Ida Boston Oral History Interview

HH00531.pdf

Ida Boston is a retired school bus driver for the Seminole County Public School system living in Oviedo, Florida. In 1956 she married her husband, Russell Boston the grandson of Prince Butler Boston, the leading figure of Oviedo’s black community for much of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this oral history Boston discusses the legacy of Prince Butler Boston, a transplant from Georgia who would go on to be a pillar of strength for the black community in Seminole County, creating a colored cemetery, funding the Oviedo Area Colored Schools, and expanding the Antioch Missionary Baptist Church. Boston also discusses black life in Oviedo as she experienced it, including membership in the Oviedo Citizens in Action Committee (OCIAC), which desegregated public places in Oviedo and fought for integration of Oviedo’s schools. This oral history is important in that it sheds light on Oviedo’s black community, which has been rendered invisible in the town's collective past.

Watch the oral history here.

Oviedo Citizens in Action Committee
Ida Boston Oral History Interview