Race relations expert presenting in Havre-Hill County Library

Race relations oral historian, scholar and performer Kitty Oliver, Ph.D., will be speaking and performing at the Havre-Hill County Library Thursday from 7 to 8 p.m.

The event is free and open to the public and refreshments will be served.

"We always want to create conversation around issues that are important to our community," Havre-Hill County Library Director Rachel Rawn said.

"The idea had always been how I can share this work as a resource with people in the community," Oliver said.

Oliver is married to Havreite Artie Musson, and she said her husband was the one with the idea to do this event at the library.

Oliver said the research she does is a combination of a journey that began in growing up in segregation in the south, then being one of the first black freshmen at the University of Florida in 1965 and one of the first black journalists at the Miami Herald, where she worked for 20 years, and then going on to writing books.

"I had a wonderful opportunity to watch as society was really transformed by more and more people from different countries, cultures and areas of the country moving toward the area of south Florida," she said.

She received her bachelor's degree in English from the University of Florida, her master's degree in fine arts-creative writing from International Univeristy and then doctorate in race and ethnic communication at Florida Atlantic University.

"The work has always been about that journey that we make in dealing with differences, whatever those differences may be, and how we negotiate it and how we change in the process, and then being able to talk about those experiences in a public way that we don't often get a chance to do," Oliver said. "This race and change work and presentations I do are all about talking about race in a different way, in a progressive way, in a hopeful way and talking about it person to person more from the human experience."

She added that when she talks about race, "race relations," some of it comes from her research in Ghana, West Africa, where she asked the same questions and had the same discussion about race relations. She founded the Race and Change Oral History Archive of more than 125 interviews with whites, blacks, Hispanics, Caribbeans and Asians, and she said it is the largest collection of its kind in size and scope in the U.S.

"Doesn't matter how homogeneous we seem to be, we have these differences," she said. 

She said that the work that she does is cross-cultural.

"I would love to do more interviews here and expand (my research) while I'm here, or share the methodology for doing it with others who might like to do more cross-cultural interviews and gather more cross-cultural experiences to share," Oliver said.

She is the author of "Multicultural Relations on Race and Change," "Multicolored Memories of a Black Southern Girl" and  "Voices of America: Race and Change in Hollywood, Florida."

She added that she was featured briefly on the documentary film, "The Beatles: Eight Days a Week - The Touring Years," where she shared her personal experiences with the band and segregation in the south.

Rawn said the presentation will be informative and valuable.

"I encourage people to come because race is a difficult conversation to have, and I think this will be a nice gentle way to have a conversation," she said.