Danny Glover On The HistoryMakers Year 2000

Host Danny Glover made a special appearance to kick off The HistoryMakers’ 20th anniversary celebration recalling how twenty years ago his friend Harry Belafonte called and asked him to travel to Chicago to be part of the national launch of a startup national African American video oral history archive called The HistoryMakers. This occasion also represented the beginning of The HistoryMakers’ An Evening With… celebrity PBS-TV interview series. 2000 was also the year that 72 interviews were added to The HistoryMakers archives from the cities of Chicago, New York, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Indianapolis, and Denver. Including Negro Baseball League Players, Pullman Porters and Tuskegee Airmen, The HistoryMakers’ live oral history interviews average 3-5 hours in length. Also, in 2000, The HistoryMakers launched a yearlong radio series that featured content from its archives that aired on WBBM-AM; participated in teacher training summer institutes at the University of Chicago and Northwestern University; and garnered significant support from the State of Illinois thanks to the support and leadership of then Illinois State Senate President Emil Jones, Jr. In addition to never-before-seen, behind-the-scenes footage of An Evening With Harry Belafonte PBS-TV taping, this evening program featured a performance provided courtesy of International Jazz Day and The Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz by Grammy Award-winning Dianne Reeves in honor of Harry Belafonte and those interviewed as HistoryMakers in the year 2000. The night finished off with the streaming of An Evening With Harry Belafonte.