University of virginia. It was done with the codirectorship of now the late jeweli i julian bond and myself. Its a project that brought prominent africanamerican leaders to the university in order to talk about their own personal life histories and also to talk about leadership in general. When did you start the project . We started the project well, i first talked to julian about it in 1998 and asked if he would be my collaborator. We actually invited the first guest in the year 2000. The project ended, we did our last interview in 2014. How did the idea come up . Initially, it was my idea. I was creating for the university an institute for public history. And i was trying to design some projects that would fall within the category of public history. Of course, part of public history, oral history is a big component of how public historians think of them Services Going out and collecting materials and stories that would otherwise not be available. And once julian bond came into the history department, i realized this was a great opportunity. The university was also seeking to highlight some of its diversity initiatives. So this seep eseemed like a gre opportunity to do something significant and important. So i approached him. I said, im interested in doing this series. And you know, i would really like your collaboration. I know your name would really be important in terms of bringing people in. And would you be interested in partnering with me . That start aed a conversation. How many interviews did do you . 51. How did you decide who to talk to . Well, we started out trying to think about categories of leaders. So first we wanted to start with people who we felt had had a major, major impact on the Africanamerican Community. So when you fwhi ththink about you think about three categories. You think about educators. You think about lawyers. And you think about ministers. Or members of the clergy. So once we came up with categories, we then started to think about, who in those categories could best represent some of those areas . And then, of course, we also wanted to get to people who we thought we might lose because they were aging. And then we wanted a diversity of age and then we wanted a diversity geographically and by gender. So those were some of the considerations that helped define who exactly we would reach out to. And then finally, as my friend julian bond always said when he was asked this question, sometimes it would just depend on who you could get to and who was available. Some of the people we might have wanted to get to were simply not available at the time we asked. And then we chose other people, things of that nature. Julian bond sat down for one of the interviews. He did. He was one of the 51. Although he could interview all the other people and did on camera, he couldnt interview himself. So i ended up as the codirector of the project doing the interview with him. And it was just it was just a wonderful experience to do that. So for people who dont know ju julian bond, tell us why he was so important to this project and why his particular life story was important. Let me start with the life story. Julian bond was one of the young africanamerican leaders who founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1960. He became its communications director. And for six years, he was really on the front line of fighting Civil Rights Movement. Snick was the organization that staged so many of the sitins in the south. It collaborated with other organizations that organized the freedom rides to desegregate buses. And there were just a core of people that became ever larger than fought that battle in a nonviolent but really aggressive way to change some of the normative behaviors and laws of the american south. And in some ways by extension of the country as a whole. So he started out there. He then in 1968 rand for the Georgia Legislature. Snick for various reasons disbanded. He ran for the Georgia Legislature. He was not seated by the legislature, and he ran three different times, won each time. They refused to see him because of his antiwar position on the vietnam war. He always believed there was an implicit racism behind that also because of his student activism. But he took his case all the way up to the Supreme Court and finally won. And it was in that process that he became incredibly wellknown nationally. He was then nominated for Vice President of the United States. He couldnt accept it because he was too young to serve. And he went on all through his life to fight for the causes he believed in. He served in the Georgia Legislature for 20 years. Then in 1987, he decided to run for the United States congress. Lost that election. Then went into a variety of other ways of being an activist, including teaching on the College Level where he brought the story of the Civil Rights Movement to thousands of people. And then in 1998, finally when he was older, he became the national chairpreecminent organization, the naacp. He was a leader. He said that he had seen in the course of his work with the Civil Rights Movement how individuals had stepped up, how leaders had emerged. Is that part of the motivation behind this project, to share those leadership stories . Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, these stories are stories of people whose lives were motivated by service most of all in a variety of capacities. And they come from all different areas. I mean, they are educators and lawyers and nine members of congress who are in the mix and playwrights. These are people who thought they needed to somehow send a larger message. And that was an important way that we defined leadership. And you know, julian himself thought that was incredibly important as a way to define leadership. But i also feel that these interviews are have an intimacy about them. Because you have one civil rights leader who was so revered. Every person who came for an interview came in large measure because of julian bond. He was so revered in the Africanamerican Community. And so many of them felt it was an honer to sor to sit down wit. And then in fact, you feel this intimacy of two people not necessarily having walked the same path but two people with really shared appreciation for one another having this conversation about what it meant to be black in america, what it meant to overcome the obstacles, whether they came from families of affluence and extended education as julian did or whether they came from deep poverty. They somehow had this intimacy because they understood that they shared some of the basic experiences of people making assumptions about you simply because of the color of your skin. How did this project fit into it the larger africanamerican oral history tradition . Well, theres a deep oral history tradition of witnessing, of talking through words. And i suspect it does go back to a time when there was much more limited literacy. And it was through the word that ideas and values were spread. First and foremost through the church and then through elders. And there are many of the interviews in the series in which people talk about the stories their elders told them and either whether it was reading from the bible or telling stories about growing up. But every single one of them had an implied lesson within them. So i think this tradition of witnessing through the oral word is deeply imbedded in the africanamerican tradition. We could even trace it even further back to africa and the tradition of elders gathering the clans and talking about the stories of the past and remembering history in that way. How can the rest of us access these story sies . All of the interviews are on a website. The website is called blackleadership. Virginia. Edu. Virginia, of course, for the university of virginia. And every single every single interview is digitized and online. And fully accessible and free. Who is your intended audience, historians, journalists, students . I think these interviews are so accessible that they are just open and available to anybody who wants to understand more about the country of america. Educators will use them. Educators on all levels, i think they can be used in secondary schools. I think they can be used in middle schools in america. I think they can be used, of course, by journalists. They can be used by historians. They can be used by sociologists. I think there are enormous capacities for these materials to be used. People would find rich things in them. They are also fully searchable. The website is fully searchable by key word. And that means you could go to the website, you could type in civil rights, you would get a list of every single aspect of every interview that mentions civil rights. What do you hope people take away from these stories . There are so, so many things. But first and foremost, i want people to understand the enormous value of these 51 individuals and, of course, there could have been so many more. But the enormous value to our country. These peoples stories are rich vignettes. And every story that people tell has an imbedded lesson in it. So i want these interviews and these stories to help us think much more deeply about the kind of society we want to create and the kind of america we want to live in. Because we dont do nearly enough to really venerate the success stories. We tend to focus on, you know, on the failures and the faults. So thats my first and foremost biggest takeaway. Then on another level, i think you can look at these interviews and you can synthesize them. And there are certain themes that emerge. And these are the themes that are related to the book that i wrote about the project. So the common themes that emerge is people talk about their lives are the importance of families and of course, within families there are all kinds of more narrowly defined assumptions and expectations that come out of family life. Theres a chapter on education and the enormous value that the black community placed on education. You know, we often talk about the failures of education for the black community. And somehow by extension, we come to assume that people didnt value education enough or they would have succeeded. But thats just not true at all. And this these interviews help us to understand the enormous importance that successful black leaders and their families put on education. Third, theres a chapter on the value of community and networking. I think a concept that we often forget. Helped lift people. And then beyond that, there are themes that emerge about the importance of National Causes that cat liescatalyzed people t themselves as leaders. Like the brown decision in which black leaders were so heavily involved. And then, of course, the Civil Rights Movement that generated grassroots leaders who came about and then became leaders for the rest of their lives. So the book has those major themes. And i think thats exactly what emerges from the interviews, and thats why i wrote the book to call attention to these themes. But you can also just go to the website and you can find what you want in these interviews. Phyllis, thank you very much. Thank you. Its a pleasure. Recently, cspan3s American History tv has been airing oral histories with Africanamerican Community leaders. The project titled explorations in black leadership was a collaboration between university of virginia professors Phyllis Leffler and julian. We hear from Armstrong Williams next. Later, his involvement in the Clarence Thomas u. S. Supreme Court Confirmation hearings. This program is about an hour and 45 minutes. Armstrong williams, welcome to explorations in black leadership. Thank you for invitin
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