The mission to safeguard Black history in the US | Julieanna L. Richardson
TED Talks Daily
TED
4.1 • 12.1K Ratings
🗓️ 19 June 2022
⏱️ 15 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Black history in the US is rich, profound -- and at risk of being lost forever, if not for the monumental efforts of Julieanna L. Richardson. As the founder of The HistoryMakers -- the largest national archive of African American video-oral history -- Richardson shares some of the unknown and incredible legacies of Black America, highlighting the importance of documenting and preserving the past for future generations.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, it's Ted Talks Daily, I'm Elise Hugh. |
| 0:07.1 | What we learn about history shapes our understanding of reality, and for so many of us in America, |
| 0:13.2 | the heroes of history are white. |
| 0:16.4 | In her 2021 talk from Ted X Mile High, the public historian Juliana Richardson raises questions |
| 0:22.8 | about the key figures missing from our collective history, and explains why their stories must |
| 0:28.5 | be better understood. |
| 0:32.8 | As a little black girl, I did not know that American history had anything to do with someone |
| 0:39.6 | who looked like me. |
| 0:42.0 | American history was George Washington cutting down his cherry tree. |
| 0:46.5 | American history was white. |
| 0:49.2 | Raised in a small steel mining town of Duquesne, Pennsylvania, my family moved to Norco |
| 0:55.1 | High, not New Jersey, but Ohio, when I was age 9. |
| 1:00.2 | And one day, the teacher asked us to talk about our family backgrounds. |
| 1:04.6 | My classmate's hands literally rose up like arrows to the sky. |
| 1:09.1 | I'm part German, I'm part Italian, I'm part French, I'm part Polish, Jewish. |
| 1:14.0 | They all had hyphenates. |
| 1:16.1 | What was high? |
| 1:18.3 | The only thing that we studied back then about black people were the other George Washington. |
| 1:25.1 | The Schigi Institute's George Washington Carver. |
| 1:28.9 | My white teacher said he could do a lot of things with peanuts. |
| 1:32.8 | And then there was the tabush of slavery, and no one wanted to be associated with slavery. |
| 1:38.2 | So to my nine year old brain, those two facts together did not compute. |
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