When a person dies, they often take with them much of what they knew, what they have seen and what they have felt. If they are fortunate, there is time to pass at least some of it on. In a pandemic, mass unprepared-for death is so common that knowledge loss also becomes part of the pandemic’s toll. Eyewitness accounts of the civil rights movement go un-gathered. Recipes passed down through the generations but never written down will never be cooked again. Claudia Booker’s know-how can no longer help a new generation of midwives—even as a growing body of research and reporting suggests that Black birthworkers like her could be a key path to addressing racial disparities in pregnancy-related complications and death. As we mark Black History Month, we know that a critical part of that history has, in these last few years, been lost.
The loss is all the more staggering when one considers that oral history has for Black Americans always been essential.
As the American way of enslaving Black Americans developed, many states enacted laws specifically barring slaves from learning to read or write. People who are not allowed to read and write don’t leave behind journals and letters or many other documents, explains Kelly Elaine Navies, a museum specialist and oral historian at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC). Oral history has been a key tool to fill gaps in the “official” history.
Today, while the written record of Black American life has grown and continues to do so, oral history maintains a special place. The information it can convey remains unique and valuable. That’s why the Smithsonian has made available online a detailed guide for collecting oral histories, a place to share some materials with the museum as well as information about the particular importance of and ideal way to gather Black stories.
“Oral history can tell us things that written records often cannot,” Navies says. “Not just when something happened or that someone was at a certain place but how did they feel about it? What part of that experience was most important, so important that they actually remembered it?”
The experiences of the last two years will be essential to an understanding of Black life and Black history in the United States in the early 21st century, but the museum can’t collect it all. Navies wants us to take up this work in our own families and local historical societies. “Historians will be looking at this period for years to come,” she says. “I would really advise everyone to spend some time recording their elders.”