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

**Elise Hu** (0:04)
You'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, Julieanna L. Richardson, that didn't happen. And she spent decades refusing to let that be the end of the story.

**Julieanna L. Richardson** (0:34)
Today, from our boardrooms to our classrooms, on TV and social media, debates are raging about whose history matters.
Those who document their history are who society says matters. For the Black community, that documentation has been elusive.

**Elise Hu** (0:59)
HistoryMakers is the largest African American video oral history archive in the US., which is now permanently housed in the Library of Congress. For Julieanna, 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.

**Julieanna L. Richardson** (1:26)
We 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 valueless or valuable.

**Elise Hu** (1:54)
That's coming up right after a short break. And now, our TED Talk of the day.

**Julieanna L. Richardson** (2:07)
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. What 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. And 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 golden brown. And I'm in New York's Schomburg Library with my headphones on, listening to this song.
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 Cissell and Ubi Blake in the 1921 production of Shuffle Along on Broadway. I 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 Wind's 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 am 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. Those 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 US 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 ourself, and James Brown led the way. Say it loud. I'm black and I'm proud.