Transcript
What inspires you from WFSU Public Media? Here's this week's Voices That Inspire. Andrea Oliver, Professor of History at Tallahassee Community College. I was very fortunate enough to grow up in a house full of educators. The household that I grew up in in Madison County was multi-generational, and it contained my grandmother and her sister, my great Aunt Julia, my mother, and my Aunt Julia's daughter, my cousin, Gail. And then there was me. Having this realization that in my family, I'm the first one to have had a totally desegregated experience, and I just turned 50 years old this summer. So the events of Jim Crow segregation, the dynamics of it all, being that close to me in my own lifespan, is just really awe-inspiring. That too has motivated me to just delve in just to the stories of people who were otherwise caught up in broader currents of great social change as these things were happening around them. The beautiful thing about being well-versed in history is understanding and recognizing its cyclical nature. We are going through a frankly reactionary period, but we've gone through those periods before, so I'm hopeful and must remain hopeful that as Americans come to recognize and understand these patterns and how we work our way out of certain things, which is through education, that these boom bus cycles of reaction to progress will be shorter than they have been historically. Andrea Oliver, Professor of History at Tallahassee Community College. You're listening to Voices That Inspire.