“Loud As The Rolling Sea” is a new series starting this week that will be hosted by Vice President of Academic Affairs and Associate Professor of History Dr. Kevin McGruder.
Dr. Kevin McGruder
According to WYSO, the series will broadcast stories that “began as a community oral history project 10 years ago in Yellow Springs, when citizens came together to gather the stories of the Civil Rights generation of activists, both Black and white, who were born in the 20s and 30s.”
Dr. McGruder explains that the series is a complex, important, and somewhat unusual collection of interviews “because the life stories of African Americans are not always told as part of America’s stories.” He writes, “Often we are not seen as just everyday people who are living our lives and having triumphs and tragedies. So there’s a way that an oral history humanizes people in a way that a history book account rarely does for African Americans.”
“Loud As The Rolling Sea” is part of a larger community-based oral history project in Yellow Springs that started in 2010, called “The Yellow Springs Civil Rights Oral History Project.” The goal of the project was to interview villagers about contemporary and historical diversity in Yellow Springs.
The project was first introduced to WYSO by Brooke Bryan, Antioch College’s Dean for Cooperative, Experiential, and International Education and Associate Professor of Writing, Aesthetics & Digital Studies. Bryan was an intern at the station and a graduate student at Antioch University at the time, and documented the early planning stages of the community oral history and civil rights project in an article published to JSTOR, titled, “A Closer Look At Community Partnerships.”
Funding for this project comes from The Yellow Springs Community Foundation, the Yellow Springs Brewery, and from Rick and Chris Kristensen, Re/Max Victory and affiliates in Yellow Springs.
