The University of Illinois at Chicago's Great Cities Institute has awarded the first Vernon Jarrett Senior Fellowship to Julieanna Richardson, founder of an archive of African American oral history.
Richardson has served as executive director of The HistoryMakers since founding it in 1999. The organization produces a website, television programs and events based on interviews with African American leaders in education, law, politics, business, media, medicine, science, technology, arts, entertainment, the military and sports.
The website (http://www.thehistorymakers.com) currently offers biographies and photographs of 1,000 such interviewees, including Jarrett and UIC art professor Kerry James Marshall. The HistoryMakers plans to add 5,000 two-hour video interviews to the site.
Richardson will help set the long-term agenda for the fellowship as its first recipient. She also will undertake short-term programs in her areas of expertise.
David Perry, director of the UIC Great Cities Institute, said Richardson is an ideal choice because her work is in keeping with Jarrett's tradition of analysis combined with action.
"Vernon believed in leadership by African American people of letters," Perry said. "He urged students not only to read their leaders' writings, but to speak their words aloud to each other and learn their way of writing, speaking, and finding motivation. The power of knowledge permeated his written columns. He was an advocate for informed leadership and social change, and a public intellectual in every sense of the word.
"The scope, ambition and goals of Julieanna Richardson's project advance the tradition of Vernon Jarrett by encouraging youth to build their lives on the legacy of past leaders," he said.
Richardson received a law degree from Harvard University and a degree in theater and American studies from Brandeis University, where she researched the Harlem Renaissance. She worked as a corporate lawyer before joining the City of Chicago in 1985 as chair of the Chicago Cable Commission and administrator of the Office of Cable Communications. She later founded a production company, SCTN Teleproductions, which managed three local cable channels and served as the production arm of C-SPAN.
Richardson serves on the boards of Lawyers for the Creative Arts and the Chicago Convention and Tourism Bureau.
The fellowship honors the legacy of journalist and activist Vernon Jarrett, who was a Great Cities fellow at UIC from 1996 until his death in 2004. Jarrett started his career as a reporter for the Chicago Defender during the 1940s. He became the Chicago Tribune's first syndicated African American columnist, a Chicago Sun-Times columnist and a host on radio and television talk shows. He established the Afro-Academic, Cultural, Technological and Scientific Olympics (ACT-SO), a year-long enrichment program for African American high school students.
The fellowship is funded by the Vernon D. Jarrett Foundation, established by the Jarrett family to distribute scholarship funds through national organizations associated with Jarrett.
UIC ranks among the nation's top 50 universities in federal research funding and is Chicago's largest university with 25,000 students, 12,000 faculty and staff, 15 colleges and the state's major public medical center. A hallmark of the campus is the Great Cities Commitment, through which UIC faculty, students and staff engage with community, corporate, foundation and government partners in hundreds of programs to improve the quality of life in metropolitan areas around the world. For more information about UIC, please visit http://www.uic.edu
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