The Elders Project - Incite at Columbia University

Established by author Jacqueline Woodson, the Baldwin-Emerson Elders Project captures and celebrates untold and underrepresented stories of activists, storytellers, and community builders who have witnessed and shaped great change in American public life.

Spanning over 230 oral history interviews and 1,000 personal mementos, the Elders Project offers a way of preserving and sharing the memories of Black, Brown, Asian, Latine, Indigenous, and queer elders before they are lost.

Woodson's inspiration for the project came from her mother, who came of age in the Jim Crow south. Woodson visited her mother's hometown, Greenville, where she was inspired by the heroic survival stories of otherwise 'ordinary' people. "Like my mom, they had a light," she says in a letter on the project's website. "I wanted to bring that light to the outside world. I wanted them to live to see it in its glory."

The Elders Project was produced by Incite Institute at Columbia University—home to the Columbia Center for Oral History Research—in partnership with Woodson’s nonprofit, Baldwin for the Arts, and made possible with funding from Emerson Collective.

The Elders Project is archived at the Oral History Archives at Columbia, made widely available thorugh an award-winning digital archive, and activated through plays, books, artwork, and community events throughout America.

A New Deal for the 21st Century

Oral history can be a powerful tool for communities to produce rich, place-specific histories. However, large-scale, national oral histories can risk undermining the relationships, trust—and importantly, trustworthiness—that make this methodology powerful.

“The act of collecting stories, investing in them, signifies what we as a society value, what narratives we deem worthy of holding on to. The absence of collecting certain stories signals the same.”

To create a rich, national composite of local stories, we looked to the 1930s Federal Writers Project, whose writers, like Zora Neale Hurston, brought life experiences from their communities into national focus. Rather than sending our team across America, we partnered with award-winning writers—including Ellery Washington, Eve L. Ewing, Caro De Robertis, and Jenna “J” Wortham—to work with elders in communities they were already embedded in. We trained the writers in oral history methods, encouraged them to explore themes of migration and identity formation, but left decisions about scope to them and their communities.

Reimagining digital oral history archives

To make the Elders Project as accessible and inviting as possible, we wanted to push the limits of how usable, dynamic, and beautiful oral history archives could be.

In Spring 2024, we launched a project website that provides multiple pathways for discovering each narrator's interview, including curated essays, maps, and topic filters. As explored in It’s Nice That, the archive’s vibrant illustrations are also induced entirely from the interviews themselves—featuring flora, fauna, places, and events that are mentioned in each collection’s interviews.

A living archive

Though our digital archive is a valuable resource for historians, educators, journalists, and the general public, our primary audiences are the elders interviewed, their communities, and those who stand to inherit their stories. Connecting elders to inheritors and supporting the transmission and continued interpretation of their stories required working in various physical media and fora across the country.

Preserving stories and supporting their transmission and inheritance are distinct but interrelated practices. The project’s physical archive at Columbia University provides stability; its digital archive provides a broader reach than ever before possible; its regional events bring communities together around story; and its creative commissions acknowledge that a story’s inheritance and survival is reliant on continued storytelling.

To launch the project, we supported writers in planning and executing community events per visions they developed with the elders they interviewed. Renée Watson, for example, held a storytelling event and rose ceremony for Black elders and the public at Portland’s World Stage Theatre. Ellery Washington held performances and a gallery opening at the African American Performing Arts Center of New Mexico for elders and their families. We provided funding, equipment, and on-site support, working with local vendors, elders, and their families to realize their vision.

For our national opening at the Center for Brooklyn History in New York City in May 2024, we held an open call for emerging artists, asking them to have a conversation with the archive in the media of their choice. We provided eleven artists with playlists developed through our research, from which they responded with poetry, paintings, sculpture, and time-based art. In August 2024, we held a week-long show at Brooklyn’s Bishop Gallery, where these same artists held talks and met with the public.

To learn more, visit the Elders Project website.