Growing the YDL Oral History Collections

Passionate and influential local food growers are recording their stories in the Ypsilanti District Library’s oral history archives.

The Ypsi Farmers & Gardeners Oral History Project headlines our new-look history.ypsilibrary.org page. Finn Bell, Assistant Professor of Human Services at University of Michigan-Dearborn, is curating this digital collection of oral interviews that discuss how growing food  has served as resistance and resilience for BIPOC and working class people in Ypsilanti.

“Gardening is unique in that it is both a way to provide nourishment and a way to create beauty,” Bell said. “I found that growing food was clearly a way that people addressed the everyday disasters of racial capitalism, including living in low-income and food apartheid  neighborhoods, but I also found that growing food was a way for people to create meaning in their lives.”

YDL’s new history page has these interviews alongside our existing local history collections like the A.P. Marshall Oral History Archive, Ypsi Stories podcast episodes, and Ypsilanti Commercial newspaper records.

The Farmers & Gardeners collection currently has 6 interviews alongside portraits of each interviewee by photographer Nick Azzaro. More interviews will be added to the collection as they are recorded.

Omer Jean Winborn, YDL Board member and cofounder of the Washtenaw County African American Genealogy Society, is lending her expertise to the project, and particularly highlighted the importance of hearing the stories in the subjects’ own words.

“We must tell our own stories. No one can tell our stories like we can,” Winborn said. “Our stories are powerful. As African American  people, many of our stories have been told by someone else, told incorrectly, or maybe not at all.”