Two Practitioners: Jen Cramer and Angela Proctor

Angela Proctor (Southern University), Jennifer Cramer (Louisiana State University), and Bernie Cook (Georgetown University) speak to Oral History as a method for learning about the experiences of the GU272+ and the histories of Jesuit Slaveholding. We recommend listening to these reflections prior to visiting the collections of GU272+ Oral Histories (audio; total running time: 4:17).

*Biographies of contributors to the audio file*
	Jennifer Abraham Cramer is the director of Louisiana State University's T. Harry Williams Center for Oral History. Cramer is responsible for managing an oral history collection of nearly 5,000 interviews and cultivates partnerships with like-minded organizations, individuals and community groups. Cramer also serves as the media review editor for The Oral History Review. In Spring 2017, Cramer collaborated with Dr. Jonathan Earle, Dean of the Ogden Honors College at LSU, to design and teach a new course entitled, 272 Slaves: Discovering Louisiana’s (and Georgetown’s) Past. Cramer and Earle designed an opportunity for their students to collect and edit oral history interviews with GU272+ descendants living in Baton Rouge and Maringouin, Louisiana.
	Angela Proctor is the Head University Archivist and Digital Librarian at Southern University in Baton Rouge. Proctor is the force behind digitizing interviews conducted by John Brother Cade, then Dean of Southern, with formerly enslaved people living in Louisiana in the 1920s. Proctor is also responsible for making available the extant Louisiana Works Progress Administration interviews with people who grew up enslaved. In 2021, Proctor partnered with Georgetown faculty member Adam Rothman to secure a grant from the Social Science Research Council which funded a new project to collect and edit new oral history interviews with GU272+ descendants with ties to Southern. It is believed that more GU272+ descendants have received degrees from Southern than from any other university.

Read the transcript.

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