Please join us for a special event with the Oral History Association (OHA) conference on Saturday, October 7 at the East Side Freedom Library.​ The annual OHA meeting brings together a wide array of people. Students as well as emerging and established educators and researchers connect with colleagues and gain new skills. Highlighting “the best work in the field,” the theme for 2017 is Engaging Audiences: Oral History and the Public. Our particular event will be Free and Open to all and will feature a walking tour, labor discussion, and celebration of leadership in social justice.

​1:00 pm: Participants in the walking tour meet at the Freedom Library

1:30 – 3:00 pm: “Immigration Then and Now” Walking Tour

• We will travel to Swede Hollow to explore its role as the first site of settlements in the 1850s. Focusing on Payne Avenue, we’ll consider its role as a center of immigrant life from the European immigrants of the 19^th century, to the Hmong, Mexican, and Salvadoran immigrants of the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries. We will walk approximately 2 miles.

3:00- 4:30 pm: Labor Roundtable

• The session focuses on the Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en Lucha/Center for Workers United in Struggle, a workers center commonly known as CTUL. Between 2009 and 2016, CTUL members and their allies succeeded in winning union recognition across the Twin Cities’ entire retail cleaning industry, including stores owned by industry giants like Target, Macy’s, Best Buy, and Home Depot.  This session allows conference participants to view and discuss interview clips and to speak with LES staff and representatives from CTUL. It connects OHA members with an ongoing local struggle (as CTUL transitions into SEIU Local 26) and allows workers and staff to interact with oral history professionals as they begin the process of transforming hours of interviews and raw footage into a variety of academic and popular education materials.

5:00 – 6:30 pm Reception Honoring the Lifework of Staughton and Alice Lynd

• Alice and Staughton Lynd have done pioneering work in oral history, struggles for racial justice, and labor history, from the Freedom Schools of Mississippi in 1964 to death row prisoners fighting for their freedom in Ohio in the early 2000s.  Among other projects, they have been the editors of RANK AND FILE and THE NEW RANK AND FILE, books in which labor activists have told their stories.

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Free and Open to All. You are welcome to participate in any or all of these events.