Paul Ortiz

Paul Ortiz is director of the award-winning Samuel Proctor Oral History Program and professor of history at the University of Florida. His book, An African American and Latinx History of the United States is the recipient of the 2018 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence. He is also the author of Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Blood Election of 1920.

He was an interviewer and co-editor of Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South (New Press)

Paul received the 2013 César E. Chávez Action and Commitment Award from the Florida Education Association, AFL-CIO for “Outstanding leadership through engaging in activities which dignify workers and by making notable contributions to the labor movement & demonstrating resilience in organizing workers, especially those who have been traditionally disadvantaged

Under Paul’s leadership, the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program has received three national academic awards including the Society of American Archivists’ Diversity Award in 2015 for the program’s “relentless pursuit of community knowledge, local voices, and academic transformation has created a monumental program that has impacted the lives of countless people in Florida and across the nation.” The program also received the Stetson Kennedy Vox Populi Award, from the Oral History Association for the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program’s “outstanding achievement in using oral history to create a more humane and just world.”

Paul is currently writing the book,“Settler Colonialism and the ‘War on Terror’: 1492 to the Present”, which will be published by Beacon Press. He may be reached at: ortizprof@gmail.com

Author photo: Deborah Hendrix