Many people are "going to write a book" but few ever do.
Fortunately, preservation of memories does not depend only on writing. There is also oral history, where interviewers have used everything from shorthand to tape recorders to videotape to capture recollections before they vanish forever.
In the 1930s, The St. Augustine Record put out several special editions focusing on local history and older members of the community. Included were several who had been born into slavery before the Civil War: Adam Sanks, George Edwards, Mary Gomez and Sarah Murray. In 1936, Martin Richardson of the Negro Writers' Unit of the Federal Writers' project came here to interview 84-year-old ex-slave Christine Mitchell who lived on Oneida Street.
His notes are now available to the public on the Library of Congress Web site.
The American bicentennial celebration of 1976 gave impetus to another round of interviews, many done by our own "Barbara Walters" -- longtime radio personality Frankie Walker. Among the members of the black community who shared their recollections were educators Richard J. Murray and James Webster, for whom local schools are named, Florence Samuels, Catherine Stowball, and legendary horse carriage driver, Major Argrett. There is even a joint interview of participants in a reunion of former Excelsior School students.
The discovery of the Richard Aloysius Twine photographs of 1920s Lincolnville, and the attempt to identify the people in them, spurred another effort, with Diana Edwards conducting many interviews for the University of Florida Oral History Project. One of them was Arthur Schwecke, and was hailed by Dr. Samuel Proctor, dean of oral historians as "a very valuable contribution, since many of the interpretations of St. Johns County's past are nowhere else available."
With the approach of the new millennium, a literacy group organized by Carrie Johnson, the "Voice of Lincolnville," collected oral histories, including Janie Price talking about the time when Martin Luther King Jr. was a guest in her home. Those interviews have been given to the St. Augustine Historical Society Library.
Now a new group is being trained at the Southeast Branch Library by veteran oral historian Glenda Bailey-Mershon to gather recollections of the civil rights movement in St. Augustine, as the city marks the 40th anniversary of that historic time.
Alex Haley, the author of "Roots," once said that "when an old person dies, it's like a library burning." Oral historians are one of our first lines of defense against that inevitable great loss. The future will thank them for their efforts.
David Nolan is a St. Augustine author and historian. For 25 years, he has collected and written about the black history of St. Augustine, drawing from personal interviews and oral histories, microfilms and news clippings of The St. Augustine Record and The Florida Times-Union, the files of the St. Augustine Historical Society Research Library, the Martin Luther King Jr. Center, Atlanta, and other resources.
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