ACCRP: Truth & Reconciliation
Project Overview
The Alachua County Community Remembrance Project is a response to work completed by the Alachua County Historical Commission as led by the Alachua County Board of County Commissioners. The project is also inspired by the Equal Justice Initiative’s work done to document the unjust lynchings that took place between 1867 and 1926 in Alachua County, Florida. Alachua County has a website called Truth and Reconciliation that needed a redesign as well as some new sections that would aim to recognize those who were victims of racial terror and would also keep track of the historical sites of significance to the Black community in Alachua County. In doing this, ACCRP aims to publicly confront the truth about this history of racial terror and injustice, fostering healing and reconciliation within the community.
Process
I showed interest in this project when my supervisor forwarded a message she received from a professor at the College of the Arts about a website project that she was helping lead in partnership with the county’s civic leaders. They needed a web developer to work on the front-end to help build a page where Black historical sites that they planned to store in an online database can be displayed on the “ACCRP: Truth and Reconciliation” website. Once I met with the professor, we came up with a timeline in hopes to get this project completed. I planned to re-design the website, establish some sort of brand identity, and redevelop the entire site.
For the mockups and style guide, I used Adobe XD. Since the initial iteration of the ACCRP website utilized React to build the frontend, that is the frontend library/framework tool that I decided to use. I also utilized SCSS to help handle the styling and Axios to handle one of the API calls to the database (I used fetch for the other). We had a graphic designer create the community map that would feature the Black heritage sites’ locations in the county, and another Graphic designer to make the image I selected for the home page’s header into a video. Once the frontend was mostly completed, I partnered with Alachua County’s IT team of developers to build the backend of the website so that I can connect it to the frontend. Once everything was connected, the site went live!
Outcome
At the end of this project, we not only had a new website with updated features, but a community map that helps Alachua County citizens and visitors learn about the historical richness of this region, and to recognize the impactful contributions of Black Americans and other African descendent people. We threw a party to celebrate and it was so amazing to meet all of the wonderful civic leaders and community members that were a part of or took great interest in this project. It was great to know that the work I did will serve a definite purpose and have a genuine impact on the citizens and visitors of Alachua County.