The mission to safeguard Black history in the US | Julieanna L. Richardson (re-release)

0:03You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. In the United States, today is Juneteenth, a day that commemorates the emancipation of enslaved African Americans and celebrates Black freedom, culture, and history. Every child and every person deserves to find themselves in history. And yet, for lawyer and founder of HistoryMakers, Juliana L. Richardson, that didn't happen. And she spent decades refusing to let that be the end of the story. Today, from our boardrooms to our classrooms, on TV and social media, debates are raging about whose history matters.

0:47Those who document their history are who society says matters. for the Black community, that documentation has been elusive. History Makers is the largest African-American video oral history archive in the U.S., which is now permanently housed in the Library of Congress. For Juliana, Black history in this country is rich and profound, and she argues it is at risk of being lost forever. In this talk from 2021, she shares some of the unknown and incredible legacies she's uncovered and makes the case for why preserving those histories isn't just an act of memory, but an act of justice. We have in this country already lost a lot of the 17th, 18th, and 19th century documentation of the African American experience.

1:38We can ill afford to lose the 20th and the 21st century. Preservation will determine if the Black community is viewed as valueless or valuable. That's coming up right after a short break.

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4:44And now, our TED Talk of the day. 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.

5:30What 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.

6:17And 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 fall day. The leaves were a golden brown. And I'm in New York's Schaumburg's Library with my headphones on, listening to this song. I'm just wild about Harry Harry's wild about me This song, this song that I associated with President Harry Truman I had found, 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 Sizzle and Yubi Blake in the 1921 production of Shuffle Along on Broadway.

7:25I was thrilled, and I took my, I went up to the librarian, the famous librarian, Jean Blackwell Hudson. 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 Winds, Butterfly McQueen, Lee Whipper, who was the oldest living black actor at the time, historian John Henry Clark and tap dancer Honey Coles. I had found myself. I had a history to call my own. I too, according to Langston Hughes, I too was an 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.

8:28Those 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? Black people went from having absolutely no rights to the U.S. 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 ourselves, and James Brown led the way. Say it loud. I'm black and white proud. He did it for us. That became our national anthem. And recently, I attended the state sale of Porgy and Bess's Edelman Barnett.

9:31she 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 for the entire collection. I told her, please give it to me.

10:29Honestly, 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, a hundred years of rich black history was henceforth scattered to the wind. The same thing happened at the state sale of poet Maya Angelou. And if that does not resonate with you, then I want you to think forward at the state sale of young poet laureate Amanda Gorman that her writings and her poetry would suffer a similar fate.

11:28We 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 a value less 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 It showed society having a 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.

12:34I 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 History Makers, 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, chairman of the NAACP.

13:28He 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 U.S. Supreme Court. And he won. He was seated. it.

14:00Another 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 He says, do you know of the Golden 13? I said, no, Colonel Thompson, I've never heard of the Golden 13. 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.

14:49Four years later, I'm seated next to General Colin Powell. Of course, I try 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 Montfort Point Marines, that they were the Marines version of the Tuskegee Airmen. The Tuskegee Airmen, the Navy's Golden 13, the Montfort Point Marines. All three helped desegregate the U.S. 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.

15:46Our 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's Alonzo Petty, the oldest living black cowboy. Catherine Dunham, the inventor of black dance. Catherine 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.

16:48When 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 Shackelford 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 birthplace for Edward James Roy, 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.

17:47What 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.

18:54I 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 story. Thank you. Thank you.

19:27That was Juliana L. Richardson at TEDx Mile High in Denver, Colorado in 2021. If you're curious about TED's curation, visit ted.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is a podcast from TED. This episode was fact-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Lucy Little, Emma Taubner, and Tansika Sungmarnivong. Additional support from Daniela Ballarezzo, Christopher Faze-Bogan, Valentina Bohanini, Banban Chang, Brian Green, and Lainey Lott. Learn more at podcasts.ted.com. I am Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feet.

20:10Thanks for listening.

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