Hey folks, this is Max Young Rice from the StoryCorps podcast.

Just want to remind you that you can tell us your personal stories by calling our voicemail at 702-706 Talk.

This week, how has your family crossed paths with history?

Tell us that story in a voicemail at 702-706, T-A-L-K.

Music 702-706, T-A-L-K. Each StoryCorps interview is a special kind of bridge to the past.

When the Civil War ended, she was my age. She was 16.

My father was born in 1925, and my parents were sharecroppers, working to land, working for tobacco.

You know, when people think about slavery, they think about hundreds of years ago.

Not about somebody who died in 1956?

When people share family stories and remember loved ones at StoryCorps, it's like they're linking their lives to the generations before them.

And on this episode, we're digging into our archive,

the largest collection of human voices ever gathered,

to highlight African-American participants whose lives have touched history.

You see, you have to build on what people come before you do.

So if you can remember the things that they had to go through,

that should make you want to do the best that you can do.

I'm Jasmine Morris, and it's the Story take us back to 1863.

The year slavery was abolished.

She told me that when she was five years old, she was in front of her mother's cabin,

and a union officer came there on a horse and read the Emancipation Proclamation.

That's the only memory she ever shared with me about her life on the plantation.

That's 90-year-old Mary Othella Burnett,

...