Cleveland Black History spotlighted today thru Saturday

Nation's Largest African American Video Oral History Archive Honors Cleveland Area HistoryMakers

Cleveland will play host and homage over the next three days to a set of highly accomplished Cleveland citizens, as part of The HistoryMakers, the nation’s largest African American video oral history archive. The celebration and recognition begin tonight with a reception at Karamu, with more than one hundred guests expected, including area business, civic and community leaders.

Those honored include living legends architects Robert Madison and James Whitley and William Whitley; physicist Julian Earls, aerospace engineer Woodrow Whitlow Jr., Albert Antoine, and Ralph Gardner-Chavis; astronaut Guion Bluford; and foundation executives Steven A. Minter and Margot Copeland.

Others to be honored include clergymen Joseph Evans, Otis Moss, Jr. and E. T. Caviness; civic activists Leatrice Madison and Paul Hill Jr.; and educators June Sallee Antoine and Anthony Jackson.

The arts community is well represented by a host of performers, artists, musicians, and educators, and gallery owners, including A. Grace Lee Mims, Jeffrey Mumford, Leslie Adams, Dianne McIntyre, Marjorie Witt Johnson, Wendell Logan, Johnny Coleman, Louise Hope, Donald White, Robert Lockwood Jr., Wadsworth A. Jarrell Sr., Ed Parker, Ernestine Brown, and Malcolm Brown.

Also recognized will be members of the legal and business communities, including C. Ellen Connally, Lillian Burke, Stanley Tolliver, Marcella Boyd Cox and Dominic Ozanne; and television journalists Leon Bibb, Harry Boomer, and Russ Mitchell.

Rounding out the list are the unique Dorothy McIntyre, a pioneering air pilot, and the renowned motivational speaker George Fraser.

Case Western Reserve University will license The HistoryMakers Digital Archive making it available for faculty and student classroom instruction and research. In doing so, Case Western joins forty other universities, including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Columbia, Cornell, Emory, Northwestern, Ohio State and three public libraries and one private school.

During its three-day visit, The HistoryMakers will seek partnerships with other local civic, educational and cultural institutions.

The HistoryMakers, a national nonprofit organization headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, is dedicated to recording and preserving the personal histories of well-known and unsung African-Americans.   It is the largest video oral history archive of its kind, and the only massive attempt, since the WPA Slave Narratives of the 1930s, to record the African American experience by the first voice. In 2014, the Library of Congress became its permanent repository. Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden has said, “The HistoryMakers archive provides invaluable first-person accounts of both well-known and unsung African-Americans, detailing their hopes, dreams and accomplishments—often in the face of adversity, this culturally important collection is a rich and diverse resource for scholars, teachers, students and documentarians seeking a more complete record of our nation’s history and its people.”

The HistoryMakers Collection now numbers over 10,000 hours (3100 interviews) of first person testimony recorded in over 200 cities and towns including international locations like Norway, the Caribbean and Mexico. The earliest memory in the collection dates to the 1700s.

The HistoryMakers wants to help elevate the black experience in Cleveland as well as ensure that Cleveland’s African American history is properly represented in this internationally significant Collection. To do so, more prominent African American Cleveland area leaders will be interviewed for inclusion in the Collection once appropriate funding is secured.