Research Guides: Florida History: Oral Histories

Where to Find Oral Histories about Florida

Visit the FSU Libraries Special Collections & Archives

Tallahassee Civil Rights Oral History Collection, 1957, 1978
Call Number: Special Collections, Strozier Library 01/MSS 1990-001
Sound recordings and transcripts of oral history interviews conducted by Dr. Jackson Lee Ice in Tallahassee, Florida, regarding events related to the civil rights movement in Tallahassee during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Topics include the Tallahassee Bus Boycott of 1956, lunch counter sit-ins, theatre demonstrations, school desegregation, voter registration, and race relations.

Reichelt Oral History Collection
Significant interview topics include United States military, life in Florida and Tallahassee, and student life at Florida State University and its predecessor institution Florida State College for Women.
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Access to oral history interviews requires permission from the Manuscript Archivist. Please contact Special Collections staff at (850) 644-3271 or lib-specialcollections@fsu.edu for more information about access to this collection.

Available Online

Civil Rights History Project (Library of Congress)
Interviews of people involved in the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-20th century, recorded by representatives of the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Filter the interviews by Location to find interviews with Floridians.
Samuel Proctor Oral History Program Digital Collection (University of Florida)
With over 8,000 interviews, of which over 3.600 are online, this is one of the largest oral history archives in the South. The largest collection contains more than 900 interviews with Native Americans including Seminoles, Cherokees, and Creeks. Other major holdings include projects on African Americans in Florida in the Joel Buchanan Archive of African American Oral History, Civil Rights action in St. Augustine (1964), and the University of Florida.

The Special Case of the Federal Writers' Project of the 1930s

In the 1930s, as part of the New Deal, the United States federal government created the Federal Writers' Project to provide jobs to unemployed writers and researchers. Among the many publications produced by the FWP were the so-called "slave narratives," interviews with African-Americans who had been alive before emancipation. A similar project in Oklahoma interviewed Native Americans and white settlers. Do these historical interviews count as oral histories?

According to Linda Shopes, historian at the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, "historians generally consider oral history as beginning with the work of Allan Nevins at Columbia University in the 1940s. Nevins was the first to initiate a systematic and disciplined effort to record on tape, preserve, and make available for future research recollections deemed of historical significance." By this definition, the narratives documented by Federal Writer's Project workers in the 1930s would not qualify. However, I include them here because they are important, if complex, primary sources that require you to use many of the same interpretive skills as you would with oral histories.

Federal Writers' Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 3, Florida
In the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers' Project (FWP), a New Deal program, interviewers collected more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves. The Library of Congress has digitized most of these, organized by state.
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Interviews were conducted in Brooksville, Chaseville, Dade County, Daytona Beach, Eatonville, Grandin, Greenwood, Jacksonville, Lake City, Live Oak, Madison, Miami, Monticello, Mulberry, Palatka, Saint Augustine, South Jacksonville, Sunbeam, Tampa, Titusville, Vero Beach and Gifford, Florida
Indian-Pioneer Papers
The Indian-Pioneer Papers oral history collection spans from 1861 to 1936. It includes typescripts of interviews conducted during the 1930s by government workers with thousands of Oklahomans regarding the settlement of Oklahoma and Indian territories, as well as the condition and conduct of life there.
Try keyword searches for "Florida," "Seminole," and other related terms.