2024 Oral History Association Annual Meeting

Getting Word Oral Historians and leaders from local descendant communities discuss the project's thirty year history charting the histories of families once enslaved by Thomas Jefferson, the project's continued relationships with multiple generations of descendant families, and contributing to a future that understands the centrality of these voices in the story of this country.

ABSTRACT: The Getting Word African American Oral History Project at Monticello is an ongoing, collaborative oral history project that charts the histories of families once enslaved by Thomas Jefferson. For the past thirty years, Getting Word oral historians and generations of brave and tenacious descendants have worked hand-in-hand to record their personal histories, with the steadfast resolve that their family’s histories are essential American history. Through the collaborative process of recording oral histories with generations of descendants, as well as building and maintaining relationships with descendant communities locally and nationally, Getting Word seeks to contribute to a growing national and international consciousness of the centrality of these voices in our shared American story.The hundreds of oral histories and accompanying family photographs, documents, and other heirlooms that form our archive are a testament to the relationships, built and sustained, with over 1,000 individuals descended from the enslaved at Monticello. In 1993, TJF historians Cinder Stanton and Dianne Swann-Wright founded the Getting Word project to find and record oral histories of enslavement at Monticello, working in partnership with genealogist and historian Beverly Gray. Not only has project has documented the history and humanity of the people who lived and labored on the mountaintop, but it has revealed a relentless pursuit of rights and freedom across generations of descendants, from colonial America to the present.Through diligent archival research and collaboration with descendants, Getting Word historians have reconnected families riven apart by slavery and its aftermath. The project, as an archive and as a community, has helped to recontextualize Monticello as a Black heritage site of reflection, remembrance, and reunion. Today, our team works to steward the invaluable archive co-created by Stanton and Swann-Wright, sustain and grow our relationships with descendant families, and foster partnerships with other descendant communities nationwide.