Newark native's work preserving Black history featured on '60 Minutes'

A Newark native was featured on CBS News' "60 Minutes" for her work archiving oral histories of Black Americans, and shared her experience of not learning about the Black history that exists in her own hometown.

Julieanna Richardson, who said she grew up in Newark, founded The HistoryMakers, a national non-profit research and educational institution that is "committed to preserving and making widely accessible the untold personal stories of both well-known and unsung African Americans," according to its website.

Richardson shared in the interview, which aired Sunday, that when she was 9, she was the only Black student in her class. She also said she wasn't taught about American Black history in school, which she added is common.

She said all she knew of Black history was that her great grandfather had been enslaved. She wondered what it would have been like for her as a child to know of the Black history that exists in Newark.

"I mean, there was actually Black history in my town, just yards from where I was. There was a man named Shackleford who sat at-- with his gun point, daring the White community to tear down his school for Black kids," she said in the interview.

Richardson also said the fifth president of Liberia, Edward James Roye, was born in Newark, Ohio in 1815.

"I'm thinking there's no Black history, but it was all around me. And that's what the kids-- it's all around them, but they don't know it. They don't touch it, so they can't aspire to be what they don't really see," she said.

In the last 20 years, Richardson's Chicago-based staff members have interviewed more than 3,500 people in an effort to document the Black experience in America through first-hand accounts.

She has interviewed Anita Hill, who is known for her testimony against Clarence Thomas during his confirmation hearings for U.S. Supreme Court seat; Tuskegee Airman, Col. Bill Thompson; Pro Football Hall of Famer Jerry Rice; and then-Illinois state senator Barack Obama in 2001.

To Richardson, these are America's missing stories.

"And American history won't be complete without them," she said in the interview.

Since 2012, The HistoryMarkers archive has been held at the Library of Congress. The nonprofit has also rolled out curriculum for schools in New York, Atlanta, Chicago and Charlotte so unlike Richardson, young students can be taught about diverse and rich Black history.

"It's a lot-- easier to actually see what we went through, and how we persevered through it, and it just shows how strong we are, really," said Loren Rounds, a Black student near Chicago whose class has used the curriculum.

mdevito@gannett.com

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Twitter: @MariaDeVito13

This article originally appeared on Newark Advocate: Newark native's work preserving Black history featured on '60 Minutes'