African-American Elders Share Their Wisdom

December 16, 2003

"A Wealth of Wisdom: Legendary African American Elders Speak is like having your grandmother in the room with you," said Renee Poussaint, executive director and co-founder of the National Visionary Leadership Project (NVLP) and co-editor of the collection of oral histories that tell the first-person stories of African-American elders, both the nationally notable and the unsung heroes in local communities. "You can leaf through the pages and see how these visionaries overcame challenges. People can even contact them."

Poussaint told BTW, "Age is really so relative and so much an aspect of where you are emotionally and mentally. To see a Katharine Dunham (age 94) still leading a master dance class at Howard [University] and to hear John Hope Franklin (age 88) tell me he just returned from Timbuktu and went because he had never been -- opens up a whole new way of looking at life and looking at age.... These elders have so much more to give."

Co-edited by Dr. Camille Cosby, A Wealth of Wisdom, coming from Atria Books in January 2004, puts you on MGM Studio's back lot with Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, on an airstrip with Tuskegee airman Lee Archer, and inside the convent of the first order of black nuns with Sister Mary Alice Chineworth.

"I know that the more I learned about my family history, the stronger I became," said Poussaint. "I had a sense of how formidable the people are that came before me. Hearing personal stories on how our elders cope helps young people see the possibilities for their lives, and that there are people whose shoulders they can stand on."

Poussaint met Cosby through her uncle, acclaimed historian Alvin Poussaint, a good friend of Cosby. Upon discovering their shared desire to develop a documentary about the life of Dr. Dorothy Height, activist and founder of the Black Family Reunion, Poussaint and Cosby decided to co-produce a 90-minute documentary film, which, in turn, led them to establish NVLP, a nationwide program that seeks to collect, preserve, and distribute in video form the living history of both national and community-based African-American leaders who are 70 or older. The program, which involves African-American college students in the research and collection of the material, also includes a Web site, www.visionaryproject.com, where the interviews are stored digitally and are accessible to everyone.

A Wealth of Wisdom encompasses the stories of 30 national visionaries (elders with national reputations) selected by the NVLP Board of Directors and local visionaries picked by students from 10 historically black colleges, participating in NVLP's Visionary Heritage Fellowship Program. The fellowship program teaches students how to interview, videotape, research, and write oral histories.

A major challenge for Poussaint and Cosby was deciding what to incorporate in the book from their many interviews. "Our editors at Atria Books had a good sense of creating a mix in the dialogues, so that everyone wasn't talking about the same thing in the book," explained Poussaint.

Each story strikes a different chord. Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, talked about the Ku Klux Klan bombing his home on Christmas Eve. Dancer, actor, and choreographer Carmen de Lavallade relived how entertainers had to recite the "I have not been a member of the Communist Party" oath to get on the Ed Sullivan Show. Maya Angelou recalled when a young prostitute said to her at a Cleveland book-signing, "You give me hope."

Poussaint hopes the book will become an annual publication offering insights into not only African-American history, but American history. "I hope it will encourage inter-generational dialogues," said Poussaint. "The core of what we're doing at NVLP is to get generations talking to each other. To teach the young people the value and skills of gathering and storing these personal histories."

Poussaint and Cosby discovered an unexpected trend, while gathering the stories. A significant number of elders attended Dunbar Senior High School in Washington, D.C., so Poussaint and Cosby decided to let Dunbar students interview elders in their community who had graduated from the school. Partnering with Dunbar's alumni association, they chose eight elders and paired them with eight teams of 16 students. The students received NVLP training before interviewing and videotaping the elders. Teachers also helped students with writing, research, and history as it related to the project.

"It validated them," said Poussaint of the students. "They discovered information about Dunbar High School and the community that had not been documented before. We asked the elders to choose a section they thought was good. We put together a 15-minute videotape based on these excerpts and showed it at the school's assembly last spring and also bound the transcripts. The Smithsonian and the Anacostia museums in D.C. agreed to be repositories for this material. These personal histories are now part of their permanent archives."

Dunbar High School has now incorporated these videotapes into political science and social studies courses and will continue the program on its own. "We're hoping the program can be replicated in other high schools," said Poussaint.

This spring, a free Legacy Guide will be published by NVLP to serve as a straightforward template for anyone interested in recording elders' history, and NVLP hopes that African-American history museums will become repositories for these oral histories.

"If an organization wanted to make their own archive, they could find materials through a national Web database we plan to create," said Poussaint. "There are hundreds of oral histories that have been [recorded over the] years. A woman who has one of the last videotapes of former Black Panther Stokely Carmichael recently contacted us. A professor found a tape recording of Langston Hughes. We want to put all of this information into a Web database."

Poussaint believes A Wealth of Wisdom can appeal to anyone: "It's gives insights into our country and who we are as Americans. It's bringing us all closer together in understanding each other better, so we can communicate across gender, racial, and age lines. This book is a bridge." -- Gayle Herbert Robinson

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