Samenia Wilson Limes Oral Histories: About The Project

The Samenia Wilson Limes Collection comprises interview recordings and transcriptions that Limes-Taylor Henderson used to complete her mixed-methods (historical and qualitative) dissertation One Hundred and Sixteenth: One Family’s Education, which focused on the educational life history of her grandmother, Samenia Limes. Limes-Taylor Henderson conducted oral history interviews with Limes’ nine living children, producing over twenty hours of interview recordings and hundreds of pages of transcriptions. Limes-Taylor Henderson went on to analyze her oral history data through the use of historical fiction, writing the novella One Hundred and Sixteenth based on her family members’ testimonies.

Upon the successful completion of her doctoral work, Limes-Taylor Henderson and the Limes’ siblings donated the oral history data to Georgia State University’s Special Collections and Archives, as the family both wanted to preserve their data and understood the significance of their story in wider discussions of education and Blackness within a U.S. historical context.