Videotapes preserving `unsung' oral histories.(Chicago Tribune)

CHICAGO _ Haki Madhubuti's eyes well with tears as he remembers his mother's murder. He remembers finding her, and he remembers that the first suit he ever wore was at her funeral.

Madhubuti remembers how her death was the catalyst for him, then a Detroit teenager named Don Luther Lee, becoming Haki Madhubuti: a prolific poet, author and educator, and the head of a thriving South Side publishing house.

Madhubuti is recalling this deeply personal story in front of cameras, preserving it on videotape as part of The Historymakers, a groundbreaking, Chicago-based archival project that chronicles the history of successful and "unsung" African-Americans through first-person video narratives.

Black History Month, which began Thursday, celebrates many of the same themes the project embraces. The initiative combines the best of an old African-American tradition_the passing of oral history from one generation to the next _ with current technology that includes video archiving and an interactive Web site (www.thehistorymakers.com) featuring streams of completed interviews.

The goal, said founder Julieanna Richardson, is to create a digital archive that will be available to museums, libraries and historians.

"History is a patchwork of individual stories," Richardson said. "With video you can see a person's eyes, you can see how they laugh, you can see what makes them emotional. It's a valuable tool for us.

"As black people," she continued, "there's so much of our history that needs to be preserved before it's too late."