One of the most important things that you can do
is preserve Black stories on the ground in your community.
When it comes to the Black community, so often our history has been erased,
and so often, many of us don't have
the ability to fill in gaps in our lineage and the stories of our community members.
So by collecting oral histories today,
I hope that that issue doesn't continue in the future
and that people are both able to build up their own sense of identity
and share that with the world.
Step 1 is prepare.
You should have notes on the basic details of their life
and what questions you want to ask.
As a history major in college, oral histories were the best way
I could get information from the past
directly from Black people unfiltered by the white lens.
Oral history has 2 main qualities that make it so unique and important.
#1, oral history is a primary source, meaning it's unfiltered.
It's from the mouth of the people who experience an event, or a moment,
or whatever they might be talking about, whatever they might be narrating
in that oral history.
And second, it's not objective.
And sometimes people think that when something isn't objective,
that's a bad thing,
but the subjectivity and the perspective that's mixed in with the narration
of an oral history allows for people to get a real human
understanding of the story that they're being told
and allows future historians to look back and not only understand a chronology
and a list of events, but also how the people who experience that,
what they perceive of it and how they feel about those things.
I sometimes binge recordings of oral histories,
like one from Fountain Hughes, a formerly enslaved person who's asked
if he would rather be a slave or free and gives a very chilling answer.
If I thought, had any idea,
that I'd ever be a slave again,
I'd take a gun and just end it all right away,
because you're nothing but a dog.
Right now, we are seeing the echoes of American history
where Black history has been subdued for the sake of this larger,
oftentimes white-centered narrative of the United States.
So Black oral history is so important, because our voices have been marginalized
for so long, and the reason we even have something like Black History Month
is because this issue has lasted for centuries.
Step 2 is conducting the interview.
Of course, active listen.
This interview is about getting the interviewee
to open up through your guidance.
It should be a collaborative process.
[narrator] Greene encourages anyone posting their interviews
to social media with their interviewee's consent,
to use the hashtag
Already, Greene has seen a positive response to his campaign.
Greene hopes participants find value beyond
just collecting historical information through the interview process.
I hope that in the conversations that Black youth or Black people in general
have with other community members to collect oral histories,
they, above everything else, get to build a rapport,
and build empathy, and build a connection
between the interviewee and the interviewer
that makes that relationship stronger than it was before.
After this, I hope to—that they are able to get more comprehensive
understanding of either a moment in time or the broad narrative of someone's life,
that they have a more deeper understanding of someone else
and of how the large events that we hear about in history class
affect people at an individual level.
And last, but not least, I hope that they have something that they get to share
with their families, their communities, and ideally an archive
so that anyone who's interested in these topics
can get to hear that first-person perspective from the interviewee.
And the last step is to preserve the interview.
And with your interviewees permission, you can share these through social media,
save it your computer for later use, or archive it with a historical organization.