Recovering the History of Portsmouth, Ohio’s Fourteenth Street Community Center - #BHM2022
Channel: SSU Center for Public History
Date: 2022-02-26

Dr. Andrew Feight, Professor of History and Director of the Center for Public History at Shawnee State University, discusses his latest research into the early history of the Fourteenth Street Community Center (FSCC) of Portsmouth, Ohio.
For over ninety years, the FSCC has been at the heart of Portsmouth’s North End community, helping meet the needs of its families and children. With the Center's roots in an Age of Jim Crow, the early history of the FSCC illustrates how a vibrant black civic movement (which included an active branch of the NAACP) led to the creation of the first Center on 11th Street in the early 1930s. Their efforts and the Center's future development would in turn be shaped during the Great Depression by New Deal jobs programs for American youth, white and black. The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and the National Youth Administration (NYA) would contribute (in their own ways) to the construction of the original Center building on 14th Street, which first opened in 1943.
This presentation is a preview of new content being developed for Scioto Historical Version 4.0, an educational mobile app and website (sciotohistorical.org) that explores the history of Portsmouth and the surrounding Appalachian region.
This program is sponsored by the Center for Public History at Shawnee State University and is made possible in part by Ohio Humanities, a state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this presentation do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.