Dr. Bernardo Motta thought he was giving his journalism students a simple project: research the history of local African-American communities.
The students, part of a working newsroom at USF St. Petersburg called the Neighborhood News Bureau (NNB), quickly ran into a bottleneck. They had difficulty finding direct sources of historical information because it was either scattered or nonexistent.
So Motta, who was conducting his own research on the subject, and his student journalists set out to fix the problem. After a couple years of dedicated work, they have launched the NNB Black History project, which chronicles the storied past of St. Petersburg’s African-American communities. Through multimedia, oral histories, digital story mapping and a searchable database, students are creating a comprehensive resource to document a vital chapter in the city’s history.
“This project will be a place for the entire community to go to and see their history and take pride in that history,” said Cynthia Swisher, a senior journalism major who is part of this effort.
The students began by developing a database and entering all of the historical information they could find. They then began filling the gaps through oral histories and investigative journalism.
All these storytelling elements came together in a new website that was showcased during the Story Days in Tampa Bay Festival on October 3, at the session “From Pepper Town to Midtown: 150 Years of African-American History in St. Petersburg.” The session is also the name of a new digital mapping and timeline tool found on the site that allows journalists, historians and educators to tell historical and location-based stories through multiple maps and aerial photographs of St. Petersburg.
Developed by Hack4Impact, which creates software to meet social and humanitarian needs, the tool will soon allow for multimedia storytelling and even 3-D videos and virtual reality.
“The public, especially younger students, can interact with the material and understand local African-American history in a new and exciting way,” said Maxwel Stone, a graduate student in the Florida Studies program who is also working on the project. “They can access interactive maps and pull up where the first African-Americans settled or the exact locations of civil right marches or defining segregation events.”
Another main feature of the new website is the Olive B. McLin community history project. Originally developed in the 1990s by USFSP Anthropology Professor Jay Sokolovsky, the project presents oral histories, photographic material and stories about members of St. Petersburg’s African-American neighborhoods. A partnership between Sokolovsky, NNB and Associate English Professor Trey Conner and his students expanded the series with new resources and stories. The stories will now be updated each semester by NNB reporters and interns.
The repository for original sources and resources related to St. Petersburg African-American history is catalogued in a comprehensive local black history database also found on the new website. The database is the pillar of which all NNB’s black history projects are built upon.
For students working on this project, it has provided them hands-on experience in their field of study while gaining new insights into the history of their community.
“It expanded my knowledge of African-American history locally and I got exposed to another discipline, media, that I never had before,” said Stone. “More importantly, I’m getting experience doing the type of research I want to do for my career and being valued for it.”
Moving forward, the NNB is working to make the database fully searchable. They will continue to develop oral histories and investigative pieces that fill in the gaps in St. Petersburg’s African-American history. And through collaborations with K-12 schools and journalists, USFSP students hope to make this vital history more accessible and understood by school children and the public.
“Getting this information into schools in our area is key, where kids can see the great history of their city and what courageous people did locally that made a difference,” said Swisher.