Last Friday, the Batten School was honored to celebrate Julieanna L. Richardson, the school’s recipient of the 2024 Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Citizen Leadership, the highest honor bestowed by the University of Virginia. Richardson is founder and president of The HistoryMakers, the groundbreaking digital archive of Black leaders who helped shape American history.  

She gave a public address in the morning at Monticello, a time-bound tradition for the leadership medalist. "Thomas Jefferson saw the preservation of documents as essential to citizen leadership," Richardson told the crowd of some 200 people. "On Oct. 4, 1823, right here in Monticello, he wrote, 'It is the duty of every good citizen to use all of the opportunities for preserving documents relating to the history of our country.' This is the essence of our work at HistoryMakers. Otherwise, those who do not know their history are doomed to repeat."  

Later in the afternoon, the Batten School hosted her at a more intimate gathering at the Colonnade Club in a conversation with Dean John M. Unsworth, UVA librarian and dean of libraries, who has played a supporting role in The HistoryMakers over the last couple of decades. 

With more than 2,500 oral histories of Black Americans recorded, the mission of Richardson’s massive achievement is to collect, preserve and make widely accessible the untold stories of both well-known and unsung African Americans. Subjects include representatives of the arts, business, civic engagement, education, entertainment, law, the media, medicine, the military, music, politics, religion, sports, fashion and beauty, and the list continues to expand. 

Richardson shared her recollection of the year 2008 and how Unsworth, dean of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign at the time, was assigned to work with her, pairing her under-resourced organization with a major university library and how that was “our saving grace.”  

“I have often thought of that,” said Richardson. “We were their experiment.” 

Richardson also talked about her own history and background, which includes work in the theatre, a law degree from Harvard University and a stint at a law firm, and a career in cable television before starting this immense project from her dining room table in 1998. Beginning during the dot comm bubble when technology was rapidly changing, she and her team were able to weave the changing innovative landscape into their teachings and research.  

“We were testing everything out,” said Richardson, who highlighted how important it was to her to videotape the interviews rather than only have audio.  “I wanted you to be able to see the people and so videotaping was very important to me.”  

Notwithstanding the success she has experienced and the impact she’s made, she’s concerned about threats to what she has worked so hard to create. Asked about the current political landscape and divide, she said she finds it very troubling.  

She also has reservations about artificial intelligence, which she said can misrepresent racial considerations to the point of being offensive. She currently restricts certain AI tools from accessing the subscription-based digital archives for The HistoryMakers.  

On the other hand, from an efficiency standpoint, The HistoryMakers has benefitted from AI. For example, by utilizing the technology on a project a few years ago, Unsworth and UVA completed work in a week that would have taken ten people working for two years. And she’s keenly attuned to the possibilities of using AI to expand the searchability of the vast and growing HistoryMakers archive for students, researchers and others wishing to learn more about the role of Black leaders in American history. 

Looking ahead, she said there are several key principles necessary to preserve the integrity of The HistoryMakers, as well as other archival projects: accurate representation, ethical considerations and thoughtfulness. 

“Pure content needs to be protected,” said Richardson. “We need to be thoughtful and think about long-term impacts.”