#storycorps

“I can’t emphasize enough how everyone's COVID-19 experience is valuable,” AFC Director Nicole Saylor said. “It’s worth preserving. It doesn’t matter your zip code, your community, whether you contracted it. Everyone has a story.”

Alice Wong

March 27, 1974 - November 14, 2025

Animation brings so much to life! Check out this animated short interview with Drew Lanham about his experiences growing up and returning to his dreams as an adult. 

For more information, we’ve shared Ward Jenkins’ thread on his art and character design influences on Twitter. Click here to view!

Rep. John Lewis is the last living speaker from the March on Washington, the 1963 landmark civil rights protest that culminated with Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech.

But before Lewis dedicated his life to fighting for racial equality, he grew up in Troy, Ala., with dreams of becoming a different kind of orator.

"When I was very young, I wanted to preach the gospel," Lewis said on a visit to StoryCorps in February 2018.

He wanted to be a minister. His nearest congregation was the family livestock.

"With the help of my brothers and sisters and cousins, we would gather all of our chickens in the chicken yard, and I would start preaching to the chickens. They never quite said 'Amen.' "

But in school, he had a mentor who would eventually open up his career in civil rights. "I had one teacher who'd tell me over and over again, she would say, 'Read my child, read.' "

He followed her wisdom. "I tried to read everything," he said.

His parents couldn't afford a subscription to the local newspaper, Lewis said, "But my grandfather had one and when he was finished reading his newspaper each day, he would pass it on to us to read."

Somewhere in those papers, magazines and school books, 15-year-old Lewis came across the name Rosa Parks, the activist famous for sparking the bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala.

"The action of Rosa Parks and the words of Dr. King inspired me," the congressman recalled. "And I kept saying to myself, 'If something can happen like this in Montgomery, why can't we change Troy?' "

Rep. John Lewis' Fight For Civil Rights Began With A Letter To Martin Luther King Jr.

For Japanese Americans across California, Feb. 19 marks the Day of Remembrance, the solemn anniversary of the day in 1942 when President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which led to the forced relocation and incarceration of more than 120,000 Japanese Americans in prison camps across the U.S.

As the Japanese Americans who experienced imprisonment get older, a California project wants to preserve their memories of what happened, while it's still possible.

The Yonsei Memory Project, based in Fresno, is an intergenerational effort to capture family stories of World War II and beyond — and the diversity of the Japanese American experience in the Central Valley.

Today, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a proclamation to make Feb. 19 an official Day of Remembrance, calling the executive order "a decision motivated by discrimination and xenophobia" and "a betrayal of our most sacred values as a nation that we must never repeat."

On this day in 2020, shortly before COVID-19 lockdowns began, Yonsei Memory Project organizers collaborated with StoryCorps to record conversations between family members and friends across generations.

Read more...

A year ago, I took my dad to New York City to fulfill his bucket list before he died less than three months later. I haven’t listened to this until today. I miss him but I’m glad that he agreed to be interviewed.