The 'Fifth Avenue African American (Alachua County) Oral History Collection' includes fifty-five interviewees discussing their personal histories and living in the black section of Gainesville ( Florida), The interviews date from the 1980s; many of the interviewees are in their 90s and 100s. Topics include how children were raised and who raised them, education--or not completing an education, black schools, teachers, marriage, segregation and racism, community changes for local blacks over the decades, entertainment, social clubs, employment, chores, earnings, role of religion and church life, parentage and ancestry, childhood experiences, medical care and home remedies, impact of Depression, farming and working in the fields, lynchings, lack of statistical records, interacting with whites, among many other subjects.
The 'Fifth Avenue African American (Alachua County) Oral History Collection' is part of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program is an affiliated program of the University of Florida's Department of History. Its collections include approximately 4,000 interviews and more than 85,000 pages of transcribed material, making it the largest oral history archive in the South and one of the major collections in the country. The transcribed interviews are available for use by research scholars, students, journalists, genealogists, and other interested groups. Researchers have used our oral history material for theses, dissertations, articles, and books.
Digitization of the collection has been funded in part by the generous donation of Caleb and Michele Grimes.