By Felicia R. Lee
The New York Times
There are so many untold stories. Mary Elizabeth Bowser was a former slave who worked as a maid in the household of the Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, was a spy for the Union. Onesimus, the former slave of the New England theologian Cotton Mather, came up with the idea in 1716 of deliberately infecting healthy people with the smallpox virus to combat the disease. Otabenga, born around 1883 in what was then the Belgian Congo, was lured to America, where in 1906 he found himself on display at the Bronx Zoo; in 1916 he quietly committed suicide.
These and hundreds of other stories are being assembled by two Harvard scholars for what they are calling the largest-ever collection of biographies of African-Americans. It is an ambitious effort to patch the spotty historical record about the men and women who, among other things, fled slavery, created art and shepherded civil rights campaigns in the shadow of giants like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
The African American National Biography project is to be published in several volumes and there will also be an online database with about 11,000 names of the living and the dead. In another departure from conventional biographies, nominations for inclusion can be made by anyone offering a name to help enrich the narrative about race in America.
The project's first effort, "African American Lives" (Oxford University Press, 2004), is to be published this month. The online database and eight or so volumes of the biography will be available in another two or three years.
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