TheHistoryMakers.com Institute for archiving and promoting African-American history
Title
The HistoryMakers.com - African American history archive
Description
Even though African Americans have made significant contributions to American life, society and culture, the world is still largely unaware of these contributions as well as the many personal stories of African American contributors. The HistoryMakers goal is to change this. With exceptions, embraced primarily within the historical lexicon are stories that focus on slavery, the abolitionist movement, the civil rights movement, music, sports and entertainment. Even then, only a relatively small number of African Americans have ever received the attention they deserve. Furthermore, existing oral history collections still consist largely of transcribed, audiocassette interviews; access to them is extremely limited; and, most are ill suited for easy transfer to today’s media formats.
The HistoryMakers represents the single largest archival project of its kind in the world, outdistancing the existing video oral history collections of New York’s Schomburg Library and the Birmingham Civil Rights Museum. The HistoryMakers is unique among these other collections of African American heritage, because of its massive scope. Like other oral history collections, The HistoryMakers collection hearkens back to the earliest and most authentic efforts to capture the voice of a people, while introducing state-of-the-art technology and increased accessibility. The HistoryMakers wants to provide living proof that African American history did not begin or end with the civil rights movement, that the HistoryMakers number in the thousands and that their names are not just Harriet Tubman, W.E.B. DuBois, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ella Fitzgerald.
The initial goal of The HistoryMakers is to complete 5,000 interviews of both well-known and unsung African American HistoryMakers within the next five years, creating an archive of unparalleled importance and exposing the archival collection to the widest audience possible. Not since the recording of former slaves during the WPA Movement of the 1930s (1936-1938), when teams of writers/researchers were sent throughout the South resulting in approximately 2,300 mostly hand-recorded interviews, has there been a methodic and wide-scale attempt to capture the testimonies of African Americans.
Contact
Administrative:
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- Chicago IL
- United States 60606
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- (312) 609-0800
Registrant:
- sctn teleproductions
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- chicago IL
- United States 60616
