I’Maya Gibbs Selected as Student Ambassador for The HistoryMakers Digital Archive

I'Maya Gibbs, a second-year graduate student in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, has been selected as a 2025-26 Student Ambassador by The HistoryMakers Digital Archive, the nation's largest African American video oral history archive.

Founded in 1999 by lawyer Julieanna Richardson, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive contains over 11,000 hours of first-person testimony of over 3,600 African American leaders recorded in over 451 U.S. cities and towns. With interviews of Angela Davis, Maya Angelou, Congressman John Lewis and President Obama, the archive is an eclectic collection of Black life across periods, experiences, and fields.

From its inception, The HistoryMakers' mission has been to educate the world about the history, lives, careers, and accomplishments of African Americans across a variety of disciplines - the arts, business, civic engagement, education, entertainment, law, the media, medicine, STEM, the military, music, politics, religion, sports, and fashion & beauty - by making its content accessible worldwide.

As The HistoryMakers 2025-26 Student Ambassador at UMass Amherst, Gibbs will introduce the campus to the rich archive highlighting its preservation of Black oral histories as well as its significance across disciplines, departments and courses.

UMass Amherst is a subscriber to The HistoryMakers Digital Archive via the library, and students and faculty can easily access the archive through the Afro-American Studies library research guide. The HistoryMakers Digital Archive can not only be used for historical learning, but also as a tool within sociology, anthropology, political science, business, dance and theater.

More information about Gibbs' appointment as a HistoryMakers and the Student Ambassador program can be found at thehistorymakers.org.