UI teams with black-history program

By Christine Des Garennes

Friday April 18, 2008

Robert K. O'Daniell
Jennifer Hamer, acting director of African American Studies, talks about
The HistoryMakers project in the south lounge of the Illini Union in Urbana on
Wednesday.

Yes, Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey are notable.

But so is Olly Wilson, music composer and UI alumna.

And so is Chicago poet Sterling Plumpp.

Since 1999 Julieanna Richardson, founder of The HistoryMakers, has amassed a collection of about 1,800 videotaped interviews with blacks, with a goal of one day reaching 5,000. The Chicago-based organization is dedicated to preserving and spotlighting the achievements of blacks, including the famous like Ernie Banks and Julian Bond, and some who are perhaps not as well-known.

This week the University of Illinois announced a partnership with the organization that will incorporate those many interviews into classrooms, aid in the development of The HistoryMakers as a research tool for scholars, and explore ways of making the archives more available to the public.

The HistoryMakers "is living proof African American history did not begin or end with the civil rights movement," said Jennifer Hamer, acting chair of African American Studies at the UI.

The UI hosted three receptions this week, one on each campus, to celebrate the partnership and display several banners depicting HistoryMakers interview subjects with Illinois ties. The banners will be on display in the south lounge of the Illini Union through the end of this semester. Some HistoryMakers with UI ties include scientist George Carruthers, educator and current UI trustee Frances Carroll, Illinois Senate President Emil Jones, Obama, lawyer and UI trustee James Montgomery and more.

Hamer compared The HistoryMakers with the Works Progress Administration narratives conducted in the 1930s. But this time around, the narratives are also visual, she said.

"It's a huge undertaking," she said.

"It's still a young project," said Clarence Lang, a University of Illinois assistant professor of African American Studies and history. He's acting as the Urbana campus coordinator for the partnership. The goal is eventually to make it a much larger project, incorporating teaching, research and public programming components, he said. For example, how can the archives be organized it so they can be cross- referenced?

A new fellowship will also be available to undergraduate or graduate students. One student will be chosen to live in Chicago and work at The HistoryMakers in Chicago for nine weeks this summer.

"In the classroom students are dealing with words, pages, but in the world outside the academy, their lives are very much steeped in multimedia," Lang said. The videos are in a medium that students are familiar with and "it makes history a lot more exciting," he said.

Lou Turner, assistant director of African American Studies, has used HistoryMakers videos in his classes and had students review the tapes. He also has seen quite a few of them himself and found many have "hidden nuggets" in them about either the person being interviewed or an event.

In a 2001 interview, for example, Obama talks about race, providing a "preview" of the talk he delivered in Philadelphia earlier this spring, Turner said.

"We live in a video age. We can sit and read about history until the cows come home," Hamer said. But for students, The HistoryMakers project is "about seeing faces, hearing stories. It makes history real to them and helps them think about themselves as potential history makers."

More information is available at www.thehistorymakers.com.