Students preserve local Black leaders' stories through oral history project

By Walter Ryce

A new oral history initiative is documenting the lives and contributions of African American leaders in Monterey County while giving California State University, Monterey Bay (CSUMB) students valuable research experience.

In 2024, Jeremias Zunguze, associate professor of ethnic and gender studies and who holds a PhD in Hispanic languages and literatures from UC Berkeley, was approached by the NAACP’s Monterey County Branch president, Lyndon Tarver, with the idea preserving oral histories from local Black leaders for future generations. 

“He said we have to interview veterans, civil rights leaders, [people in] employment, education, business, housing, community organizations, youth engagement in Seaside,” Zunguze recalled. “The project was big and overwhelming.”

He decided to enlist the help of CSUMB students from the African Heritage Research Collaborative (AHRC), an interdisciplinary research project that teaches student scholars the theories and practices of the humanities and social and behavioral sciences while investigating African American experiences and contributions. It’s anchored in the Helen Rucker Center for Black Excellence, and is modeled after the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Center (UROC). There are about seven AHRC mentors — with backgrounds that range across social work, business, chemistry, biology, health and education — and Zunguze has been the AHRC coordinator since Fall 2025. 

Instead of collecting oral histories in the traditional sense, Zunguze designed the project to combine interviews with archival research, qualitative analysis, and existing historical sources.In doing so, the AHRC students would also learn how to do research.  

They tapped into local networks, found subjects and conducted the first set of interviews focused on education, leadership, business and entrepreneurship, housing, and community development. Interviewees were asked about their upbringing, education, careers, civic engagement, and experiences overcoming barriers as they contributed to the Monterey Bay community. 

Mister Veazie, a third-year cinematic arts student, was one of the interviewers who covered education, politics and community leadership.  

“I conducted interviews with monumental figures in the Seaside and Monterey Peninsula communities, like Mel Mason,” he said. “We took the interviews and applied coding to see common themes, like how education, community and politics play off each other when you’re African American in Monterey County.”

Zunguze intends to make the stories accessible to the public in a digital archive. 

“At some point we’ll polish those interviews, transcribe them and publish them into [CSUMB’s] Digital Commons,” Zunguze said. “That will take place after we’re done collecting all the interviews we’re planning.”

Next year's interviews will expand into health and wellness, the arts, social action, and veterans' experiences. Each interview lasts about an hour, and Zunguze says there is no fixed number of participants.

“The project will end when we exhaust the proposed themes,” he said. “But the more we engage in this research, the more people we discover who have important stories to tell. It keeps branching out and growing, and I like that.”

That evolving nature also teaches the AHRC scholars that research is exploratory and can lead to surprises. Nine student scholars presented three of the oral history project findings at UROC’s Spring Showcase at the university’s library. 

Among the scholars was Lani Johnson, a member of CSUMB’s rugby team, who presented on “From Redlining to Resilience: African American Homeownership, Civil Rights Legacies, and Housing Inequality in the Monterey Bay Area.” 

She said in an AHRC statement that her participation in the collaborative’s research — combined with school, sports and work — helped her with time management, communication skills and working in diverse spaces. 

“It will benefit me in the real world in my future career,” she said. 

Zunguze affirms that the AHRC teaches professional development skills, offers students mentorship opportunities, and helps them in their academic trajectory – a few AHRC scholars have already gone on to graduate school. Presentations like the UROC showcase help the students with writing and public speaking. And the oral history project brings together students, the campus and the community into a closer relationship with one another

“It's going well,” he said. “The community members we've interviewed appreciate the project, and together we're preserving an important history that future generations will be able to learn from.”