At Mother Wit Central we are adding stories to The People's Archive. We have focused on inviting elders, particularly Americans of color, to share their stories. By collecting stories, interviews and other content, we are filling in one dimension of The People's Archive. The greater goal is to add new perspectives from all walks of life to the American story, and to preserve first-hand accounts that will be included in the research of future historians.

In this talk at the Storytelling Conference held in Romania in 2017, Nikole Hannah-Jones provides a perspective for journalist on the importance of capturing narratives. Narratives, personal stories that can awaken us to institutionalized racism, entrenched in our cultural behaviors. Learned norms of discrimination that work against our pursuit of a more perfect democracy. In this talk she proposes:

The role of storytellers in making people care:

The problem was: no one really cared. Which seems to be a theme about many of the things that we cover, those of us who are storytellers here. We’re interested in those deeply entrenched things that are so important but no one cares about. And part of the reason they don’t care is because they are so entrenched. It’s hard to get people to care about poverty because people feel like it won’t change, that there’s nothing you can do about it. That is just the way society is. And that is how school segregation was seen in the United States in 2013. I think with a lot of the stories that we’re trying to talk about – mass incarceration, poverty, the stories that Sarah talks about, war – we think we know the story. Our job as storytellers – if we want to get people to care about things that seem to be fixed in our country – is we have to figure out a way to make them see the story in a different way and to help them understand they actually don’t know the story at all.

The 2017 MacArthur fellow, who works at The New York Times Magazine and covers discrimination and segregation, presented some of her most important values as a journalist:

  1. Meticulously reporting: “The kind of reporting that I do is making an argument. I have to convince you that what you think is right is not right. We can’t expect people to trust what we tell them, because people don’t trust reporters anymore. So there has to be reporting that cannot be disputed. I read obsessively on everything I’m reporting on.”

  2. The stories have to be intensely narrative. “It can’t be a story about abstract content. If you don’t have humanity, you can spend a year on a blockbuster investigation, people will not care if you don’t show a human aspect they can relate to. Narrative means you’re telling a story all the way through, and that means you have to spend a lot of time to gather the information.”

  3. My work is deeply historical. “It’s important to say: This is not by accident, we have created this, its foundational. The running joke in my office is all my articles start in 1619. But if you want to undo the harm, you have to put an equal amount of time that was put to creating it. And if you don’t undo it, it’s not going to change just because the law says so.”

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Stories From the Civil Rights Movement - On Whose Shoulders We Stand

In this group you will find stories from remarkable people of all colors and ethnic backgrounds. Americans who played a role in the Civil Rights Movement of the past century. We are currently focused on capturing video stories, first person narratives from Black Lives That Matter. Ordinary Black Americans who have who have demonstrated extraordinary effort toward building their communities. To quote Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman, we are in search of "On whose shoulders we stand" and moving forward, "What we stand for." If you are so inspired, please contact me to share your story.

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