New Media and History Merge at HistoryMakers Symposium

Event at George Washington University explores how a digital archive of oral history preserves the black experience.

November 10, 2014

HistoryMakers

By Nic Corbett

The power of hearing historical figures recounting the obstacles they overcame cannot be underestimated, said Geneva Henry, librarian and vice provost for libraries at the George Washington University.

“Research has shown that when students are emotionally impacted, that’s when they retain what they’re learning—that’s when the memory kicks in,” she said Saturday at an event on digital media and the black experience.

Ms. Henry and dozens of educators gathered at GW’s Jack Morton Auditorium for “Digital Innovation Meets the Black Experience,” an education symposium created by the HistoryMakers. Since 1999 the organization has been recording African American oral histories and building a digital archive. Attendees learned more about how this resource is being used around the country at the event, a collaboration between GW and Howard University.

“Unfortunately, our students are often not often exposed to those primary sources,” Ms. Henry said. “But what we’re starting to see now are some movements to help get that out there into their hands, so that they can understand history in a much more personal way. When they read the textbook, so many times what history seems to convey are events and places and points in time, but the reality is history is all about people.”

The HistoryMakers’ digital archive features about 700 interviews that the organization has conducted. An annual “Back to School with the HistoryMakers” event over the past five years has sent nearly 400 high-achieving African Americans to 200 schools around the country. Participating schools receive a free yearlong subscription to the archive, and teachers are encouraged to incorporate it into their curriculum.

HistoryMakers founder and Executive Director Julieanna Richardson said the in-person program is important, especially for those schools that lack adequate computers to take advantage of the digital archive, but also to bring African American professionals into the classroom.

“The K-12 space in the United States is a very challenged area as we speak when you deal with urban and minority youth,” she said.

Howard Dodson, director of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center and Howard University Libraries, spoke about how the voices of liberated slaves were recorded in the 1920s and 1930s, but as late as the early 1970s scholars were still not using these sources in writing about the history of slavery, not considering them to be legitimate or reliable.

“They would write about the history of slavery from the perspective of the slaveholder and from the perspective of the governing elites and others who had left records without consulting the voices of the enslaved African population,” he said. “It’s not because there weren’t any voices to consult.”

The HistoryMakers organization has also interviewed top African American scientists through a three-year National Science Foundation grant. These interviews make up the ScienceMakers archive.