Students seek out storytellers
In the fall of 2020, students in an Honors College course took to sifting through history by engaging with current and former residents of Brownsville. As part of their studies on social movements in the United States, they reached out to folks who could speak directly not only about the civil rights era through which they had lived but, on an even more personal level, about the thriving, tight-knit community in which they once resided.
In the wake of the current national push for social justice, the 2.3 square miles of Brownsville became the lens through which the young people reflected upon recent Black American history.
Zion Sealy is a junior marketing major from Trinidad and Tobago. Although he identifies as a man of color, Sealy says he has a very different perspective than that of a Black man in the United States. “My understanding of the Black experience was just what I read online,” he says.
“Coming into this interview, I had an expectation of this is going to be a story of struggle,” he says. “The reality was far different. The emphasis was hope. The emphasis was perseverance. The emphasis was getting an education, no matter what.”
Sealy’s lesson came compliments of 70-year-old Milton Vickers, who today serves as the director of human services for Miami-Dade County and still lives in Brownsville. The pair’s recorded Zoom discussion—which veered from segregation and integration to the election of Barack Obama and the Black Lives Matter Movement—will be archived at Hampton House, now a thriving cultural arts and community center, along with a written account prepared by Sealy. (The files of all 25 students will be used by the Dade Heritage Trust to seek historic designation for the area.)
International student Kristina Miletic, a sophomore finance major from Serbia, arrived in 2018 in Miami to attend FIU. She welcomed and was excited by the diversity around her—something not found in her native land—and only slowly became aware of racial tensions.
Like Sealy, she found an uplifting story—the kind shared by families of every culture—when she spoke with Ernestine Williams and two of her daughters, Rojean and Roniece. The matriarch, who still lives in Brownsville, talked about moving there in 1950 from Michigan and starting a successful dry cleaning and tailoring shop. The sisters spoke of school and their teachers.
The first-person accounts and the women’s willingness to share memories moved Miletic.
“I didn’t believe that someone was going to talk about their life to me,” she says, fearful at first that her queries would seem intrusive. “I was kind of scared. Will they answer my questions?” she worried, all for naught. “They were so open to tell their life story. I was so happy to talk to them. It was an honor.”
Connecting people of different backgrounds served one of Professor Shed Boren’s goals for the class, which “was to have the students realize the power of conversation and storytelling about individual lives.”
Such interaction, the professor of social work says, sows the seeds of transformation. “Change starts with empathy,” he explains, “and this is only possible by listening.”
"story" - Google News
December 23, 2020 at 12:01AM
https://ift.tt/2LUUd0d
What's in a place? What's in a story? Meet those at FIU working to preserve local Black history and create a better future - FIU News
"story" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2YrOfIK
https://ift.tt/2xwebYA
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "What's in a place? What's in a story? Meet those at FIU working to preserve local Black history and create a better future - FIU News"
Post a Comment