This was the last week of my internship. I had already submitted my transcripts to Michael Boonstra. And so we went over any last things that needed to be completed. But most importantly we talked about my continued involvement with both Monroe history and the library. I have been very clear that I do not want to have this be a one off thing. Beyond that, while my work is done, Aaron Fonseca is still editing the videos, so they will not be uploaded until the end of August. So I wanted to make sure I was available, if there was any problems, or questions while the video was being made. I also talked with Aaron Fonseca about the possibility of creating subtitles for the videos, since the transcripts are a useful base. And accessibility is important to me. None of the other oral histories in the project have subtitles and the youtube autogenerated ones are very inaccurate. Aaron Fonseca was very interested in this, but this is by definition not something I can do until the videos are does, because I need the timestamps. Aside from this I also have to meet and show the final product to participants. I have talked to the participant that I would do this, and I have spoken with Dorothy Weaver Jones family about arranging an event with them specifically. I know this is not enough in order to be engaged fully, but I am not sure what to do after this, so I am taking it one step at a time. As far as continuing Monroe history goes, Michael Boonstra and Dorothy Weaver Jones have pointed me to Norma Poitier and Peggy Weaver respectively. I do not have a project in mind but I will be reaching out to them to at least introduce myself and start building a relationship. And the 100th anniversary of Cocoa Junior High is coming up in the winter so I will be involved in that.
We did our internship showcase this week. It was very nice, I was glad to have a chance to speak about my work. And I was really blown away by everyone else's work. I noticed many people worked on similar projects, oral history, community engaged history, Black history, and digital preservation. So it was very cool to hear about all of this and see how they approached these topics. I will be doing all of this for my thesis on downtown Melbourne, so it was good to hear from other people on how to tackle these issues. And I am glad I know who to reach out to if I have questions or difficulties in my own projects. Aside from all this, I have been working on my historiography paper. Most of this week has been dedicated to finishing that up.
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This week has been about finishing up and completing my historiography paper. I did the third passes for transcription, and I have over 100 pages, so that took quite a bit. I met with Micheal Boonstra to go over exactly what I need to deliver because of the broad tensions within transcribing oral histories. Personally I feel that transcriptions should adhere as close as possible to what was said. I recognize that some editing and comments are necessary for clarity but I want to keep it as similar to the recording as possible.
I feel this way for a couple reasons. Firstly, I feel that a transcription is less a supplemental or a distillation of what was said, and more a different format for expressing it. Video recordings can be inaccessible in a lot of ways. Firstly many disabled people, such as the hearing impaired, can not make as effective use of a recording. Also video recordings can be inaccessible due to poverty or unequal access to technology. Many people do not have regular access to computers or the internet, and so they would not be able to access, view, and download these large video files. And since this is a work of Black history, and given that in the US Black people are less likely to have access to a home computer than white people, this is a real concern. A transcript can be viewed and downloaded much more easily than a video. And they can be printed out, which allows access without computers. Also I feel transcripts are vital because they extend the preservation of the oral history. Like I said, a written document is much easier to store, view, display, and download. There is less worry about long term software support, and they can be printed and stored in perpetuity much more easily than a video. Also transcripts let people ctrl+f which makes them great for historians using current digital tools. And last, last but certainly not least, I feel that sticking more closely to the words that were said helps make history less hierarchical, and well, more public. I personally have real problems with there being very rigid ways in which ideas must be presented in order for them to count as historical knowledge. This is generally called professionalism and standard english. I especially have this problem because this language proficiency is gated behind unequal barriers of race, class, gender, and disability. One of the core tenets of public history is recognizing that nonacademics create histories and have meaningful historical knowledge. This is one of the driving factors for creating oral history in the first place. So what better way could there be for someone to share their knowledge in their voice, than by respecting the words that they chose. Because of this, I went to Micheal Boonstra to figure out how to connect these inclinations with the existing collection and the desires of the Brevard Historical Commission, and he gave me good advice for how to produce something acceptable for this particular project. Transcription, transcription, transcription. I have spent this week transcribing. This has been slow and tedious work but I have been greatly aided by technology. Initially I used a cumbersome setup where I played the audio on one computer and used the dictate function of word on another. But this required me to borrow my partner's computer and it was very inaccurate, missing large sections of conversation. Then I switched to OtterAI, which worked much better and allowed me to import files directly. However, it had errors and did not let me import all of my files. While this greatly reduced my time transcribing, it is still slow going. I have over 5 hours of audio to transcribe and I have not finished yet. It has been a major task to decide which filler words and repeats to include or omit, and when someone is using more popular language and terms, rather than just being part of someone’s dialect.
While I have spent most of this week transcribing, it is not all that I did. I visited Dorothy Weaver Jones and got the release form from her for the oral history. When I visited her, many of her family members were there, including children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. It was nice to meet them. Her children also all went to Monroe. I explained the project to them and invited them to join together when I visit again to show the completed project to Dorothy Weaver Jones. I enjoyed getting practice explaining the project, and I think building these sorts of relationships is important. I also spoke with Dorothy Weaver Jones about speaking with Robert Browne about his research on Mt Moriah AME Church. Aside from the oral history itself, I have been very happy with this internship because it has helped me build relationships and learn how to do local history research. It really seems that you cannot do any of this without just talking with people and knowing someone. For example, I am getting involved with the 100 year anniversary of Cocoa Junior High school (later renamed Monroe) because I heard about it from Robert Browne at the Leon and Jewel Collins African American History and Culture Museum, and I was able to put him in touch with Dorothy Weaver Jones. I was also able to learn important information about the last use of that building in the 50s (useful for my project and the anniversary) from talking to Deborah Keys, who is a key member of the Monroe Alumni Association, and who was key in getting participants for the oral histories. This week I conducted a panel interview with Monroe Alumni. I was the narrator and Aaron Fonseca did the recording. Rosemary McGill, Mildred Hancock, Curbie Wynn, and James Johnson participated. The oral history went incredibly well. We recorded for two and a half hours and I still feel that there was so much more to learn about. After participating in the oral history, I am confident that oral history was the best choice for conducting history on Monroe High School. This was for several reasons. First and most importantly, oral history is the technique that is most in line with the wishes and work of Monroe graduates and the Monroe alumni association. Rosemary McGill (who is also a historian) expressed this mostly directly. While we were recording she spoke about how the oral history format was the best way to preserve their stories, and how, based on her experiences as an educator, she found that stories are the best way to teach future generations their history. The other participants also spoke directly about the importance of telling and recording their stories. Something that I found especially interesting, is that they said that after desegregation, many did not often speak about their experiences under Jim Crow to their children and the next generations, and so there was a communal forgetting of what happened. Because of this they felt it was especially important to speak now, as they near the end of their lives. Oral history was also the best format because it allowed them to speak about the theory and historiography of their Monroe history efforts that are not preserved in any academic publication. Monroe graduates and the Monroe alumni association have been creating history about Monroe High school for decades. And so they have well developed ideas of what is important and why, and why things happened the way that they did. And they spoke very freely about this. While I certainly shaped the discussion through my questions, their were many topics or little things that I had wanted to ask about or follow up on that I had to let go of because of limited time, and because the conversation flowed away from it strongly. It would definitely be inaccurate to say I was merely a researcher extracting information from my sources.
One thing that stuck me (and Aaron Fonseca) was the emotional impact of some of their personal experiences of white violence, white gendered violence, lynching, murder, and rape. The stories that they chose to share were deeply impactful and difficult to tell. And I want to do honor to them, for making the choice to tell these stories, and revisit this trauma. Another thing that I noticed was that they stories they told and knowledge they shared, aligned strongly with many of the themes and processes discussed in Dr. Cassanello’s History of the Civil Rights Class. I found this important because it colored my existing understanding of this period of the Black Freedom Struggle, but also because it changed how I saw producing knowledge of the Civil Rights Movement. While many of the things aligned with what I had read in academic articles, this was people’s lives. And it just feels different hearing someone talk about their past vs reading that same event in an academic article. And it changes the epistemic authority from radiating outward from an academic to being produced by people who lived it. And I feel this is a meaningful change, especially when the people involved are Black women and men in america. I conducted my first oral history for Monroe High school this week. Earlier today I met with Dorothy Weaver Jones to conduct an Oral History of her. Aaron Fonseca of the Cocoa Library and Creative Lab filmed, and I narrated. Dorothy Weaver Jones entered Cocoa Junior High school for first grade in 1936, and was a high school student when Cocoa Junior High expanded into Monroe High School (a senior highschool). She was a part of the very first graduating class at Monroe in 1948. And she is the last surviving member, out of the six initial graduates. It was truly an honor to speak with her and help preserve her knowledge and perspective.
This was the first oral history I recorded for the Monroe Project, and the second oral history I have done ever, so I was very nervous. We did the Dorothy Weaver Jones’ oral history before the panel purely because of scheduling reasons, but it really worked out in my favor. She is only one person, and before the oral history we had spoken for over an hour multiple times, so I was able to research things relevant to her specifically and develop questions just for her. This helped me feel more confident narrating the oral history. This kind of person specific preparation will not be possible or desirable in a panel style oral history because the panel needs to focus more on general topics that can be commented on by multiple people. Overall I feel the oral history went well. Dorothy Weaver Jones was very willing to speak. I tried to pull back as much as possible to give her room to share what she felt was important, though there were times that I felt we wandered off topic for too long. I was a little hesitant to bring us back to Monroe, because I was trying to build a rapport with her and did not want her to feel cut off, or that I was trying to extract answers from her, but in the next oral history I think I can do a better job keeping us focused. Dorothy Weaver Jones also has been preserving documents and ephemera from Monroe for decades, and she was very willing to share them with us and let Aaron photograph them. We ended up speaking for nearly 2 hours so the camera ran out of battery before we photographed her entire collection. But Ms. Jones is very friendly and has invited us back, so we can come at a later date to photograph the rest. I think her account is valuable for three main reasons, firstly she is a direct participant in events, so her life story is historically valuable. Second, she has knowledge of people, places, and daily life that is not preserved in other documents. She spoke extensively about the families in her neighborhood and what the did. These relationships and geospatial information are hard to find elsewhere. In fact she spoke of her father working at Nevins Packing House by Cemetery Hill, which Micheal Boonstra, the Brevard Historical Commission Archivist, was not familiar with. And third she is one of the first wave of historians on Monroe. She has preserved Monroe documents, spoken about Monroe, and been actively involved in the Alumni Association for many years, so recording this oral history both preserves the historical knowledge she has developed, and will help future historians understand the historiography of Monroe. I will be conducting two oral histories. The first will be conducted next week on Friday July 7, one on one with Dorothy Weaver Jones at her home. The second will be a panel style held at the library the week after on Friday July 14 with Rosemary McGill, Deborah Keys, Curbie Wynn, and Mildred Hancock. I am incredibly excited to have locked in times for these interviews. This week has really shown me the organizational labor that goes into these oral histories. Last week I felt fairly confident on the day and participants for the oral history, and thought I just needed to lock in a time. However when I was making calls to settle on a time, David Jenkins had to withdraw because of family obligations. This was totally reasonable, and situations like this often arise. And so I spent every day this week calling Aaron Fonseca and Micheal Boonstra at the library, and alumni members in order to coordinate a new plan. When I think of history projects, I tend to focus on the work that is most interesting to me, the research and the conversations, and underestimate the more mundane aspects (like scheduling, communication, and transcription) that are completely necessary for the success of a project.
While I spent over an hour everyday making calls this week, everyone was so helpful that I really could not have had an easier time with these organizational aspects. While David Jenkins could not participate personally, he has been incredibly helpful and proactive in this project. He reached out to Curbie Wynn personally, to get him involved in the project. This was a great boon to me, because I had not met Curbie Wynn personally. Also Curbie Wynn is the only man who is participating, and I feel that we will be better able to explore gender by hearing from women and men, which is important to me. David Jenkins also recommended I speak with Rosemary McGill. It was amusing to me because Mildred Hancock who I had spoken to immediately beforehand also recommended speaking with Rosemary McGill. And she really is an excellent choice to participate in this oral history. She is a historian, and is incredibly knowledgeable about and a direct participant in the Black education movement and Civil Rights Movement. It really was a joy to talk with her. Also after speaking with Dorothy Weaver Jones and Rosemary McGill, I have noticed that the way they speak about Black education and resiliency in the face of white supremacy, are similar to what R C Calhoun (the first principal of Hungerford School in Eatonville) has said. Ms. McGill emphasized the need to tell their story in order to improve the present, which reminded me of Calhoun’s statement “We live by the story we tell.” And Dorothy Weaver Jones spoke of taking the aspersions and attacks cast down on the Black community by whites and transforming them into the building blocks of Black success, which reminded me of R. C. Calhoun’s parable of the donkey in the well. I want to emphasize how this organizing and movement goes back generations and spans the entire region, not just Brevard. Also I have used the informal conversations I have had this week to guide last minute research relevant to each alum so that I can develop questions that are more relevant to each person, their goals and their interests. This was a big week for the Oral History. The Monroe Award Ceremony and unveiling of the Academic and Arts Hall of Fame was held on Saturday at Emma Jewel Charter Academy (which is in the old Monroe High School building. I was honored to have an opportunity to hear the speeches and stories during the event. Compared to Friday's festivities this event was more tightly focused on history and historic preservation. The speakers highlighted the importance of preserving Monroe’s legacy because of the State government's attacks and erasure of Black history and achievements in schools. Beyond this, just organizing the event required a serious amount of historical research. They identified the Valedictorian and salutatorian of each year, as well as band and chorus leaders. They gathered as much biographical information on the people being honored as they could, and found if they were still living. Perhaps most importantly they reached out to everyone still living to build a network for creating historical knowledge and preserving the legacy of Monroe.
After the award ceremony I spoke with several alumni who agreed to meet with me to record an oral history in a panel format. Then later in the week I contacted them to schedule this meeting. One of the excellent benefits of working with existing local history organizations is that members are very eager to tell their story, and want to spread it to other people. I was especially pleased to speak with Dr. Lennet Morse. She was valedictorian in 1951 and her father was the principal during the transition from Cocoa Junior High to Monroe High. She is incredibly knowledgeable about Black education in the period and a personal participant in the Civil Rights Struggles over education in Central Florida. Attending this meeting really brought into focus how interconnected the Black community of central florida is. I also feel this taps into Julian Chambliss’s idea of a Black social world. In telling their stories, the alumni of Monroe are constantly moving between the Black communities of Jacksonville, Eatonville, Cocoa, and Melbourne and are knowledgeable of events and people in those communities. Telling the story of Monroe involves so many things that are outside of Monroe. For example, Robert Lewis, a Monroe graduate, was a musician who played on the Chitlin Circuit, and he credits Monroe with developing his musical talents. I feel it is a good thing that I tend to focus on connections in my history because it aligns well with the alumni associations twin goals of preserving Black history and celebrating the achievements of Black people during difficult circumstances. With those goals in mind I can focus my research and guiding questions on the Black organizing and network required to establish Monroe and all of the different lives and roles people took in our community because of their education at Monroe This is a very big week for the internship. The Monroe Highschool Reunion is this Friday and saturday. I am writing this post after attending the Reunion Dinner this evening. Me, Michael Boonstra, and Aaron the photographer, attended the program. We arrived early to take pictures of the display boards that they had created, which contained excellent pictures from Monroe. Our plan for this event was to walk around and have the organizers introduce us to people who they thought it would be good to talk to, especially people who would not be at the event on Saturday. I focused on introducing myself and building rapport with people so we could speak more formally at tomorrow’s event. With the speeches and then the dinner, there weren't really any appropriate opportunities to speak with people at length. But I will be able to speak more formally at tomorrow's event, where we have a space reserved for us. Aaron also took pictures and videos of the guests and the program which we can incorporate into the oral history video.
The one person we did get to speak a bit with was Dorothy Weaver Jones. This was my first time meeting her, but she is incredible. Her wit and memory were truly impressive. She is the last surviving member of the class of 1948, the very first Monroe graduating class. She was born in Cocoa, and spent her entire life here. Her father worked in a Citrus Packing Plant. She has 11 children. All of which were home births delivered by midwives. She married a pastor and three of her children are pastors as well. And she worked in the Brevard School System at Andersen Elementary for over 20 years. I say all of this to highlight how important she is as a historian and a member of the Cocoa Black community. She is important, not just because she can help tell the story of Monroe, but because her life is connected to most ov the major themes in the history of Cocoa. She can speak about the Citrus industry, Black midwives, Black businesses, Black education, Black educators, and Black churches. Many of these are topics that we already have existing oral histories on. So doing an oral history with her will do a lot to support the existing oral histories, and fill an important gap in the history of Cocoa. She will not be attending the event tomorrow but she gave me her contact information, and invited me to speak with her in her home. Which I will absolutely do. Attending this event was helpful, because it helped me refine how I will conduct the oral histories. There was a very strong emphasis on the community of Monroe High School, and the support and love that the teachers and school provided. Speakers also emphasized the expansion and improvement of Black education that established Monroe, and the traumatic experience of its rapid closure during desegregation. So I will alter my questions to explore these topics more thoroughly. I met with the Monroe Alumni Association this Tuesday. I was really happy to meet with them and it went really well. The meeting was held at the Emma Jewel Charter Academy, so it was good to start getting a feeling of the space of Monroe High School, as well as to get familiar with the space we will be working in during the reunion on the 17th. They also had several displays in the meeting hall with pictures and trophies and memorabilia from Monroe High school, so I was glad to get a better look at the surviving physical material.
I spoke with the vice president of the alumni association, and they seemed very confident in arranging for Dorothy Weaver Jones to attend the reunion event on the 16th. This is great news for me. And I am very happy to be able to speak at some length with Ms. Jones. Dorothy Jones graduated from the very first class at Monroe High School in 1948. She is the last surviving graduate from her year. So I am eager to record this important story about the expansion of Black education. I spoke with another member of the alumni association and they went to Monroe in the late 1960s. They actually did not graduate from Monroe, the schools were integrated so they graduated from Merritt Island High School. The alumni association has been working so diligently to create this history, and they have so many incredible stories about Black education and integration collectively. One highlight of working with the alumni association is that everyone is so eager to share their story. Monroe High School was a place that provided Black people with opportunities and impacted the Brevard community for decades. And the alumni association is an organization that celebrates and continues the mission of Monroe High school. So it should be no surprise that organization members are so willing to talk about the legacy of Monroe High school and their experiences with it. Meeting with the alumni association also helped me refine what I will focus the oral histories on. Personally I am strongly interested in agriculture and space. And I am inclined to put emphasis on any 4-H or agricultural programs, and I even suggested a group memory mapping exercise. But I think I am getting ahead of myself. The members of the alumni association mostly emphasized the experience of integration, as well as student achievement. They also discussed how the alumni association continues to provide scholarships to local students. This is something that I want to emphasize in this project. Monroe was a part of a broader Black movement to provide education, and the alumni continue this project to this day. I feel that this does respect to the subject of the oral history and the people who are the main keepers of this history. I will still ask about agriculture, and other historically significant topics, I just feel it is most useful to support the work that is already being done rather than go off entirely on my own. This has been a very exciting week for my internship. Micheal Boonstra heard back from the alumni association. They are hosting a reunion on June 16th and 17th. They have invited us to attend a planning session on June 6th, to introduce us, so that everyone will be familiar and comfortable with our work. And they have invited us to attend the reunion on the 16th and 17th at the Emma Jewel Charter Academy (which used to be Monroe High School). I can begin to say how excited I am about this. I am very glad to be working directly with the Monroe Alumni Association, and to have an opportunity to speak with them about the work they are doing and their needs, so that I can shape this project to fit their ongoing goals. There are long standing practices within public history and decolonial research that emphasize building in person relationships and doing history that supports existing efforts through collaboration, so I am very glad to gain experience doing this. This is important because it builds a less extractive and more collaborative partnership between the professional historian and community historians. This also greatly improves the quality of work I am able to do. By working with the alumni association, more people will be comfortable speaking with me and telling their story. Also the reunion is absolutely the best place to do these oral histories. There is simply no way I would be able to organize so many Monroe Alumni to gather in one location at one time. At the reunion they will all be together, and they will all be thinking about and celebrating Monroe. This opportunity is only possible because of the literal decades of work the alumni association has done organizing Monroe graduates, preserving the memory of Monroe, and reminding everyone of the importance of this school and its legacy.
This is also an excellent opportunity because the reunion will be held in the Emma Jewel Charter Academy, which is the old Monroe building. They have a collection of Monroe artifacts at the school, and alumni will have the physical layout of the school to support their memories and stories. The Monroe Alumni Association has videos of various events they have hosted, which includes former Monroe students walking through Emma Jewel to talk about the physical space of Monroe. This is something I want to feature as well in my oral history. I plan to get some video and meet people at the reunion, but I plan on arranging for longer oral histories at a later date, because it is not appropriate to keep people from the events for the one to two hours it would take to conduct an oral history. The video from the reunion itself will be edited similarly to existing videos from the Alumni and Historical Commision. It will highlight the project and emphasize its collaborative and organizational aspects, and it will show the spatial components of the project. This will be used to introduce and support the longer form oral history. I also spoke with Micheal Boonstra about adding a digital component to the project. I have experience with timelinejs, scalar, and mymaps, and felt that an introductory digital resource would support the more interpersonal and documentary aspects of both the Oral History Project and the Alumni Association. Further community members and archivists have done an excellent job collecting and preserving the history of Black education in Brevard. When I started working on this project I was blown away by the wealth of knowledge and publications on this subject available in the local archives, so I feel a digital component can help spread this knowledge, because most people do not visit local archives often. |