Dr. Connie Lester, associate professor, lectures her students in the Nicholson School of Communication and Media on Oct. 20.
Rachel Jones
Dr. Connie Lester, an associate professor at UCF, has worked for the university for 20 years and has shaped a legacy that includes educating through a weekly radio broadcast and directing a program documenting interpersonal Black histories in the Orlando area, each first impacted by her time working with a Pulitzer Prize-winning author.
As editor of The Florida Historical Quarterly, a peer-reviewed journal celebrating more than 100 years of publication, Lester showcases the value of the journal’s pieces on “Florida Frontiers,” an NPR segment broadcast on nine Florida radio stations by the Florida Historical Society. But before her time at UCF, Lester initially earned her bachelor’s degree in microbiology, which led her to conduct cholera research at the University of Tennessee and St. Jude Children’s Hospital. Lester helped develop protocols that are still inB use at St. Jude today, she said.
However, Lester left the field to pursue motherhood and did not feel pigeonholed into returning to microbiology when she returned to her career.
“I had to decide what I was going to do again, because five years out of the sciences is a lifetime,” Lester said.
Lester returned to school to pursue master’s and doctoral degrees at the University of Tennessee and was allowed to support the research team for the author of “Roots,” Alex Haley.
Lester said Haley’s impact on her life was nothing short of consequential.
“I learned a lot from him, and I think he probably shaped my direction because I became really interested in looking at history from the perspective of ordinary citizens, not from the political elite, and the way in which they shape history. And that’s been the trajectory of my research ever since,” Lester said.
As part of Lester’s focus on ordinary towns, documenting the significant events that shaped small communities in Central Florida is important to the truth of her life’s work.
“Seeing Florida history more broadly has been a very great help to me as I’ve done the third thing I do in my job, which is as director of the RICHES Digital Archiving Project. And going back to my — no pun intended — going back to my roots with Alex Haley, we focus on the histories of neighborhoods, of towns, of ordinary people in Florida history,” said Lester.
Lester has worked with more than 80 community partners over the last 15 years to archive histories of all shapes and sizes for the RICHES project. In studying Black communities, Lester said she witnessed incredible moments, large and small, of Black history.
A prized project of RICHES, “Bending Towards Justice,” focuses on Black communities. The 1920 Ocoee Massacre is significant to the project, as it is their primary archival substance accounted for in the “Voter Rights & Voter Suppression” chapter.
As RICHES program director, Lester received an invitation to the masonic burial of July Perry, a Black man lynched during the Ocoee Massacre, and to video the ceremony for RICHES. The burial was held in 2020, for the 100th anniversary of Perry’s lynching, amid the lively Black Lives Matter protests.
The burial served as the finale to the commemoration that Ocoee held in memory of Perry’s death.
“That was the most moving ceremony I have ever seen, and I thought it was the perfect way to end the commemoration,” Lester said, having noted the chills she felt recounting the event.
Geoffrey Cravero, digital archivist for the RICHES Project, works directly with Lester to compile the project’s exhibits and collections, having previously been one of Lester’s students.
“Dr. Lester is the backbone of this program,” Cravero said. “She deserves the lion’s share of credit for its success. Without her vision and direction, RICHES would not be the program that it is today.”
More of Lester’s work includes her research of the Black community of Parramore. She was given access to the nomination documents for the “Luminary” project that the city was pursuing. which created a memorial park honoring significant members of the Parramore community who hadn’t previously been recognized in any way.
The Luminaries were nominated by fellow community members who remembered their legacies through letters of nomination that Lester sifted through. And, in the instance of one Parramore Luminary, Lester said, “I was in tears by the time I finished that one.”
Lester has curated, written and documented a legacy for herself in her lifetime of academia. But said the most rewarding part of her work is seeing the new generations looking at her writings and continuing the conversations. By citing her works, students and historians are building off the work she has dedicated her energy to, a notion Lester finds exciting. Lester gets to watch her academic legacy develop in real time.
“I could not imagine working for a more charitable, knowledgeable and fearless person. It would be impossible to quantify what I have learned from her. She never ceases to amaze me with her work ethic and her seemingly boundless energy. She might be the hardest working person I know and treats everyone with the same respect and dignity that she commands,” Cravero said.