Capital B is Creating a Black Oral History Archive. Nobody in It Is Famous.
Capital B is collecting 250 Black oral histories for America's 250th year. Over a hundred are already live at ForTheRecordArchive.org, gathered over the past year by their reporters and partners, and the collection is still growing.
Founding editor Akoto Ofori-Atta laid out how it started. Capital B launched in 2022, right as the national conversation about race pivoted from reckoning to fighting over what could be taught in a classroom. Book bans. DEI rollbacks. Arguments about whose history counts. The question for many: “Who gets to shape America's story?”
Their answer was to do what the Black press has always done, and document the truth. The original plan was to put younger people in conversation with elders. People who sat in segregated classrooms. People whose families marched.
Then, Capital B realized that preservation meant protecting the hard history. The stories of Black ingenuity, courage, artistry, and accomplishment were just as endangered. So the project became an attempt to preserve all of it. Stories from the activist recalling his first encounter with the Klan in the sixties alongside the shoemaker in Gary keeping his craft alive in a changing town, the young artist in New Orleans building a life in a city that won't hold still, the twenty-something in Miami describing the side of his hometown tourists never see.
Documentation involves what survived and what was birthed.