NSMoHxCHDR Newspaper Digitization Project: Week Fourteen (4/17/2026)

 Hello! Welcome to Week Fourteen of my Spring 2026 internship with the New Smyrna Beach Newspaper Digitization Team at UCF's Center for Humanities and Digital Research. This week, we began scanning the 1960-1961 edition of The Pelican. While I had thought the last two volumes after the 1959-60 edition were from the 1970s, it's actually just the final volume, which skips all the way to 1972. Unfortunately, this means there will likely not be any discussion of the Cross Florida Barge Canal, as President Nixon cancelled the canal by executive order in 1971. Nonetheless, I was happy with the progress we made with the '60-'61 edition this week, and I remain hopeful we'll finish the remaining volumes by the end of the semester. I also realized that I forgot to give some updates in terms of newspaper content from last week. Probably the most exciting thing was that I saw a picture of a Black person in The Pelican for the first time (and it only took about 6 months and more than 5,000 pages scanned for it to happen). Furthermore, it was on the front cover! Now the newspaper, from March 7, 1960, didn't picture him alone, but the entire Police Department of New Smyrna Beach, as he seems to have been the only Black police officer in the city at that time. The man, whose name is listed as John McArthur, took me by surprise because, as previously stated, I have never seen a single Black person pictured in any of The Pelican's previous issues. Even as the number of featured photographs from around the NSB area has increased, Black residents have been intentionally omitted. While this is partially because a large number of these photographs are taken on the beach, and NSB had segregated beaches at this time, I think even in photographs from around town, Black citizens are excluded for not fitting the image the paper is attempting to sell. At a time when newspapers, developers, and local governments were hard at work attempting to "sell" Florida to the rest of the US, places like NSB were motivated to present an artificial, carefully-crafted image of their city as a place free from any of the outside issues facing the rest of the country. A major one of those issues in 1960s America was the rapidly growing Civil Rights Movement, which many Southern states racistly viewed as simply stirring up trouble. Perhaps that is also why the paper was comfortable showing McArthur in this setting, in a police uniform and surrounded by white men. Whatever the case, it was a good reminder of simply how invisible Black Americans were often made to feel through popular media. At a time when NSB only had a population of around 8,800, the some 3,000 Black residents that lived there are all but absent from this paper.