The Tuskegee Airmen Oral History Project and Oral History in the National Park Service

J. Todd Moye

In 1998 President Bill Clinton signed into law a bill directing the National Park Service (NPS) to create a national historic site at Moton Field in Tuskegee, Alabama. The site will honor the Tuskegee Airmen, as the first African American military aviators—men who trained to fly airplanes at segregated facilities in Tuskegee during World War II—were later called. When Congress appropriated funds for the creation of the site, it authorized the NPS to conduct an oral history of surviving Tuskegee-trained pilots and the thousands of people who supported them during World War II. The resulting Tuskegee Airmen Oral History Project is but one of the hundreds of ways that the National Park Service has embraced the possibilities of oral history.	1
About a third of the 384 units in the National Park System report that they have undertaken oral history projects.1 Park Service historians, anthropologists, ethnographers, and natural resource specialists have long understood that oral history can help them document important American experiences in rich detail. They have then shared those stories with park visitors. Consequently, the NPS has been responsible for a significant portion of all the oral history conducted in the United States.	2
The National Park Service is likely to expand its oral history program in the future. In 2001 the National Park System Advisory Board, chaired by the eminent historian John Hope Franklin, suggested that the Park Service's first priority for the twenty-first century should be accepting "its mission, as educator, to become a more significant part of America's educational system." The board proposed that the NPS should "encourage the study of the American past, developing programs based on current scholarship, linking specific places to the narrative of our history, and encouraging a public exploration and discussion of the American experience."2 Oral history is unique in its ability to fulfill those missions.	3
Yet there is great variety in the condition and size of the oral history collections produced by NPS employees. Some collections contain only field notes for a handful of untranscribed, even unrecorded, interviews. Others have hundreds of impressively cataloged interviews and finding aids. For example, the oral history collection at San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park dates back to the 1940s and is one of the nation's longest-running oral history programs. Its more than 600 interviews are cataloged and available to researchers. With close to 2,000 interviews, the oral history collection at the Ellis Island Immigration Museum at Ellis Island National Monument is among the nation's largest and most important. The collection is impressively cataloged and widely accessible to park visitors. Thousands of New York City schoolchildren, scholars, curious visitors, and descendants of interviewees have listened to the collection's recordings in the site's research library. The archive of the National Prisoner of War Museum at Andersonville National Historic Site in Georgia includes video histories of more than 900 American POWs, veterans of every American conflict since World War I.3	. . .