Martha’s Vineyard Living Legends (MVLL): The Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) Elders Oral History Project

Students build lasting relationships with interviewees and learn valuable oral history interview skills. Interviewees appreciate the opportunity of sharing insights, gaining mutual respect and understanding, fostering inquiry, seeing the impact of their words, and helping to analyze how their life experiences relate to current issues. The exchanges do not end with the interviews. The project includes access to a searchable video library, tagged thematically, where viewers will deepen their understanding of history, inspired by the Elders, to gain new perspectives and envision constructive change through community building.

The MVLL project team of multigenerational, multicultural volunteers, made up of educators, curriculum writers, historians, artists, and oral history specialists, started in August 2021. The vision began when a team co-founder and veteran teacher was inspired by conversations with Marie B. Allen, then 91, where she shared a moving story from her memoir. Knowing that Vineyard high school students could identify with Allen’s strong desire, as a young person of 18, to leave her tight-knit Black community in Boston and venture on her own to Chicago, prompted the idea of forming the oral history project. During Allen’s journey, she faced and overcame enormous obstacles of racism, sexism, and class bias, and became a vital community activist. The team shared Allen’s story with a Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School (MVRHS) social studies teacher. Her class of 29 students was excited to research shared documents about Allen’s life. These students had the honor of conducting the first interview for our project. Approximately 100 students from Martha’s Vineyard Public Charter School and the MVRHS have been involved yearly since the project began, and we have conducted 17 interviews of BIPOC and Immigrant Elders on the island of Martha’s Vineyard. Our collection includes six videos from the Association for the Study of African American Life and History-MV Branch (ASALH MV) whose then-president joined the project team in 2023. Beginning in 2017, ASALH MV sponsored interviews with African American leaders of Martha’s Vineyard conducted by an MVRHS student selected for each interview, and edited by that student with the MVTV Access Coordinator.