The Race and Change with Doctor Kitty Oliver. Dr. Kitty Oliver is a veteran South Florida journalist, author, oral historian, and university professor with a Ph.D. focusing on race and ethnic communication. She has been featured on CNN news, “Black in America,” for her race relations work. She is also president of Kitty O. Enterprises, Inc., a cultural diversity consulting firm based in Fort Lauderdale, FL, and director of the new Race and Change Initiative at Florida Atlantic University.
Dr. Kitty Oliver is an oral history consultant working with educational and community organizations to develop and teach courses and conduct projects for the purpose of presentations to the public as well as archival research. She is a member of the national Oral History Association. Current projects:
“The Race and Change Initiative” is a multimedia project that promotes a 21st Century discussion of race and ethnic relations and differences through the innovative use of archival oral history interviews, video and Web radio programs, and performance presentations. Youth and adults share their stories.
The Initiative is based on The Race and Change Dialogue a model for talking about differences across races, ethnicities, and generations in public forums, and doing it in a non-confrontational, hopeful way.
“The Race and Change Oral History Collection” has over 125 interviews on race relations and is one of the only historical archives which features multicultural-multiethnic narrators. Blacks, Whites, Hispanics/Latinos, Caribbeans, and Asians share their growing up experiences in various parts of the U.S. as well as other countries, and their encounters with race, focusing largely on the era prior to and just after passage of the Civil Rights Acts of the mid-1960s. The interviews, collected by Oliver and university students she has trained, are housed in Special Collections at the African American Research Library and Cultural Center, Fort Lauderdale, FL. and available to researchers.
