The Mission to Safeguard Black History in the US | Julieanna L. Richardson | TED

As a little Black girl,

I did not know

that American history had anything to do with someone who looked like me.

American history was George Washington cutting down his cherry tree.

American history was white.

Raised in a small steel mining town of Duquesne, Pennsylvania,

my family moved to Newark, Ohio, not New Jersey, but Ohio,

when I was age nine.

And one day the teacher asked us to talk about our family backgrounds.

My classmates' hands literally rose up like arrows to the sky.

"I'm part German, I'm part Italian, I'm part French, I'm part Polish, Jewish."

They all had hyphenates.

What was I?

The only thing that we studied back then about Black people

were the other George Washington,

Tuskegee Institute's George Washington Carver.

And my white teacher said he could do a lot of things with peanuts.

And then there was the taboo issue of slavery,

and no one wanted to be associated with slavery.

So to my nine-year-old brain

those two facts together did not compute.

How could he have done all those things with peanuts

when all we had been were slaves?

So I mumbled something like "Negro" or "Black,"

"Native American" because most Black people think

they have Native American blood in them.

And I added in French, I lied,

My father had been stationed in France,

but I wanted to have a history also.

That sense of not knowing and not belonging

stayed with me until my sophomore year at Brandeis University.

I remember it like it was yesterday.

It was a fall day.

The leaves were a golden brown.

And I’m in New York’s Schomburg Library

with my headphones on, listening to the song:

"I'm just wild about Harry,

Harry's wild about me."

This song,

this song that I associated with President Harry Truman,

who was a white president,

I had found in a Black music collection

in a Black library written by a Black songwriting team

of Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake

in the 1921 production of "Shuffle Along" on Broadway.

I was thrilled.

And I took my --

I went up to the librarian, the famous librarian,

Jean Blackwell Hutson,

she gave me a list of people to interview.

And I had my tape recorder in hand,

today, it would be an iPhone.

And I went out and interviewed

"Gone with the Wind's" Butterfly McQueen,

Leigh Whipper, who was the oldest living Black actor at the time,

historian John Henrik Clarke and tap dancer Honi Coles.

I had found myself.

I had a history to call my own.

I, too, according to Langston Hughes,

I too, was, am America.

And from that day forward,

my life was forever changed.

Today, from our boardrooms to our classrooms,

on TV and social media,

debates are raging about whose history matters.

Those who document their history

are who society says matters.

For the Black community, that documentation has been elusive.

How many of you had heard about Tulsa and its Black Wall Street until recently,

let me see a show of hands.

Great.

But there are those who don't.

Black people went from having absolutely no rights

to the US electing its first Black president.

Our civil rights gains paved the way for the women's movement,

the gay rights movement and the social movements of today.

In the 1960s we had found ourself,

and James Brown led the way.

"Say it loud, I'm Black and I'm proud."

(Applause)

He did it for us,

that became our national anthem.

And recently,

I attended the estate sale

of "Porgy and Bess's" Etta Moten Barnett,

she had the famous contralto voice.

And her husband, Claude Barnett, Pan-Africanist,

who was founder of the Associated Negro Press,

in their home, literally,

was clothing and furniture and rare books and artwork

that demonstrated the fineness of their lives.

But as I approached one room,

I looked to my side and I saw something I should not have seen there.

There were family photographs

and letters and scrapbooks.

As the estate seller yelled out, "Cash and carry,"

I told her, "You can't do that, not with this."

A local university had offered 3,000 dollars for the entire collection.

I told her, "Please give it to me.

Honestly, I'll take it and preserve it.

These are family heirlooms."

She told me it would be a quarter of a million dollars.

A quarter of a million dollars?

I don't have that.

I bought the little I could.

But ...

That priceless, intact, one-of-a-kind collection,

from that day forth,

of rich Black history,

100 years of rich Black history,

was henceforward scattered to the wind.

The same thing happened at the estate sale of poet Maya Angelou.

And if that does not resonate with you, then I want you to think forward.

At the estate sale of young poet laureate Amanda Gorman,

that her writings and her poetry would suffer a similar fate.

We have in this country already lost

a lot of the 17th, 18th and 19th century documentation

of the African American experience.

We can ill afford to lose the 20th and the 21st century.

Preservation will determine if the Black community is viewed as valueless,

or value-full.

Consider 17-year-old Darnella Frazier

and that nine-minutes and 29-second recording

of George Floyd's murder.

And the complete disregard

that it showed society having of Black life.

We in the Black community have always had value.

It's just been hidden from view, not well documented.

Over 20 years ago,

I sat at my dining room table.

I was unemployed,

no kids and single.

And you get to the point in your life when you start asking:

What will be your leave-behind, your legacy?

And those stories of my sophomore year

came back to me.

I took my love of the theater.

My degree in American studies.

My legal training from Harvard Law School.

And I set out to create the nation's largest

African American video oral history archive.

It's called The HistoryMakers.

And back then, lots of people had thought I had lost my mind.

But we’ve interviewed thousands and thousands of African American leaders.

One early interview was of civil rights leader Julian Bond.

We had traveled from Chicago to Washington, DC.

We had asked him to bring photos of him.

And one of the photos was like the one here.

And when he walked into the room, literally,

I was taken back to my 12-year-old self and my serious crush on him

when I had seen him.

Look at those curls.

(Laughter)

Chairman of the NAACP,

he had been one of the student leaders for SNCC,

the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

At the tender age of 25,

he had been elected to the Georgia House of Representatives.

Georgia being Georgia, then and now,

and there being no Stacey Abrams in sight,

they refused to seat him.

And his case went up to the US Supreme Court.

And he won.

He was seated.

(Applause)

Another early interview

was of Tuskegee Airmen Colonel Bill Thompson.

We arrived at Colonel Thompson's house,

and he had prepared for us

for four days.

He had boxes and boxes of material

that are now housed at the Air and Space Museum

at the Smithsonian.

He sits me down.

He says, "Do you know of the Golden Thirteen?"

I said, "No, Colonel Thompson, I've never heard of the Golden Thirteen."

He said, "They were the Navy's version of the Tuskegee Airmen

and there are four left living in the country,

and one lives upstairs.

And he'd like to talk to you also."

It was at that moment that I knew

that we were on a path of great discovery.

Four years later,

I'm seated next to General Colin Powell.

Of course, I tried to get him to interview with me.

He so politely declines.

Then I tell him my Colonel Bill Thompson story.

He tells me about the Montford Point Marines,

that they were the Marines version of the Tuskegee Airmen.

The Tuskegee Airmen, the Navy's Golden Thirteen,

the Montford Point Marines:

all three helped desegregate the US armed forces.

But unfortunately, most people only know of the Tuskegee Airmen.

We have such an opportunity to make change.

Our crews have traveled to 413 cities and towns

across the United States.

Our collection is housed permanently in the Library of Congress.

Our digital archive,

thanks to the computer geniuses at Carnegie Mellon,

is now accessible worldwide

24 hours a day, seven days a week,

on all kinds of portable devices and computers and phones.

We have interviewed, as I said,

thousands of African American leaders.

There is Alonzo Pettie, the oldest living Black cowboy;

Katherine Dunham, the inventor of Black dance;

Katherine Johnson, the NASA scientist

whose story was portrayed in the movie “Hidden Figures”;

Poets Nikki Giovanni and Sonia Sanchez,

and Ursula Burns, the first Black female CEO of a Fortune 500 company.

We are now the digital repository for the Black experience,

and it will include those digitized copies of the family heirlooms

that I spoke of us losing.

When I think back on my fourth-grade self,

I have such compassion for her.

A little Black girl in a sea of white faces in rural Ohio.

Little did she know that Black history was all around her.

Yards from her home was the first Black school built for Black children

by a man named Shackleford, who sat at gunpoint,

daring any white mob to tear down his school for Black children.

Her hometown of Newark, Ohio,

was also the 1815 birth place for Edward James Roye,

who had tired of life in America and migrated back to Africa.

And in 1870, he had become the fifth president

of the African country of Liberia.

What if she had known

that being president of a country would be possible

for someone who looked like her?

What if her classmates had known that history

and that would have changed their views and their world experience?

You all know

that I'm that little girl.

And when I had spoken to General Powell,

he told me that no one can change their yesterdays.

But all of us can change our tomorrows.

I ask you today

to join with me in changing America’s tomorrows,

so that the Black community and its experience and its history

will have an undeniable place

and permanent place in this great country

and in America's lexicon.

I also ask you to join me so no child will ever feel

that way that I felt in that classroom

when I did not know the history

that was my legacy.

We can all work together and make this happen.

Thank you for listening to this little Black girl's story.

Thank you.

(Applause)