A list of projects recovering erased histories. These were created by scholars, artists, and academics working in Digital Humanities, both locally, and on a national level.
Our mission at PAMM Education stems from a desire to provide all with the twin tools of critical thinking and visual literacy. Gary Simmons: Public Enemy provides ample opportunity for critical and visual engagement. To that end, PAMM Education compiled a list of digital educational resources, created by other scholars, groups, and institutions working in the field of Digital Humanities related to the histories and themes present in the work of Gary Simmons.
Digital Humanities is a transdisciplinary form of scholarship, leveraging digital platforms to aggregate and display themes relating, but not limited, to the intersections of art, literature, history, sociology, demography, geography, and anthropology. The through-line connecting all of these digital projects centers around three central ideas:
- Free and open access to information
- The importance of unearthing the silenced histories of Black people in Miami-Dade County
- Highlighting the ongoing work of local historians, artists, and scholars in the telling of these stories
Please learn about these digital resources in their own words, and click through to learn more about these histories, and this ongoing work happening in and around our community.
Black Miami-Dade
“Black Miami-Dade is a multimedia history and storytelling platform that resists the erasure of Miami-Dade County’s Black past. Black people are pioneers and architects of Miami-Dade and we believe the history of Black existence in this space should be accessible and shared widely. At Black Miami-Dade, the layers, memories and beauty of local Black life are highlighted through storytelling, research, community-based projects and education. Founded by writer and researcher Nadege Green, who was born and raised in the county of Dade, this platform is a thank you and love offering to Miami-Dade’s Black past, present and future.”
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University of Miami – Race, Housing, and Displacement in Miami
“This StoryMap has laid out the parallel histories of oppression and opposition in Miami’s housing industry. The text, documents, maps, and interviews have affirmed the outsized effects racialized planning and zoning practices have had on Miami’s black residents, as well as how these effects have been compounded by contemporary economic and ecological trends. However, this StoryMap also emphasizes the continued efforts from residents, activists, and community groups to combat these inequities and protect Miami’s most vulnerable from modern patterns of discriminatory development and economic exploitation.”
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Miami-Dade College Learning Resources
“This guide provides users with valuable resources pertaining to censorship and intellectual freedom.”
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Mapping Inequality – Miami
“The goal of Mapping Inequality is to call attention to the ways in which the practice of redlining contributed to the ongoing reality of racial inequality in the United States.”
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Segregation by Design – Miami
“Since the creation of the Interstate, freeway planning has been an integral tool in the systematic, government-led segregation of American cities. Used not only as a direct means to destroy the communities in their paths, freeways have also been used to cement racial segregation and ensure its endurance. Working synergistically with the legacy of redlining, freeway planning became the ultimate enforcement mechanism: literal walls of concrete and smog that separated black communities from white. In the name of the thinly veiled racist policies of ‘urban renewal,’ the freeways took the red lines off the map and built them in the physical world.”
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May 17, 1980: Miami Riots Begin
The Zinn Education Project promotes and supports the teaching of people’s history in classrooms across the country. Since 2008, the Zinn Education Project has introduced students to a more accurate, complex, and engaging understanding of history than is found in traditional textbooks and curricula. With more than 150,000 people registered, and growing by more than 10,000 new registrants every year, the Zinn Education Project has become a leading resource for teachers and teacher educators.
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Broward County Library Digital Archives – Kitty Oliver Collection
The Kitty Oliver Collection consists of correspondence, personal and professional papers, photographs, newspaper clippings, printed materials, and awards of South Florida journalist and educator Kitty Oliver.
The collection also contains the Race and Change Project, a group of multiple oral history interviews with African Americans, European-Americans, and immigrants regarding their memories growing up in Broward County, the United States, and other countries. Subjects include family and community lifestyle, race relations and societal change from the late 1920’s through the aftermath of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and desegregation. The collection contains audio and visual content of participants from the Race and Change Project including research composed by students taught by Kitty Oliver, and an essay written by Deborah Works entitled “Historical Sketches and Rare Glimpses of the North Fork of the New River: a history of its natural and human environment” (2001).
The majority of Dr. Oliver’s questionnaires, transcripts and interviews consist of ongoing research study of race and ethnic relations, geographical history and social change through the collection of oral histories of Whites, Blacks/African Americans and immigrants of various Hispanic/Latinx, Caribbean and Asian backgrounds. Research sites include the South Florida cities of Hollywood, Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach, Miami, Opa-locka, Delray Beach and Boca Raton; North Fork and Liberia –historically significant Black/African American communities; towns along Florida’s landmark Lake Okeechobee; Stranahan High School in Fort Lauderdale; and Ghana, West Africa – where women who have experienced America’s racial climate shared their stories.
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PEN America Index of School Book Bans
Founded in 1922, PEN America is the largest of the more than 100 centers worldwide that make up the PEN International network. PEN America works to ensure that people everywhere have the freedom to create literature, to convey information and ideas, to express their views, and to access the views, ideas, and literatures of others. Our strength is our Membership—a nationwide community of more than 7,500 novelists, journalists, nonfiction writers, editors, poets, essayists, playwrights, publishers, translators, agents, and other writing professionals, as well as devoted readers and supporters who join with them to carry out PEN America’s mission.
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