What is this?
A Land Re-membered is a multimedia project that highlights the Floridian history that isn’t allowed in class. Specifically, we look at people, places, and moments on the Florida Black Heritage Trail that changed everything for everyone. We’re for the curious citizens who want to understand why talking about race in history matters and how this knowledge can lead us to a more thoughtful, kinder, and equal future. This history belongs to all of us. Understanding past ideas about race and what kind of country those ideas built helps us make sense our present day issues, questions, and concerns. The trail is still speaking, full of stories and revelations from then that give so much context and clarity to our current now.
Our title is a remix of and a nod to a Florida classic, Patrick D. Smith’s novel A Land Remembered. The novel follows three generations of a single family, a narrative theme of man versus nature, and outsiders coming into the wilderness of a Southern state. Florida, as land, as served as both a battleground (literal and figurative) and a field for ideas of democracy and liberty, oppression and liberation, colonization and rebellion to morph and transform. This land has birthed Native American civilizations and been occupied and sold and bought and fought over by many others. We’re re- membering this land in our way, with film and written words. Putting together the ways various, forgotten or minimized members of this state dramatically changed it can change you and how you see your own part in this story. From what I’ve seen on the Florida history trails, specifically the ones that detail the Floridian women, Native Americans, and African American diaspora over the centuries, I no longer believe that anything here was “discovered”. Debated? Yes. Discussed? Absolutely. Divided over, violently contested, wildy altered, dramatically changed? Of course. The land we know, with its laws and customs and traditions, has been in many ways one giant and contentious group project. Because while Florida functioned in many ways as a kind of Wild West in the past, since people have been here we can’t honestly say that what the Americans and the Spanish and the Dutch came to was “wilderness”. For as long as cultures have encountered each other, this land has served as the stage for collisions of ideologies, civilizations, and basic beliefs about who we are and what we owe each other.
At the end of the day, government, religion, and history are fundamentally about just that. Who are we? What do we owe each other? Who matters?
Our history can tell us a lot about how people back then answered those questions and what that meant for the state, the country, and the people. That matters because it’s really hard to go anywhere without knowing where you’re from. Florida tomorrow depends a whole lot on Florida today understanding the Florida of yesterday.
But what is this?
A picture is worth a thousand words, but sometimes a thousand words are called for. Everything about this history project that was best suited for print (as opposed to our video interviews and film) lands here. Check back here every week for various essays from different Floridians, stories that were fascinating but could not be contained in a mere 10 minute episode, and project updates.
Who are you?
I’m a Floridian whose holiday family dinners look like the United Nations called an emergency meeting. I’ve been deeply informed by their very different experiences in this country and state, and privy to their discussions and debates that sound like conversations families all over the country are having now. I too wonder about how we the people got to this current moment socially, racially, and politically. I wonder what tomorrow will look like for us, how and where our American ideas and beliefs fail and triumph. I am someone very convinced that our history isn’t dead, but living and speaking today if we stop long enough to listen to it. I’ve had an atypical education and experience with history classes. I was homeschooled (think free range with tutors) and spent two years in New England at a boarding school and women’s college where I studied government and history. By “studied” I mean that we were privileged to have very serious professors and doctors in history and government who lost their minds long enough to agree to Socratic round table discussions and intense, all consuming role playing classes. They taught me that the study of history and government is less about learning unquestioned facts about an inevitable fates and founding demigods, and more about stepping into an ongoing discussion with and about real events and people who were complicated, inspiring, embarrassing, and deeply human. This project is the result of the very professional, much older and wiser people I’ve had the chance to learn from. It’s a very humble remix of my collision with the work of James W. Loewen, Paula Giddings, the Reacting To The Past Program, The Florida Black Heritage Trail, Timothy Synder, Catherine MacKinnon, Cornel West, Hannah Nikole Jones, The 1619 Project, This American Life, Planet Money, The Daily show by the New York Times, my very patient professors and instructors at Smith College and Philips Exeter Academy, the students there who challenged me (and killed me. I died so many times in our version of the French Revolution), and the many others who’ve shaped my thinking. The end depends upon the beginning, and I’ve been given a fantastic beginning. I hope that even one tenth of what I’ve been given can speak to you here. - Alex