Reparative Histories: The Black Experience Oral History Project recordings
Collection
0596-UA
This is a collection of ongoing oral histories documenting the existence and experience of Black students, faculty, and staff at the University of Maryland (UMD), as well as community members from the surrounding areas, through the voices and words of the narrators themselves. The Black Experience Oral History Project is part of the larger Reparative Histories initiative, which seeks to address the relative absence of the histories of traditionally marginalized communities within UMD’s University Archives collections. Recordings for the Black Experience Oral History Project begin in 2021. Individual interview materials include audio recordings and transcripts.
This collection is open to the public and must be used in the Special Collections reading room. Researchers must register and agree to copyright and privacy laws before using this collection.
Photocopies or digital surrogates may be provided in accordance with Special Collections and University Archives duplication policy.
Copyright resides with the creators of the documents or their heirs unless otherwise specified. It is the researcher's responsibility to secure permission to publish materials from the appropriate copyright holder.
Archival materials may contain materials with sensitive or confidential information that is protected under federal and/or state right to privacy laws or other regulations. While we make a good faith effort to identify and remove such materials, some may be missed during our processing. If a researcher finds sensitive personal information in a collection, please bring it to the attention of the special collections reading room staff.
21 audio materials : WAV audio recording
21 Folders : 21 Word transcripts
English
The Black Experience is an oral history initiative of the University of Maryland’s (UMD) Reparative Histories project. Established in 2020, Reparative Histories seeks to address the relative absence of the histories of traditionally marginalized communities within UMD’s University Archives collections. The Black Experience Project focuses on documenting the existence and experience of Black students, faculty, and staff at the University of Maryland, as well as community members from the surrounding areas, through the voices and words of the narrators themselves.
The experiences documented within the project are bookended between 1951 when Hiram Whittle--the first Black undergraduate student on campus--enrolled at UMD, and the organizing around the murder of Lieutenant Richard Collins III in 2019. This period encompasses major global and local social events and movements such as the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, the Antiwar Movement, the modern Black Studies Movement, and more recent movements against all forms of state-sanctioned violence. The stories within document struggle, adversity, and perseverance, as well as Black creativity and joy.
The Black Experience Project is comprised of oral history recordings and transcripts. Transcripts and audio recordings are available as digital files. The Black Experience Project is an actively growing collection, with interviews added on an ongoing basis as project interviewing and processing continues.
The Black Experience Project launched in the fall of 2020 as part of a two-year strategic partnership, entitled the University of Maryland Restorative Justice Project, with the University of Maryland Libraries Special Collections and University Archives (SCUA), the African American History, Culture, and Digital Humanities (AADHum) initiative based at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), and Project STAND.
The project has been supported by a grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) and the Digital Library Federation (DLF), which has funded the project work of Dr. Francena Turner, a CLIR/DLF Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation for African American and African Studies. Dr. Turner served as the project interviewer from the project's first interview in 2021 through to project interviews in 2024. In addition to coordinating and conducting interviews, Dr. Turner collected and documented metadata about project interviews, including writing interviewee biographies and abstracts.
Conceptualization and planning behind the project was led and conducted by Dr. Turner in collaboration with Lae'l Hughes-Watkins, University Archivist for UMD Libraries from 2019 to 2023. In 2023, Hughes-Watkins became UMD Libraries' Associate Director of Engagement, Inclusion and Reparative Archives. Hughes-Watkins was co-primary investigator of the CLIR/DLF Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation for African American and African Studies grant, and is the founder of Project STAND, a radical grassroots archival consortia project between colleges and universities around the country to create a centralized digital space highlighting analog and digital collections emphasizing student activism in marginalized communities.
The collection is organized alphabetically by the last name of the individual. Interview materials are described together at the File Level. When digital content is available, there is a link to Digital Collections.
This collection contains born-digital materials. If you would like to access these materials, please contact us prior to your visit as items may require specialized software for access.
Interviews were co-created and shared under a Creative Commons license by interviewer Dr. Francena Turner and individual narrators with the University of Maryland Libraries. Please check the folder listings for additional information.
Project interviews were transcribed using the transcription software otter.ai and were audited by Dr. Francena Turner and University Archives staff.
Part of the Special Collections and University Archives