Ocoee and Drawing Connections

This week, I continued to work on the upcoming Bending Toward Justice (BTJ) digital exhibit on Voter Rights and Voter Suppression in Florida, which is scheduled to go live in November.  In particular, I have been assessing and creating a summary of the many research materials that BTJ team members have collected that document the Ocoee Massacre.  These materials include newspaper articles, oral history interviews, a thesis, photographs, etc.  I will then develop ideas for transforming the wealth of research into an exhibit.

I found the first part of this task to be familiar and pleasant, but the second has proved to be thornier for me.  As an archivist, I am used to organizing, assessing, and summarizing collections content.  However, as a neophyte historian, I have an unfortunate tendency to gather too much research material and then find myself struggling to winnow and distill the mass of data into a cogent, concise final product.  In an exhibit, this is an especially critical step, as visitors or online viewers will not have the patience or ability to pore over dozens of sources.  Researchers have found that visitors to physical exhibits spend an average of ten seconds reading each label, and soon experience "audience fatigue" when presented with too much text. (1)  Given these limitations, both traditional and online exhibit designers must ruthlessly cull their materials and select only the most effective and powerful objects or images, accompanied by streamlined and simplified text.  This is decidedly not something that comes easily to me!  However, I am hopeful that in working on this exhibit, I will gain more experience with distilling arguments and carefully selecting sources, and hope to apply similar methods to my research papers in the future.

I should also note that I found this to be a particularly challenging week, albeit a valuable lesson in the power that public history has to help audiences draw connections between past tragedies and current events.  At least one (July Perry, who was lynched by a white mob) and as many as fifty Black citizens of Ocoee were killed during the Ocoee Massacre, which newspapers of the time also described as the "Ocoee Riot."  It has been admittedly difficult to focus so closely on an event that included the unjust murder of a Black man and violent efforts by white citizens to maintain white supremacy amid ongoing civic anguish and protests stemming from the death of George Floyd, who was killed by a white police officer.  However, I also believe that the strength of my reaction is a reflection of the value of the project and the potential impact that it may make on others, so I am working on leaning into and pushing through my discomfort.  Next week, I will discuss the concept of "difficult history" further and explore self-care strategies for public historians who are working with subjects and materials that may be fraught and traumatic.

(1) Museums and Galleries of New South Wales (NSW). "Fact Sheet: Exhibition Labeling." https://mgnsw.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/MGNSW-Resource-Exhibition-Labelling.pdf.