Amidst 21st-Century Racial Strife, 20th-Century African American History At Risk of Being Lost Forever
Nation’s Largest African American Video Oral History Archive Makes Loss Prevention Its Mission
(Chicago, IL – January 14, 2021) America sits at a critically important crossroads in the 21st century. Racist ideology is on the rise and significant parts of 20th-century African American history and culture are at risk of being lost forever. The HistoryMakers, the nation’s largest African American video oral history archive (www.thehistorymakers.org), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit headquartered in Chicago, has made preventing this loss its mission. Yet, in 2021, it finds itself in a race against time.
“The challenges facing our country at this moment only reinforce the need to preserve and elevate the truth about the African American experience. We must work together to massively digitize the personal collections of our HistoryMakers and other African American leaders, making them accessible worldwide. Otherwise, the continued distortions, falsehoods, and stereotypes that adversely impact the perceptions of African American contributions to our culture and democracy will continue. Our need is urgent, as evidenced by the events of last year and so far this year, especially as the next generation of storytellers, changemakers, and stewards of our legacy are now taking the lead,” says Julieanna Richardson, Founder and President of The HistoryMakers. “To date, a fraction of 1% of our HistoryMakers have repositories for their personal collections. We are committed to finding solutions that will more aggressively stem this loss,” adds Richardson, who urges the involvement of everyone, including the federal government, corporations, foundations, organizations, and individuals. For example, in 2019, The HistoryMakers worked with the Library of Congress and Harvard’s Schlesinger Library to ensure the preservation of the papers of their respective HistoryMakers Jessye Norman and Angela Davis.
The HistoryMakers is the digital repository for the black experience, with its archives containing almost 3,400 video oral history interviews (over 11,000 hours) recorded in 413 U.S. cities and towns, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Norway. In December of 2020, for its twentieth anniversary, The HistoryMakers convened twenty days of panels highlighting the magnitude of this problem across various subject matters, professions, and regions, with over 100 of the nation’s African American leadership participating. Participants included former U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Merck CEO Kenneth C. Frazier, activist, author, and professor Angela Davis, NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson, U.S. House of Representatives Majority Whip James E. Clyburn, Congresswoman Maxine Waters, Retired Four-Star U.S. Army General Vincent K. Brooks, NAACP Legal Defense Fund president Sherrilyn Ifill, actor Danny Glover, singer Dionne Warwick, Essence magazine co-founder Edward Lewis, leaders of the four remaining HBCU medical schools, National Council of Negro Women chair Johnnetta Betsch Cole, president of Prairie View A&M University and former president of Brown University Ruth Simmons, comedian and radio personality Rickey Smiley, FUBU founder and star of ABC’s Shark Tank Daymond John, Ford Foundation president Darren Walker, and Director and Chief Curator of The Studio Museum in Harlem Thelma Golden, among others.
HistoryMaker Howard Dodson, Director Emeritus of Howard University Libraries and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, notes: “Our nation’s mainstream institutions have not approached their preservation work equitably to be inclusive of the African American experience, creating a heritage gap that is contributing to the divisions in America we are experiencing today. But even more important, there is also a funding gap to support and uplift this work. And that needs to change.” This is consistent with the goals of The HistoryMakers. With education as its mission, The HistoryMakers’s one-of-a-kind collection is housed permanently at the Library of Congress, providing an unprecedented and irreplaceable physical and digital record of African American lives, accomplishments, and contributions through unique first-person testimony. Its website (www.thehistorymakers.org) is regularly accessed by millions worldwide, frequently cited in Wikipedia, and used as a “go-to” reference tool by scholars and laypersons alike. Particularly relevant in the COVID-19 era, with an increased focus on online learning, its digital archive (https://da.thehistorymakers.org / trial passcode: THM2021) has been licensed by nearly eighty colleges and universities (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Howard, Spelman, Morehouse, Ohio State, University of Oregon, and others), K-12 schools, and public libraries (Chicago, New York, Cleveland, Houston, Los Angeles, etc.) for use by faculty, students, and patrons. The HistoryMakers’s archive now and well into the future is essential to providing a more complete understanding of who we are as Americans as well as where we have come from and where we are going as a nation.
