Diversity Award: The Samuel Proctor Oral History Program

The Samuel Proctor Oral History Program (SPOHP) at the University of Florida is a 2015 recipient of the Diversity Award. The award recognizes an individual, group, or institution for outstanding contributions in advancing diversity within the archives profession, SAA, or the archival record.

SPOHP teaches students, independent scholars, and community organizations how to bring history to life through oral history interviews. SPOHP teaches the craft and intellectual traditions of oral history through university seminars and community-based workshops. Since its founding in 1967, SPOHP has conducted more than seven thousand interviews and transcribed more than 150,000 pages of material from the interviews. Its current roster of projects, including the Alachua County African American History Project, the Mississippi Freedom Project, the Veterans History Project, the Native American History Project, and the Latina/o Diaspora in the Americas Project, represent the breadth of the program’s impact on diversifying the archival record. 

One supporter wrote that SPOHP’s “relentless pursuit of community knowledge, local voices, and academic transformation has created a monumental program that has impacted the lives of countless people in Florida and across the nation.”

SPOHP joins the Evanston, Illinois, nonprofit Shorefront as the 2015 recipients of the Diversity Award.