A grandson talks to his grandfather about his childhood, civic responsibility and the future of African Americans.

"Nobody wanted to work with me." In 1991, Monica Harwell became the first woman to climb electric utility poles for ConEdison in New York. As a line constructor, her job was to install power lines dozens of feet in the...

“You have to go back. And you’re going back to train for the Olympics.” During the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, many black athletes were called upon to protest racial inequality. Not all were able to do so. This was the...

Twenty-five years ago this week, Greg Yance arrived in the tiny town of Niota, Illinois, on the banks of the Mississippi River. He was serving time for a drug conviction and was sent to Niota with a group of inmates...

“Being in a place like that, I didn’t feel like we was human.” In July of 1963, a group of African American protesters were arrested during a series of non-violent, anti-segregation demonstrations in Americus, Georgia. More than a dozen girls,...

My aunt and dad reminisce about racial tensions, dumb decisions, and run-ins with the law in the Middle of Nowhere, USA. If you like comedic, feel-good stories about smalltown life in the 80s, then give it a listen!

"I remember seeing your face and I was shocked." Longtime friends Barbara Parham and Jeanne Satterfield remember reconnecting at a place neither one of them expected to be — the Pine Street Inn homeless shelter — and taking their next...

Judge Olly Neal grew up in Arkansas during the ’50s and didn’t care much for high school. One day he cut class and wandered into the library. It’s there he came across a book by African-American author Frank Yerby. The...

On November 18, 2003, in the case of Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, the Massachusetts Supreme Court declared that “…barring an individual from the protections, benefits, and obligations of civil marriage solely because that person would marry a person...

Guy Bryant grew up surrounded by women who dedicated themselves to caring for children in their Brooklyn community. He then spent years working with foster teens as they made the transition to living on their own. But after three decades...

“...Everything was dead. Like if I had landed on the moon.” Fifty years after arriving in the United States from Honduras, Roy Daley sat down with his daughter, Lucy, and wife, Ana, to reminisce about his first Thanksgiving dinner. Produced...

On October 29, 1969, the Supreme Court ordered schools across the country to desegregate, in the little-known but milestone case Alexander v. Holmes. It was 15 years after schools had resisted Brown v. Board of Education, and most black students...

The StoryCorps archive is the largest collection of human voices ever gathered, preserving United States history as told through the voices of everyday people in this country. The recordings run the gamut of human emotion, from joy to despair and...

When Courtney McKinney was 16 years old, she learned that she’d been conceived through anonymous sperm donation. As an adult, Courtney discovered she had a half-sister—Alexandra Sanchez. Theirs is one of the many families that have expanded as a result...

"I got to find a job I can do for thirty years in this place." After working her way up from the assembly line, Dorothy Glinton became one of the first women to hold a management position at the Ford...

On April 15, 2013, two explosives placed near the finish line of the Boston Marathon detonated within seconds of each other, killing three people and injuring over two hundred others. In the days following the attack, a massive manhunt took...

More than half a million Americans have recorded StoryCorps interviews across the country. Often, participants use the opportunity to pass vital wisdom and stories from one generation to the next. That was the case in this StoryCorps recording from Norfolk,...

Retired Colonel Denise Baken enlisted in the Army in 1975 , following in her father’s military footsteps. She’d go on to serve for nearly three decades. At StoryCorps, Denise told her children — Richard and Christian Yingling — about her...

Brandy Carpenter, 38, and De’Marchoe Carpenter, 41, began their romance in the summer of 1994. Brandy was 14 years old. De’Marchoe was 17. And Brandy had had a crush on him for years. But before they had their first kiss,...

On August 11 and 12, 2017, white nationalists from around the country gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia for a rally they called Unite the Right. They were met by counter-demonstrators who showed up to protest against the rally. Heather Heyer, 32,...

Ed Cage and Nicole Paris are a father-daughter beatboxing duo. Back during the 1980s, Ed immersed himself in the St. Louis hip hop scene and fell in love with beatboxing. Fast-forward a couple decades and that love is now firmly...

Arguster and Lebronze Davis grew up on their family’s farm in Wetumpka, Alabama. As two of 17 siblings, they had little time for anything outside of school and work. The brothers came to StoryCorps to talk about their childhood and...

During the 1940s, custodians who worked for the New York Public Library often lived inside the buildings they tended. In exchange for cleaning and keeping the building secure at night, the library provided an apartment for the custodian and their...