“If a race has no history, if it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated.”

Carter G. Woodson

​

The Seattle Griot Project (SGP) is the genesis of a long-promised Heritage Museum and Cultural Center to find its home within the Black community. We'll call it “The Legacy” for now. This will be a heritage collection installation offering digital content as well as diverse training in multimedia highlighting: photo, film, audio, print and web content.

 

SGP's aim is to empower the Black American's community as well as spark an awareness of those accomplishments that these communities have made, thereby yielding tools to create for them their own narrative stories, tapping from a collection of heritage resources starting from multimedia to oral story contents about Washington’s King County. The Legacy Museum in tandem with SGP will help share and affirm the lived Black history across generations as well as within the community which in turn will be transformational and offer the opportunity to present their culture, history and their stories to all King County residents, visitors and those who will inherit this legacy.

 

 “The Seattle Griot Project”.

 

The definition “Griot” has been known to be:

 

A West African historian, storyteller, praise singer, poet, or musician. The Griot is a repository of oral tradition and is often seen as a leader due to their position as an advisor to royal personages.

 

We are building this repository to preserve the accuracy and details of the memories from all historical content to be collected concerning the pacific northwest's black community's evolution, starting from the time of community redlining to present day. Our strategy is gathering by topic file any and all relevant photos, print articles, audio and motion visual media. This effort will result in the building of a comprehensive archive which will be freely available for our future generations of black people and those other community dwellers that will inquire via internet. This repository will be available offering data to understand the resolves of the local businesses, visualize events previously captured and to re-visit cultural and political expos.