Program examines early civil rights struggles in Florida

January 15, 2013

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Paul Ortiz, director of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida, will present “Race Relations in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920″ at 1 p.m. Feb. 5 in Smathers Library Room 1A.

Ortiz is the author of “Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920,” a penetrating examination of African-American politics and culture.

In this work, Ortiz writes of the struggle of black Floridians to create the first statewide civil rights movement against Jim Crow. The book received the Harry T. and Harriette V. Moore Book Prize from the Florida Historical Society and the Florida Institute of Technology.

Ortiz has published and taught in the fields of African-American history, Latino studies, the African diaspora, social movement theory, U.S. history, U.S. South, labor and documentary studies.

Ortiz also co-edited and conducted oral history interviews for the award-winning “Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Jim Crow South.”