Preservation of The HistoryMakers, the single largest archival collection of African-American oral histories, is now assured after its acquisition by the Library of Congress.
“Things have been so marginalized with Black history,” says Julieanna Richardson, founder and executive director of The HistoryMakers, a nonprofit research and educational institution committed to preserving, developing and providing access to thousands of African-American video oral histories. “People like learning new things and looking for areas that have not been well researched.”
Founded in 1999, Richardson envisioned conducting 5,000 interviews three to six hours in length that document the lives and stories of prominent African-Americans as well as people who are witnesses to history. The collection currently comprises 2,600 videotaped interviews with people in a diverse range of fields, including science, the military, art, religion, style and politics.
In late June, it was announced that the current collection and all future HistoryMakers interviews will be permanently housed at the Library of Congress.
“We like being able to record history in first-person accounts. This has been a tradition at the Library of Congress,” says Mike Mashon, head of the Library’s Moving Image Section. Every interview done to date and in the future will be available for researcher access in the Moving Image Reference Center.
“The depth, breadth and variety of the people that they talk to makes it a very astonishing collection,” says Mashon.
