Co-Directed by Phyllis Leffler & Julian Bond
Explorations in Black Leadership
Explorations in Black Leadership
Welcome to UVA's Explorations in Black Leadership
Video collection of leaders in the African American community.
The UVA Library
The UVA Library received a two-year, $1 million grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to help make The HistoryMakers digital archive of African-Americans more accessible.
Julian Bond and John Lewis
Julian Bond, former national chairman of the NAACP and professor of history at the University of Virginia and John Lewis, US Representative from Georgia and a founding member of SNCC
Video Interviews
These rich and thoughtful interviews, conducted chiefly by Julian Bond, teach us how leadership emerges from historical struggle rooted in the hope of a better future.
About the Site
By concentrating on leadership in equal measure to the remembered past of peoples' lives, the conversations implicitly connect the ways in which historical circumstances create the conditions for the future.
Education Resources
By viewing the clips and completing the activities students will better understand what leadership is and how they can become leaders.
American leaders interviewed with responses categorized into three themes - Biographical Details of Leadership, Contemporary Lens on Black Leadership, and Historical Focus on Race
These 51 oral interviews reveal how leaders are nurtured, and how historical circumstances shape them. They are stories of identity -- stories about the self, stories about the group, and stories about value and meaning. They link the private and the public -- the personal and the professional. You can listen to and learn from 51 American leaders from all walks of life -- law, education, religion, public service, the arts, business. The leaders in this sample span the full twentieth century, reflecting economic, geographic, and age diversity. Some experienced the indignities of segregation; others came of age after major legislation ended de jure discrimination. Learn More