Episode 2 - Childhood

Authors

Ayana Thompson, University of South Alabama
Kiara Smith, University of South Alabama
Erik Ware, University of South Alabama

Files

Description

This second episode in the series explores the ways that oral history narrators described their childhood experiences growing up Down the Bay. Ayana, Kiara, and Erik reflect on similarities and differences between their own childhoods in their hometowns and the stories that they learned about through the interviews.

What Happened Down the Bay? is a podcast created by University of South Alabama students in summer 2025, through the Jean O’Connor-Snyder Internship Program (JOIP) funded by the David Mathews Center for Public Life. Down the Bay is a historic Black neighborhood south of downtown Mobile, Alabama, and this podcast explores the history of Down the Bay as community members have related it through oral history interviews. In preparation for the internship, students participated in an oral history seminar with Drs. Ryan Morini and David Messenger, working with interviews from the Down the Bay Oral History Project collection at the McCall Library before meeting with elders from the community and recording new interviews for the collection. The podcast combines clips from the archived interviews with students’ reflections on how their own home communities and experiences relate to those that people describe from Down the Bay.

Publication Date

2025

Disciplines

African American Studies | American Studies | Oral History | Public History | United States History

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

Recommended Citation

Thompson, Ayana; Smith, Kiara; and Ware, Erik, "Episode 2 - Childhood" (2025). Down the Bay Student Podcast. 3.
https://jagworks.southalabama.edu/dtb_oral_hist-podcast/3