want to side with John Lewis or Bull Connor?”
Professor Kotch said that for the issue to have weight, people need to know how black Americans were influenced by Connor, the segregationist commissioner of the brutal police department in Birmingham, Alabama, in the early 1960s.
“Who do we ask to know what it’s like to be in one of his cellars?” said Professor Kotch. “These stories go away.”
Activists of that era are well aware of this. After Pauline Gasca Valenciano finished sharing her oral history in 2015, while she was a civil rights activist in Fort Worth, Texas, she got off her couch and chased a departing historian down a hallway and into a parking lot.
Wait, she called Max Krochmal, professor of history at Texas Christian University.
“I have something to share,” she said, lashing out. Professor Krokhmal took out a voice recorder and listened. Miss Valenciano died in 2018 at the age of 82.
“It gave her a release, a release from her history that she carried with her for a long time,” said her daughter, Jodi Valenciano Gonzalez.
It was the same liberation that Ms. Filer felt in Florida in 2019, impetuously sharing her memories: an isolated doctor’s office where whites had flower pots and coffee; a waist-high window in the back room for black patients who arched their backs to check in.
Finally, she spoke about the anger and nervousness that made her and Mabel Dorsey once enter the front door, take a magazine and sit next to the white patients.
“It is our turn to integrate,” Ms. Filer told historians. “And if anyone was going to do it, it’s us.
Ms Filer is currently Chairman of the Board of Directors Cotton Club Museum and Cultural Center in Gainesville, which will release Granny Stories in March, the oral history of women during the Jim Crow era.
Miss Filer will read the role of Miss Dorsey, her character who died in 1996.
“There were so many of us,” she said. “That’s why the few of us who are left have to tell their story.”