Meet the historians and poets preserving Black oral tradition, one performance at a time.
Long before archives and databases, communities relied on griots — tradition-bearers whose job was to remember, and to tell. Rhode Island still has them, and the Faces Project spent months documenting their work in partnership with Rhode Island Black Storytellers.
"A people who forget their storytellers forget how to tell the truth about themselves," says Dr. Vivian Hayes, who has spent four decades collecting and performing these histories.
