Julieanna Richardson, the founder and president of the HistoryMakers, a non-profit research and educational institution, is keeping Black history alive.
“We’re the largest attempt to record the Black experience across all disciplines whether it be law, business, sports, entertainment, science, and music,” Richardson told BLACK ENTERPRISE.
Richardson founded the HistoryMakers in 2000 to address the significant lack of documentation and preservation of the history of African-Americans. The collection is the leading digital repository for the Black experience.
The HistoryMakers’ digital library and oral history interview collection contain numerous profiles and interviews from the nation’s most prominent Black people, including poets Sonia Sanchez and Nikki Giovanni; actor James Avery; activist Angela Davis; singer Dionne Warwick; attorneys Anita Hill and Sherrilyn Ifill; U.S. Congresswoman Maxine Waters; Major League Baseball hall-of-fame outfielder Hank Aaron and many more.
Richardson said she started the HistoryMakers in part because of the lack of Black history she experienced growing up.
“I grew up in a primarily White town and didn’t get a chance to study about Black people,” said Richardson. “Back then you only studied about Black people if you came out of an HBCU. I didn’t know a lot myself and I was talking to people who had interesting family histories and stories that you wouldn’t hear about and that’s what started me doing this. I wanted to change the paradigm of African-American achievement.”
The HistoryMakers is headquartered in Chicago, with regional offices in Atlanta and the Washington, D.C. area. Richardson, who sports a unique background in theater, television production, and the cable television industry told BE that the HistoryMakers is paramount to preserving the accomplishments and achievements made by African-Americans.
“It’s really important because we’re on the verge of losing the 20th century in terms of documentation. If you go into our nation’s libraries, museums, and archives they don’t have Black people in them for the most part,” Richardson told BE. “That’s repeated over and over again and it’s really important because it goes to the issue of you preserve what has value and throw away what doesn’t and if we throw away our photographs, speeches, letters, and the things that we’ve done we can’t get them back.”
According to Richardson, the HistoryMakers has raised more than $36 million during its 23-year existence and is now in
the process of digitizing its collection and is the digital repository for Essence Magazine, digitizing its archives and making them accessible worldwide.The non-profit also uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to help in the process of digitizing its collection. Additionally, the HistoryMakers collection was acquired by the Library of Congress in 2014 and its digital archive can be accessed worldwide. The HistoryMakers collection is also available in almost 200 colleges and universities to educate those inside and outside the Black community.
“I feel that we’re just about to realize our mission and all the ethics and the time,” said Richardson. “All the struggle will all be worth it if we’re successful and I have full intention of being successful in this,” said Richardson. “There’s all this talk about diversity and inclusion right now but how do you diversify when you don’t have the content to do it?”