A Digital Archive Is Making History in African-American Studies

摘要

African-American people of accomplishment are often underrepre-sented in history sources. Recent movies such as Red Tails and Hidden Figures put an exclamation point on that gap. Julieanna L. Richardson was keenly aware of this, and she set out decades ago to do something about it. Although she had a successful legal career after graduating from Harvard Law School and a career in cable television management, she wanted to do something that would highlight the accomplishments of African-American achievers. In 1999, she founded The HistoryMakers (thehistory makers.org), a digital archive of videos with the oral histories of notables such as Colin Powell and Barack Obama, as well as lesser-known heroes, including several of the Tuskegee Airmen. It is a national 501(c)(3) nonprofit research and educational institution committed to preserving and making widely accessible the untold personal stories of both well-known and unsung African-Americans.