Civic Media Center & Stetson Kennedy Library
The Civic Media Center, known as the CMC, is an alternative library, infoshop, and community organizing space. It has been open since October 1993, making it one of the longest-running spaces of its kind in the country. The CMC runs on volunteer labor and community donations, with no large grants or institutional funding. On any given week, the space is open for library hours, hosts a documentary film screening, holds a Poetry Jam, opens its doors to grassroots groups for meetings and workshops, and puts on DIY music shows with donation-based entry.
The library side of the CMC carries several thousand books, periodicals, zines, and audiovisual materials focused on radical politics, labor history, and social movements. The annex holds the personal collection of Stetson Kennedy, a folklore archivist and civil rights activist who spent decades documenting the American South and infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan to expose it publicly. The CMC also houses the Travis Fristoe Zine Library, the largest independent zine collection in the southeastern United States, alongside decades of archival material documenting Florida’s radical and labor movement history.
The CMC was founded in October 1993 by a coalition of independent press editors and media activists, including people behind the Gainesville Alternative Press, the Black community paper Mahogany Revue, and the Gainesville Iguana, a progressive newsmonthly still in print today. Noam Chomsky dedicated the original building at its opening. The space has moved twice since then and settled at its current location in 2009. It describes its own orientation plainly: information is power, and access to that power is political.
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