We are American history: The vision behind The HistoryMakers

In this podcast, our hosts Elizabeth Brandon and Charletta Dawson explore the motivations and origins behind the creation of The HistoryMakers, a non-profit organization with the largest archive of first-person oral histories of renowned and unsung African Americans. Learn how Julieanna Richardson’s discovery of the accomplishments of a black artist helped her find her identity and inspired her to create The HistoryMakers.

Transcript:

Intro: Welcome to the Reed Smith Podcast, Inclusivity Included: Powerful Personal Stories. In each episode of this podcast, our guests will share their personal stories, passions and challenges, past and present, all with a goal of bringing people together and learning more about others. You might be surprised by what we all have in common, Inclusivity Included. 

Charletta: Hello and welcome to Reed Smith's Inclusivity Included. We are celebrating Black History Month, and my name is Charletta Dawson. In a recent interview, Dr. George C. Fraser shared that for Americans in America, Black excellence is the base, but exceptionalism should be the goal. And with us today is one exceptional individual, and that is Ms. Julieanna Richardson. She is the founder and driving force behind the HistoryMakers. Ms. Julieanna, welcome, and we are so pleased to have you with us today. I'm just very excited to get into this podcast and hear all this great information that you have to share with us today. 

Elizabeth: And my name is Elizabeth Brandon. I am a partner at Reed Smith the Dallas office. I practice litigation. And I'm excited today to be kind of primarily leading this interview with Julieanna. Thank you, Charletta. And Julieanna, let's just dive right in. And first, can you just tell the audience a little bit about what exactly is HistoryMakers? 

Julieanna: So The HistoryMakers has grown to be the nation's largest African-American video oral history archive. We actually turned 25 years old this year, this month. This month, in the year 2000, we started doing our interviews, and we've grown to over 3,800 interviews of African-American leaders in 451 cities and towns across the United States. We've actually traveled internationally. The importance of the collection, though, which is housed at the Library of Congress, is that there's only been one time in the history of the United States that there's been a massive attempt to record the Black experience through the first voice, and that was 1900s, our enslaved experience. There had been no attempt to do that until we came along. And so it was very important for us that we were able to interview people who have enslaved ancestors. And while we always are wanting to do younger people, the majority of the people that we've interviewed historically have been 70 and above. But it's really needed. In many ways, the project is about identity, identity of a people, identity of a country. And the other part is I really believe that you can't have a melting pot unless you have all the parts, all the ingredients to make soup or a cake. You've got to have all those ingredients. And so we see ourselves as a very important ingredient of the American experience. 

Elizabeth: Well, I mean, that is just fabulous and, frankly, inspiring to hear those words. And before we kind of delve in and unpack some of the things you just told us, I kind of want to delve a little bit behind you, Julieanna, and your background. Can you tell us what inspired you to even undertake this whole journey? 

Julieanna: Well, you know, it's interesting that I'm presenting at a law firm because I'm a lawyer by training. I started my career as a graduate of Harvard Law School in the banking and corporate department of Jenner & Block in Chicago. But the project itself really starts when I'm nine years old. And I'm living in a town called Newark, Ohio, which is about 35 miles southeast Columbus, Ohio. And I was the only black kid in my class because we had 1,000 blacks out of 50,000 whites in my town. And the only two things we studied about black people, I should also say, was George Washington Carver. My white teacher was very animated about George Washington Carver and said he could do all these things with peanuts. And then there were the pictures of the enslaved, and they are hunched over. So my nine-year-old brain that wasn't computing? How could one person have done all these things, all these things, when all we have been were slaves? And then that same teacher asked us to talk about our family background. So you know how nine years old, you're excited. So everybody's hands are raising up. I'm part German, I'm part Italian, I'm part French. And I'm literally sort of cowering over the corner because I don't know exactly how to answer. And this is before James Brown, I'm Black and I'm proud. And so I say maybe Negro or colored. And then I threw a Native American because most Black people think they have Native American in them. And then I added in French because I wanted to be sexy like the other kids. I wanted to have an identity. Now, I don't know about Haiti or Cote de Blanc or about those at all. That's way beyond my concept. But I'm sitting there. And I know, and I've been told not to lie, you know, you don't lie, but I'm lying. And my teacher looks at me with a little raised brow and I felt like a fraud. Never told my parents. 

Elizabeth: How did it feel at nine years old, sitting in that classroom and kind of just both receiving all the only information historically that you're learning about people that look like you is that they were slaves? And how did you feel about basically having to lie about what you felt your background was? 

Julieanna: I didn't feel good and I never told my parents about it, but maybe it's better to talk about how I felt when I found out I had history. I'm in my sophomore year at Brandeis University, and I'm American Studies and Theater Arts major because my father wanted me to go to law school, but my dream was theater. And so I'm doing research on a project called the Harlem Renaissance, which is a period in the 1920s in our country, in New York and Harlem, where there's a cultural renaissance. Alice Childress wrote to me, the writer Alice Childress wrote to me and said, renaissance, that means a rebirth. They were poor, they died poor, they were poor. But there's this period called the Harlem Renaissance. And so I went to study it. And there was a famous librarian in New York, Schaumburg's Library, named Jean Blackwell Hudson. I've actually, my letter I wrote to her telling her. 

Elizabeth: Wow. Wow. 

Julieanna: And asking her to identify people in the Harlem Renaissance that I could talk to. So one day I'm in the library and I've got my headphones on and it's like a gray day. It's a fall day and the leaves are brown and orange. And I'm looking out from the library at the trees and I have my headphones on. I'm listening to I'm Just Wild About Harry. And this song that I know, I thought it was about Harry Truman. This song that I know I find in that black library. Was written by a Black songwriting team of Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake in the 1921 production of Shuffle Along on Broadway. And you talking about like wanting to like, almost like I was shot out of a cannon, I was overjoyed because I had found my identity. And I had found Black people had done And not just that, lots and lots of things. 

Elizabeth: So you said something very interesting when you started talking about this. You started this by saying you were going to talk about how you felt when you discovered you had a history. Could you kind of tell us what it means to have that feeling that you had a history? And this is something you discovered, I guess, in college. So you were 18, 19 years old. 

Julieanna: Yeah. I get chills just now thinking about how I felt. I don't think people understand the importance of identity and identity formation. And feeling, you know, people talk about feeling other. But I don't think because, you know, people, when you have a sense of legacy and where you came from, and that's what those kids could talk about that day. You know, they all knew it or they seemed to know it. They knew more than I did. I didn't know anything. And so here I was, and I found my own identity, and I'm with my tape recorder, and I'm doing research, and I'm interviewing Lee Whipper, who was born in 18—he was born in 1870. And he—I go to interview him, and he says that he had moved to New York in 1900. And I go, wow, because I'm like 18, 19 years old. And he just will be old as Methuselah. I don't know what concept, you know. And so my interviewing skills have improved since then. But I'm researched. I am researched and I'm serious because he actually gave me front row tickets to see Josephine Baker, who was a noted artist 

Elizabeth: Oh, my goodness. 

Julieanna: Who moved, and my family had spent time at her castle that she had in France. And so he's telling me he has these tickets, and I have an existential crisis. I'm there to do my interviews, or do I go see Josephine Baker? And I opted to sit and interview with him. And one interview led to the other. I interviewed Butterfly McQueen, who had starred in Gone with the Wind, and that little voice that she had it was a real voice and she was working up in Harlem in impoverished conditions though when she had started gone with the wind that she had made five thousand dollars a week but she had also been typecast as a silly you know, But she wasn't like that, but she still had that voice. And so that was lovely. I interviewed tap dancer Honi Coles. I interviewed John Henrik Clark, historian. And just one interview led to the other. And there was no question at that point. It sort of like lit a fire in me. And I went on to finish. And I ended up going to Harvard Law School. And then I was thinking I could represent artists if I couldn't be an artist. And it was really hard in those days to be hired if you were a Black person at an entertainment firm. 

Elizabeth: So when you graduated from Harvard Law School, you decided to go into private practice. Was that difficult to get hired in that capacity? 

Julieanna: Yes, it was difficult. My, oh, they don't like me to say it, but I was the first Black, but it's the truth. 

Elizabeth: First Black, in the corporate? 

Julieanna: Black in the corporate department. And Jenner is mainly a litigation firm. But at that point in time, I asked them, because they had only had one woman, you know, how was it going to be? And was I going to be given work like the others? And they said they would have to screen clients because some of the clients wouldn't want to deal with me. Because there weren't Blacks incorporated. So I took that as the reality. That didn't actually, wasn't really the reality. In fact, I went out and got my first year, my own little newspaper client who wasn't Black either, a distributor, and so I was representing him. And I really, you know, I have, I'm very happy that my father had me go to law school because I would not have been able to do the project that I'm doing right now. 

Elizabeth: I want to connect to the project you're doing now, but I, and since this is, you know, we're at Reed Smith, it would be remiss in not delving into what, how did you feel when you were being told, look, we're going to have to screen our clients to work with you? And did that impact how you were going to be, I guess, you know, functioning as a lawyer? 

Julieanna: No, that didn't really. I mean, you have to understand that law was my father's dream, not my dream, though I'm very happy that I have the legal training. And that didn't affect me, but it did when he said it, because I responded, I'm okay with that as long as I'm not put in a corner. And I found I was put in the proverbial corner. I was not being given the same work as my white male counterparts. And when I found it, I went ballistic on this because my thing was, I'm here to work, but you have to give me the work and you have to give me the same experience. And so in another instance, if that had been my dream, that may have been problematic. But it had never been my dream. I think sometimes, you know, what would have been my trajectory had I stayed there? Because at that point, there had not been someone come through the ranks to go and make partner at the firm. They sent subsequently, just a few years after me, the first Black partner to come through the ranks was a man named Gerald DePriest who was technically in my same class, but it took him two more years. 

Elizabeth: So how long did you stay in practice before you decided, look, law is not my dream. I've got to go pursue my project. 

Julieanna: Not that long. So two years. And then I, you know, law firms were different back there because they were genteel places, actually, back then. And so I went and gave my resignation, and then I had gotten hired as the assistant cable administrator for the city. And then by 30, I was the cable administrator for the city. When the cable companies were franchising, that seems like old days now with the advent of cable. But I'll tell you this and why I'm so really gung-ho about legal training. For the same reasons that my father had told me. I believe that legal training teaches you how to really think. And I became a very good writer and a very good. I was drafting contracts. And all of that knowledge, that and my experience in an organization called Lawyers of the Creative Arts, where we were incorporating our Chicago's sort of nonprofit community. And advising people on things like trademark and copyright. All of those things were extremely important to me as I started. And I really think it's a way of thinking that that is very, very important in what I would call the ecosystem of life. So I'm very pro-pro legal training and getting actually a law degree. 

Elizabeth: How did that legal training help you as you then focused your efforts on what is now grown to be the HistoryMakers? 

Julieanna: I'm going to answer that question, but I need to tell you just a quick trajectory between law schools. So I went into the city and I did my city work and became cable administrator for the city, which was regulatory. And I found that very interesting from not only starting something up, but the nature of the cable industry and all the things around policy and how you form policy. But then I then started, and this is the, so politics had me out. And I was doing a little consulting, but no one was hiring anyone with a cable background. And I started a home shopping channel, a regional home shopping channel, which it doesn't matter where I'm presenting. I saw the brakes just go off in your head every place I go, especially in academic circles. You start hearing screech, you know, up there like it's like, where did that come from? Out of nowhere. But that's really important because all roads have led to where I'm doing right now. But I raised the million dollars and started one of two regionally based home shopping channels when it was called Shop Chicago. There was another family group in New Orleans that had started. But that went belly up after five years, but I raised money. And so how I'm starting the HistoryMakers is in that period of not knowing. Now, you can't say that I was a person who always had a five-year plan. And I was a little more organic than that. I was with this five-year plan. But I see my life as these very intense moments. I can get very intensely engaged. And so I'm without a job. I'm pretty angry, actually. And I have no idea what I'm going to be doing. And no one's going to hire me as a lawyer. And I went to Memphis. It was the year that Clarence Thomas had gotten appointed to the Supreme Court. And I was at the National Bar Association Conference, and Judge Leon Higginbotham, who I love and adore, was speaking. And in that, and I'd been really confused about what I was going to do next, confused, disoriented. And I tell people that sometimes at your lowest point, what you're intended to do comes. And that's how the HistoryMaker came to me. So I'm sitting there and I'm listening to Judge Constance Baker Motley and Reverend Billy Kyles. And they were talking about Martin Luther King, and I was like, people don't know their names, but they were very significant in the movement. Reverend Billy Kyles was on the balcony when Martin Luther King died that day. He's one sort of pointing. Is he the one pointing the finger? He may be. And so the name came to me, because I've got this creative thing. The name of the HistoryMakers came to me, and I should, in my indecision, one of my friends was general counsel of our local PBS station. She's since become general counsel of a national PBS. And she had been indexing tasks under the legal department to inventory their tapes, their archives. And so I come running. So the name comes to me, the HistoryMaker. So I come running back to Chicago because I've been totally, I was doing one thing in the morning, one thing at night, total indecision. And I come running back to her and I say, Katherine, I know what I want to do. It's called the HistoryMakers, and it's an archive of Black people. And instead of her being like, she goes, that doesn't make any sense. And so some friends of mine, she included, did an intervention on a Saturday. And I have to give them credit because they probably thought I had lost my mind completely. But they asked me, I explained, I'm sitting there with my boards and, you know, easel, And I'm explaining to them, because I've been doing a lot of research on the internet, and I'm explaining what I want to do. And they said at the end that I needed to answer two questions. One, did an archive like the one I was envisioning, did it exist already? And they said that if it didn't exist, then I needed to answer the second question, would anyone be interested? They said they theorized, no, but those were the two questions. And I took it as like a dog with a bone. I went out, those were the two questions I was asking. And so there is probably not an archive in the United States around Black experience that I don't know. I was writing to TV stations. I was writing to sororities. I was writing to African-American organizations. I was writing to anyone who would talk to me. And that's where I'm seeing my legal degree came in very handy. I knew how to already incorporate as a nonprofit. So I knew those things, how to set up the structure. The other very, very, very important thing about our collection is everyone has to sign a release form because we would not own the collection in the way that we owned it. Our collection is very clean, very, very clean. 

Elizabeth: And what does that mean when you say clean? 

Julieanna: It was really important to me that we not be hampered and not be able to use the material. And then as technology changed, because I wanted to take, it was very important that the interviews be videotaped. I have no problem with audio cassette and audio interviews, but I wanted to see what people, I didn't want to have to imagine what people looked like. 

Elizabeth: And let me ask you about that, because one of the very first things you said today was that the HistoryMakers is the largest oral archive of the Black Lives Matter. 

Julieanna: Video, video, oral. Video and oral history. 

Elizabeth: Why was it important to structure this as a video and oral archive as opposed to, let's say, in written form? 

Julieanna: Because you get to hear people tell their own stories, and you get to see them talking about their own lives. And that was very important, that first-person testimony. Now, when we're starting, there's no money. There's no money for oral history interviews. That money that was there in the 70s had all dried up. And we are not accepted in the academy. When I mean the academy higher education, we are not accepted at all. So here I have this envisioning. I also had, from my home shopping days, I knew how to do a business plan, but I didn't know anything about archives, education. I didn't know any media. I didn't know anything about anything I was supposed to be able to mount, nothing. And so I had a University of Chicago business school graduate who went with me on that part of the journey. And so we were at that point, this is during the dot-com era. So there was money flowing all over, but she came back one day and she goes, you've got to be a nonprofit because there is no ROI because we figured it was going to take $36 million. And that's really what I took seriously that it was going to take. I would have to raise $36 million. And so I was very serious about it. We've raised $36 million as I speak to you. The collection is, archives are really expensive. Each interview costs us about $6,000. But I often tell people what value do you put on something whose ultimate value is priceless. It can't be replicated. 

Elizabeth: Who was the first interviewee for your archive? 

Julieanna: The first interviewee is sort of interesting. His name is Barry Mayo and he had been very prominent in the world of urban radio that was our first interviewee and I started to learn you know we were in those early years we're trying to develop our process you know we have I had been out to the Shoah Foundation which is Steven Spielberg's project and they have been really secretive but they finally had me come out and they had done 52,000 interviews in five years. So I decided, oh, we can't do 52,000. Where’s that money coming from? So I set 5,000 as a goal because that was double the number of slave narratives. And I figured that was doable. And we were going to do. All across the Black community, whether it was law or business or music or entertainment or STEM or medicine. And it's clear in my original concept paper that I really don't know anything about STEM because I have Dr. Joycelyn Elders, who's a noted medical person from STEM. And that shows you, because we actually, in 2009, were awarded a $2.3 million grant from the National Science Foundation. And we have the largest recording of blacks in STEM. And that was just a magical period in the history of our project. But so in the early years, we were focused on Negro Baseball League players, Pullman Porters and Tuskegee Airmen. Pullman Porters had almost died. The Tuskegee Airmen, I'll tell you a story about that, and the Negro baseball players. One day, I was going to interview in the early years, and we were trying to do well-known and unsung, and we're going to interview Colonel Thompson, Bill Thompson, and he was a Tuskegee Airman. And I'm questioning myself, why am I interviewing Colonel Thompson? I got to do the Oprah Winfrey's. I got to do bigger names. So when we got there, he had been preparing for us for four days. And he was the chief documentarian for the Tuskegee Airmen. Lots of his things are in the Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian. And he sits me down and he says, have you heard of the Golden 13? And I said, no, Colonel Thompson, I've never heard of the Golden 13. And he said, well, they were the Navy's version of the Tuskegee Airmen. And there are four left living in this country and one lives upstairs. 

Elizabeth: Wow. 

Julieanna: And he’d like to speak to you all. So that is the moment that I knew the process was, it was all about discovery. 

Elizabeth: Julieanna, I think you may know that I think the last living Tuskegee airman recently passed. So the HistoryMakers was able to capture some of these stories that would otherwise have been lost forever. 

Julieanna: That's right. 

Elizabeth: All right. So we have a few minutes left. And if we jump to now present day, there are over 3,800 or so interviews. How do you select people to continue interviewing and to be considered for the database? 

Julieanna: So people can nominate people on our website, which is www.thehistorymakers.org. We have now 16, a committee for each group, and they've been very helpful in helping us vet and prioritize. We rely on our committees a great deal, but, you know, all history is local in a lot of ways, and we've had people identified to us like, early in the project, we had the, you know, if you see a black tap dancer in any of the old black and white films, she identified herself to was, and her things are in the Smithsonian. So this is a group project. The community has to be helpful to us in that way. We're in the legal area, and I would say that we have the largest reporting of Black lawyers. 

Elizabeth: Wow. Yeah. 

Julieanna: Us, and then there's, well, our collection is much larger than his, David Wilkins out of Harvard Law School had done recordings, but between the two of us, I think he may get 100, but we have over 400 lawyers that have been interviewed. And you start to see, and I'll just leave you with this, and I've maybe asked the question, when is the first Black lawyer in the history of the United States? What year is he? 

Elizabeth: Now you're putting me on the spot. I'd have to say that was 1932. 

Julieanna: So the first Black lawyer in the United States is 1816. His name is Moses Simons. He is mixed race. He goes to the first law school. He goes to the Yale undergrad. And then Litchfield Law School, which was the first law school in the United States, also in Connecticut. He has a practice in New York, and then he goes to a ball dance, and someone calls him out of his name, and he gets in a fight, and he loses his law license. So his legal career lasted from 1816 to 1816. 

Charletta: So did he get into Yale by passing? 

Julieanna: No. 

Charletta: Okay. 

Julieanna: No. Well, we don't know that, actually. You know, I say no, but it was clear. I mean, he did get into this fight, and it was because some people tried to come to his defense, but he lost his law license. But I want to say we don't know a lot about ourselves. And I think really knowing, and why I'm so committed to this work, is knowing will change the trajectory of how the Black experience and its contributions are seen and known because there's a tremendous amount that Black people have contributed to this nation. 

Charletta: Yes. 

Julieanna: And it's not yet, no. And that's the whole essence of our work. 

Elizabeth: Well, thank you, Julieanna. The database is vast. I do want to give you an opportunity to give the website again so that folks can, you know, go on the site and, you know, nominate or identify individuals. I already know several individuals that I'd like to nominate. And by the way, who is conducting, are you the one conducting all the interviews? 

Julieanna: No, no, no, that's not possible. 

Elizabeth: Okay, I figured it couldn’t have been. 

Julieanna: You know, I've probably now done about 600 over a 25-year period. 

Elizabeth: Great. 

Julieanna: But let me just say the site, once again, is www.thehistorymakers.org. Our digital archive, which is not publicly available, was developed in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon, this major research on tech institution that has worked with us for 20-something years. And they have created this wonderful tool. We're now in 205 colleges and universities and public libraries across the United States. We just picked up D.C. Public Library, San Francisco, Dayton. Marin County, and we're in Chicago, New York, LA. And they're just really wonderful innovation coming out of the places that we're having here. 

Charletta: But Ms. Julieanna, let me say, you made a very profound statement in your 60 Minutes interview where you were talking about the untold Black stories that they have to be told, because without them, American history would be incomplete. 

Julieanna: That's right. 

Charletta: And that was very profound. I was like, yes, we are so intertwined into the American history story. You cannot have one without the other. 

Julieanna: No, you cannot have one without the other. Because I really think that archives are really important because they determine value. Because you don't throw what away but has value preserve it and so preservation is, and keeping things are critical to who has value and who doesn't have in society. And so I'm just hoping that you as the Reed Smith community will get involved with us, not only as users of the content. Some people have used it to give speeches and introduce people. Kids are using it for reports. We have a school in North Carolina that's using it to teach vocabulary and context. So there are all kinds of uses for it. But I also hope that you as a community will also get involved with us. We love working out of law firms. We would love to be able to do interviews out of your facilities, if that were ever possible. But we just are pleased that you've stepped forward. And I want to say another thing about A. Scott Bolden, who is one of your partners. And he, you know, was very, we met through an organization called The Community and the Family that was Black leaders. And they adopted us. And that's how I first got to know A. Scott Bolden. But we're just pleased that this is happening. I'm pleased that you're drawing attention to our work during Black History Month. And I hope that this is just the beginning. 

Elizabeth: Thank you, Julieanna. And now before we close, I want to ask you one question, okay? I want you to take yourself back in time to that nine-year-old girl in class, and I'm your teacher asking you to tell us about your history, your background. What would you say today if you had to answer that question? 

Julieanna: Oh, that's a wonderful question. I would say that, I'm the descendants of slaves, and they were really amazing because they made that their way through the Middle Passage. And that if I could have the strength that they exhibited, or if anyone could have the strength that they exhibit, and that I'm really proud to be their progeny. 

Elizabeth: Thank you, Julieanna. We appreciate your candor and telling us all about the HistoryMakers. 

Outro: Inclusivity Included is a Reed Smith production. Our producers are Ali McCardell and Shannon Ryan. You can find our podcasts on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, reedsmith.com, and our social media accounts. 

Disclaimer: This podcast is provided for educational purposes. It does not constitute legal advice and is not intended to establish an attorney-client relationship, nor is it intended to suggest or establish standards of care applicable to particular lawyers in any given situation. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Any views, opinions, or comments made by any external guest speaker are not to be attributed to Reed Smith LLP or its individual lawyers. 

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