Julieanna L. Richardson
speaker
226 appearances
9 recordings
5 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 10 Jul
Julieanna L. Richardson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 9 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 7.
Appearances
I'm part German, I'm part Italian, I'm part French, I'm part Polish, Jewish.
They all had hyphenates.
What was I?
The only thing that we studied back then about black people were the other George Washington, Tuskegee Institute's George Washington Carver.
And my white teacher said he could do a lot of things with peanuts.
And then there was the taboo issue of slavery and no one wanted to be associated with slavery.
So to my nine-year-old brain,
Those two facts together did not compute.
How could he have done all those things with peanuts when all we had been were slaves?
So I mumbled something like Negro or Black, Native American, because most Black people think they have Native American blood in them.
And I added in French, I lied.
My father had been stationed in France, but I wanted to have a history also.
That sense of not knowing and not belonging stayed with me until my sophomore year at Brandeis University.
I remember it like it was yesterday.
It was fall day.
The leaves were a golden brown, and I'm in New York Schomburg's library with my headphones on, listening to this song.
Just wild about Harry.
Harry's wild about me.
This song, this song that I associated with President Harry Truman, I had found, who was a white president, I had found in a black music collection in a black library written by a black songwriting team of Noble, Sissel and Yubi Blake in the 1921 production of Shuffle Along on Broadway.
I was thrilled, and I took my, I went up to the librarian, the famous librarian, Jean Blackwell Hudson.
Showing 101–120 of 226 · page 6 of 12
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