History Lecture – Maitland’s African American History: Marked, Unmarked, Remembered

Dr. Scot French

In the lecture, Dr. Scot French, guest curator of the Maitland History Museum’s Spring 2019 exhibition, will discuss his efforts to document Maitland’s African American History — from the arrival of homesteaders and grove workers in the mid-1870s through the Jim Crow Era of exclusion, marginalization, and erasure to the desegregated civic and commemorative landscapes of today. While African American residents played a critical role in the founding of Maitland, much of their history extends beyond city limits into the neighboring black communities of Eatonville, Hannibal Square, and Woodbridge. French will “reintegrate” that social history into Maitland’s civic narrative and suggest ways that we — like Zora Neale Hurston and André Smith in the 1930s and ’40s — can draw insight and inspiration from it.