From Colored to Black
2019
From Colored to Black explores the intersections between public health education, oral history performance, and community arts activism, and functions as a multi-modal platform to communicate health data, historical research, and the lived experience of the Black community to the public.
Created by emerging African American playwright and UF graduate Ms. Brittney M. Caldwell, and Jeffrey Pufahl, Lecturer in the Center for Arts in Medicine, this groundbreaking play incorporates dramatized Civil Rights era oral histories excavated from the UF archive into an analytical framework designed to educate audiences and provoke critical dialogue.
The play exposes the origins and mechanisms of systemic racism on the Black community and traces these mechanisms through history, revealing their impact on current health and social issues. Themes include:
women’s roles in the Civil Rights Movement
the St. Augustine Civil Rights Movement
epigenetics and intergenerational stress and trauma
the significance of redlining and racist public policies on education and community health
the lasting effects of integration on Black education
Black identity and the portrayal of Blackness in the media